The aim of this chapter is to provide a basic understanding of GIS and how GIS can be used to support transportation in terms of application levels, areas of management, and types of data, analyses and modelling functions. This chapter is structured in five sections. Section 2 provides a basic description of GIS in terms of definition, basic characteristics of GIS data, spatial representation of data within GIS, key functions, and special requirements of GIS for transport applications. A GIS-T framework discussed in Section 3 is proposed for using GIS-T to support a broad range of application levels (planning and operations) and areas of management (facility management and fleet management). Section 4 presents two illustrative examples of GIS-T applications. The first example is in the category of planning of facility management. It describes the use of GIS to support urban transportation and land-use planning. The second example is in the category of real-time operations and control for fleet management, the use of GIS to develop and maintain digital road map databases to support vehicle navigation, and commercial vehicle dispatch and intelligent transport systems (ITS). The chapter concludes with a summary of major challenges in the GIS-T technology.
Samenvatting