IEEE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS MAGAZINE • 36 • WINTER 2011

From the IEEE ITSS Committees Artificial Transportation Systems and

Simulation Technical Activities Committee

There is no doubt that Intelli-gent Transportation Systems (ITS) have evolved a great deal

within the last three decades and been definitely changing mobility paradigms in many different ways. Ubiquitous communication and in-formation technologies are playing an important role in travellers’ ex-perience with wonderful potentials that are still to be fully assessed and explored. Also, governments all over the world are now prioritising mobil-ity as a key ingredient of their social and economical growth and policies, and industry has engaged as an ac-tive partner and great promoter of ITS’ technological development. It is quite acceptable that part of such a challenge is technological, and an-other considerable responsibility lies upon institutional, organisational and financial aspects. However, and in spite of the great development in computer and communication technologies, future transportation requirements stir up even more chal-lenging issues, allowing for social and environmental aspects of urban systems where users, as well as their preferences, are a central concern. Such a complex scenario clearly de-mands appropriate methodologies, tools and means to design, test, and validate ITS-based technologies, opening up opportunities for new generation models and theories to be devised and proposed.

Given its ability to effectively ad-dress and assess innovations within ITS, the area of Artificial Transporta-tion Systems and Simulation (ATSS) soon gained a great interest from the IEEE ITS Society, being awarded the

creation of a Technical Activities Com-mittee on its own right. The concept of Artificial Transportation Systems (ATS) extends the aim and purpose of traditional simulation techniques as they have traditionally been applied within transportation engineering, and has been initially introduced by Prof. Fei-Yue Wang [1, 2] to offer an inte-grated emulation with real-time traffic information to support certain traffic decision-makings.

Since its creation, the ATSS tech-nical committee (ATSS-TC) has been the major platform motivating and promoting the ATSS field within the IEEE ITS Society, as well as other technical and scientific communi-ties both within and outside IEEE, with the primary aim at fostering the discussion on issues concerning the development of Artificial Trans-portation Systems and Simulation. With the ability to integrate differ-ent transportation models and solu-tions in a virtual environment, ATSS serve as an aid to support decisions made by engineers and practitioners in a controlled and safe manner. They also provide a natural ground where

new approaches can be experimented while avoiding natural drawbacks of dealing directly with real critical domains, such as ITS. On the basis of theories and methodologies bor-rowed from a wide spectrum of dis-ciplines, such as the Social Sciences, Distributed Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Multi-agent Sys-tems, Virtual Reality, Cyber-physical Systems, and many others, several important issues arise which chal-lenge and motivate researchers and practitioners from multidisciplinary fields, as well as different technical and scientific communities. Areas of interest to the ATSS-TC include, but are not limited to: agent-based modelling and simulation; real agent architectures; hardware and soft-ware-in-the-loop simulation; agent-human interactions; environment modelling and interaction protocols; learning and adaptation; collabora-tion, cooperation, competition, and coalitions in traffic and transporta-tion models; social and emergent behaviour in multi-agent systems applied to traffic and transport; large scale simulation of agent-based

Rosaldo Rossetti

Date of publication: 28 October 2011

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MITS.2011.942781

ATSS Workshop.

IEEE INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS MAGAZINE • 37 • WINTER 2011

microscopic traffic models; calibra-tion and validation methodologies.

The primary structure of ATSS-TC’s activities relies on promoting the ATSS series of workshops and special sessions within IEEE ITS Conferenc-es, each happening biannually every alternating year. Whereas workshops aim mostly at discussing in an in-formal environment trends, work in progress and new ideas related to Artificial Transportation Systems and Simulation, special sessions are intended to be focused on specific developments and topics or problems within the field, based on sound re-sults or projects already in an ad-vanced stage of development and/or concluded. The first edition of the workshop series was held in Shang-hai, China, in 2004, followed by the editions held in Toronto, Canada (2006), Beijing, China (2008), and Madeira, Portugal (2010). Besides the workshops, a Special Session on ATSS was organised within the 2007’s edi-tion of the IEEE ITS Annual Confer-ence, held in Seattle-WA, USA, with the second one to be placed within this year’s conference, in Washing-ton-DC, USA. Almost over a decade after the term was first coined, these events have rapidly gained an in-ternational prominence and been established as the main forum for discussions on ATSS issues, with a growing number of participants from different fields of expertise.

It is also important to emphasise the committee’s effort to contribute with a legacy of good and state-of-the-art pub-lications, enhancing the knowledge of the community on different aspects of ATSS related topics. Whereas the pri-mary means has naturally been the proceedings of IEEE ITS Conferences, ATSS-TC has recently accomplished an important goal of concluding and hav-ing published the first Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on ITS dedicated to Artificial Transportation Systems and Simulation. The publication resulted in a collection of seven regular and

one short paper, selected from works presented in previous editions of the workshops and special sessions series, as well as some invited submissions. Its Guest Editorial [3] gives a glimpse of its content, which covers topics such as modelling issues and metaphors for ATS models, architectures for ATS, and practical applications of ATS. Cur-rently, ATSS-TC is working on a new publication, to be published as a book in the Integrated Series on Intelligent Systems by Springer. The book, to be entitled Advances in Artificial Trans-portation Systems and Simulation, is the post-proceedings of the fourth ATSS workshop, held in Madeira, Por-tugal, last year.

Following up the success of the ATSS series of workshops and special sessions and as part of its commit-ment to foster an open and multi-disciplinary discussion on related topics, it is also part of the commit-tee’s plan to extend its activities to other events sponsored by the IEEE ITS Society, co-promoting activities that encourage the community to fur-ther develop and consolidate the field of ATSS. ATSS-TC is also committed to attract motivated and enthusias-tic volunteers to help its community grow even further, beyond the fron-tiers of IEEE ITS Society. Students’ activities within ATSS-TC in another key aspect of its strategy to grow and

become even more active and partici-pative in the community, envisaging a long-term engagement of young re-searchers, enthusiastically motivat-ing and calling their attention and interest to such a fascinating and challenging area.

More about ATSS-TC’s activities can be found on the committee’s Web site at http://www.fe.up.pt/~atss-tc/.

ATSS-TC is co-chaired by: ■ Henry Liu, Department of Civil

Engineering University of Min-nesota – Minneapolis, MN, USA (henryliu@umn.edu)

■ Sharron Tang, Institute of Au-tomation, Chinese Academy of Sciences–China (sharrontang@gmail.com)

■ Rosaldo Rossetti, Department of Informatics Engineering, Univer-sity of Porto – Porto, Portugal (ros-setti@fe.up.pt).

References[1] F.-Y. Wang, “Integrated intelligent control

and management for urban traffic sys-tems,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2003, vol. 2, pp. 1313–1317.

[2] F.-Y. Wang, “Artificial transportation sys-tems: From computer simulation to compu-tational experiments,” in keynote presented at IEEE Int. Conf. Intelligent Transporta-tion Systems, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2006.

[3] R. J. F. Rossetti, R. Liu, and S. Tang, “Guest editorial: special issue on artificial trans-portation systems and simulation,” IEEE Trans. Intell. Transport. Syst., vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 309–312, June 2011.

ATSS Workshop in Madeira, Portugal 2010.