Road Transport Informatics: The Next 20 Years

Future on-board navigation and information systems for automobiles will automatically keep the driver informed of current location, deduce best routes to specified destinations taking into account current traffic and road conditions, and provide turn-by-turn route guidance according to where the automobile is along the route. Other road transport informatics functions will include location-keyed directory services and automatic vehicle identification for toll and parking billing. These systems will be integrated with systems for automatic headway control and collision avoidance and, eventually, automatic vehicle control. Advanced on-board information systems require integration of vehicular navigation technologies such as dead reckoning, proximity beacons, and radiolocation with various other technologies including digital cartography, data processing and storage, mobile data comunications, information display, voice synthesis, etc.