While it is certainly too early to make a definitive assessment of the effectiveness of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), it is not to takestock of what has been achieved and to think about what could be achievedin the near future. In our opinion, ITS developments have been up to now largely hardware-driven and have led to the introduction of many sophisticated technologies in the transportation arena, while the development of the software component of ITS, models and decision-support systems in particular, is lagging behind. To reach the full potential of ITS, one must thusaddress the challenge of making the most intelligent usage possible of the hardware that is being deployed and the huge wealth of data it provides.We believe that transportation planning and management disciplines, operations research in particular, have a key role to play with respect to thischallenge. The paper focuses on Freight ITS: Commercial Vehicle Operations and Advanced Fleet Management Systems, City Logistics, and electronic business. The paper reviews main issues, technological challenges, and achievements, and illustrates how the introduction of better operations research-based decision-support software could very significantly improve the ultimate performance of Freight ITS. (A) Reprinted with permission from Elsevier.
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