Purpose of a Regional ITS Architecture

The purpose of developing a regional ITS architecture is to illustrate and document regional integration so that planning and deployment can take place in an organized and coordinated fashion. Typically, a region contains multiple transportation agencies and jurisdictions. These may have both adjoining and overlapping geographies, but the common thread for all of the agencies is the need to provide ITS solutions to transportation problems such as traffic congestion and safety hazards. It is important that these solutions be provided economically, utilizing public funds in a responsible manner.

Regional integration allows for the sharing of information and coordination of activities among regional transportation systems to efficiently and effectively operate. Regional integration may also have a synergistic effect on transportation systems, e.g. information from one system may be used by another system for a different purpose. An example of this would be transit Automated Vehicle Location (AVL) data being used by a freeway management center as probe data to obtain speed information on freeway segments traveled by the transit vehicles. A regional ITS architecture illustrates this integration and provides the basis for planning the evolution of existing systems and the definition of future systems that facilitate the integration over time.