September 17-20, 2006

Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre

             Toronto, Canada

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Special Sessions

Special Session Organization is encouraged. The goal of special sessions is to provide a forum for focused discussions on new topics or innovative applications of established approaches. A special session consists of four or five papers, which should be specialized in some particular theme or consists of the works of some particular international project. Prospective organizers are invited to submit their proposals to the Special Session Co-chair Dr. Yibing Wang at by the 15th March, 2006. Each proposal should include the session title, statement of importance and novelty, a list of the contributing authors and their contributions, a brief biography of the session organizer(s). Special session papers will undergo the same intense review process as regular papers do and submission is not a guarantee for acceptance. If less than four papers submitted to a special session are finally accepted based on the review, the special session cannot stand, in which case the program chair and the special session committee reserve the right to merge the accepted papers into regular sessions.

The following twelve special sessions have been set up at the conference.

Special Session: PATH at 20

Organizers:

Steven E. Shladover (), California PATH, USA

The PATH (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways) Program was created by a collaboration between the University of California and the California Department of Transportation in 1986, representing the first step in North America toward what we now know as intelligent transportation systems (ITS). On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the start of PATH, we present a session that reviews the history of the creation of this research program (and indeed of the field of ITS) and of its major milestones and accomplishments. Following an introductory presentation of PATH history, four speakers describe the current PATH research in its four primary fields of concentration: (1) traffic operations, (2) transit operations, (3) transportation safety, and (4) policy and behavior.

Papers are solicited for the following eleven Special Sessions. Any author who wishes to contribute to a Special Session should contact the corresponding session organizer(s).

Special Session on "ITS Applications of Various Filtering Techniques"

Organizers:	Yibing Wang (), Technical University of Crete,Greece
	Constantinos Antoniou (), National University of Athens, Greece
	Hans Van Lint (), Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

With the rapid development of ITS, different stochastic filtering approaches such as Kalman filter (KF), extended Kalman filter (EKF), unscented Kalman filter (UKF), particle filter (PF), etc. have been applied to the real-time solution of a number of ITS problems. This special session is soliciting papers on simulation and field applications of different filtering techniques to various ITS topics, which include (but are not limited to) traffic state estimation/prediction, on-line calibration of traffic flow models, travel time estimation/prediction, real-time OD estimation, intersection turning rate estimation, on-ramp/intersection queue estimation, incident alarm and detection.

Any paper related to ITS applications of filtering techniques is welcome. Papers with the following emphases are particularly welcome:

(1) Approaches of general interest to a certain ITS problem

(2) Demonstration of application difficulties and provision of promising solutions

(3) Comparison of various filtering techniques in terms of ITS applications

(4) Combination of the filtering techniques with some other approaches (e.g. neural network) aiming      at better solution of some ITS problems

Special Session on "Approaches and Algorithms for Dynamic Travel Information Systems"

Organizers:	Jon Bottom (), Charles River Associates, USA
	Yibing Wang (), Technical University of Crete,Greece

This session is soliciting papers in the area of dynamic travel information generation, with an emphasis on theoretical approaches and computational methods. As used here, dynamic travel information means travel-related messages (travel conditions or trip recommendations) derived from real-time estimates of prevailing network-level service conditions and possibly from forecasts of future conditions. Driver information and route guidance systems are examples of this, but all travel modes are of interest here. Papers that explore formulations and properties of the dynamic travel information generation problem or that specify and investigate the performance of information generation algorithms are particularly welcome.

Special Session on "Ramp Metering"

Organizers:	Yibing Wang (), Technical University of Crete,Greece
	Tom Bellemans (), Hasselt University, Belgium

Currently there are some 3000 metered ramps worldwide, with the vast majority located in North America, but numbers are rapidly increasing in Europe, Australia and elsewhere. Despite significant research advances and the expectation of high benefits from ubiquitous application of advanced ramp metering strategies, the current state of practice needs to be much improved.

This session is soliciting papers on all aspects of ramp metering. Papers with the following emphases are particularly welcome:

(1) Field application and case study

(2) Advanced network-wide ramp metering strategy design

(3) Local or network-wide ramp metering strategy design with consideration of ramp queue control        so as to avoid interference with the adjacent street traffic

(4) Ramp queue balancing in space to avoid asymmetric disbenefits of users at different on-ramps

(5) Local ramp metering strategy design with set-point adaptation

(6) Local ramp metering strategy design in special circumstances (e.g. with a mainstream bottleneck      at the downstream of the on-ramp)

Special Session on "Cybercars Technology and Trends"

Organizers:	Michel Parent (), INRIA, France
	Laurent Trassoudaine (), LASMEA, France
	Urbano Nunes (), University of Coimbra, Portugal

A new approach for mobility, emerging as an alternative to the private passenger car, tries to offer the same flexibility and much less nuisances based on fully automated electrical vehicles. These automated vehicles, named cybercars (www.cybercars.org), may be a solution of a public transportation system in specific areas and complement the mass transit transport, providing passenger service for any location at any time. A fleet of such vehicles forms a transportation system, for passengers or goods, on a network of roads with on-demand and door-to-door capability. The fleet of cars is under control of a central management system in order to meet particular demands in a particular environment.

Papers are solicited for this special session focused on technologies and trends of cybercars, addressing topics such as:

(1) obstacle detection and avoidance

(2) city trips and management of the fleet

(3) environment perception, vehicle localization and autonomous navigation

(4) inter-vehicle and vehicle-infrastructure communications

(5) cooperation techniques

(6) modelling, simulation and architectures

(7) economical and social impacts

Special Session on "ITS Data Archiving Applications"

Organizers:

Robert L. Bertini (), Portland State University, USA

With the proliferation of more ITS data--collected from fixed points in the infrastructure and from mobile sources--there is a heightened need to plan, design, test and operationalize ITS data archive systems. More than just repositories for operational data, ITS data archives can become useful tools for planners, designers, operators and decision-makers as these systems mature. Even more important is for ITS systems to have data collection, quality monitoring and dissemination built into them from the outset, in order to avoid costly retrofitting. Some examples of multimodal transportation agencies and private initiatives already exist, but more research is needed so that optimal decisions about data archiving can be made in the future.

Any paper about ITS data archiving is welcome. Papers with the following emphases are particularly welcome:

(1) Multimodal data archiving systems that include data quality assessment

(2) Data archiving systems that integrate fixed sensor sources with mobile (e.g., floating car) data

     sources for improving information quality

(3) Data archiving systems that include detailed evaluations of visualization capabilities, information

     access or performance measurement capabilities

(4) Data archiving systems with quantified, demonstrable benefits (e.g. cost savings) for planning or

     operating agencies

Special Session on "Pedestrian Flow Simulation"

Organizers:	S.P. Hoogendoorn (), Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
	W. Daamen (), Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

Pedestrian flow research has become a lively research field. In the last years, this has lead to the development of a large number of pedestrian simulation models, such as the social forces model, NOMAD, Legion, SimPed, Exodus, and PedGo. The application area of such models is in theory very large, ranging from design of transfer stations, large ships, and sports stadiums, to evacuation simulation, and operation management of pedestrian flows. On top of the ability to support infrastructure designers and architects in providing walking infrastructure with a better Level-of-Service, several dramatic events have emphasized the importance of safe designs and the role of simulation therein.

The special session of pedestrian flow simulation invites all contributions that focus on modeling pedestrians, such as model calibration and validation, numerical simulation, pedestrian flow modeling approaches, etc. Topics of specific interest are:

(1) ITS and pedestrians

(2) Data collection for pedestrian flow modeling

(3) Pedestrian simulation for evacuation

(4) Joint simulation of pedestrians and motorized traffic

(5) Pedestrian route choice modeling

Special Session on "Advanced Technologies and Innovative Concepts to Highway Safety"

Organizers:

Heng Wei (), University of Cincinnati, USA

The importance of using advanced technological solutions to highway safety problems has been increasing as the number of vehicles and vehicle driving miles, as well as the needs for highway maintenance and construction continue to grow in US and other countries. The traditional methods for enhancing highway safety have been to include safety features in highway design, construction and maintenance projects, which are sometimes a costly and time-consuming undertaking. Advanced technologies have potential to offer a more cost-effective method of enhancing highway traffic mobility and safety by enabling us to use the existing infrastructure more safely and efficiently.

This special session is soliciting papers on all aspects of innovative ideas and applications of advanced technologies for highway safety problems. Papers with, but not limited to, the following focuses are strongly encouraged for submission:

(1) Advanced highway maintenance and construction technologies

(2) Advanced traffic control strategies and systems in work zones

(3) Advanced technologies and countermeasures for incident prevention in highways and vehicles

     (e.g., trucks, bus, etc.);

(4) Integration of safety measures with Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Vehicle

     Infrastructure Integration (VII) related topics

(5) Highway safety performance systems

(6) Mechanism study of accident causes

Special Session on "Petri Net Based Applications in ITS"

Organizers:	Davide Giglio (), University of Genova, Italy
	Nicola Sacco (), Polytechnic of Torino, Italy

In the last decades, Intelligent Transportation Systems received a growing interest and became an increasingly promising research subject. The complexity of these systems and of their dynamic behavior requires investigation on simulation models, effective and appropriate control strategies, as well as scheduling procedures. Moreover, different powerful modeling tools exist to state and solve ITS-related problems and to transfer theoretical results to practical applications. On the other hand, Petri nets and its related extensions (such as timed PNs, colored PNs, hybrid PNs, etc.) have been extensively adopted in the past to model discrete-event systems such as manufacturing systems and communication networks. In this connection, they have been proven to be a valuable and powerful tool for design, analysis, and control, since their ability in capturing the precedence relations and interactions among the concurrent and asynchronous events typical of such systems. In the last decade, the Petri net formalism has been also applied to the modeling and control of traffic and transportation systems.

The aim of the special session is to gather a large community of researchers interested in the application of the Petri net formalisms, and its related extensions, to the modeling, optimization and control of ITS, and to outline new trends and problems in this area including practical applications.

Special Session "Calibration and validation of microscopic traffic flow models"

Organizers:

S.P. Hoogendoorn (), Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

With increasing computation power, microscopic simulation models have become widely applied tools for numerous applications in traffic engineering. Parameter identification remains one of the difficult tasks when using these microscopic traffic flow models. The reasons for this are manifold, e.g. parameters are not directly observable from common traffic data, they are not transferable to other situations (different locations, periods of the day, etc.), real driving behavior is variable in time and space, etc. Several approaches to structured model calibration using macroscopic and in some cases microscopic traffic data have been proposed.

This special session deals with the parameter identification as well as validation of (microscopic) traffic flow models. All papers dealing with this topic are welcome, such as the parameter identification techniques, frameworks for model calibration and validation, data and data collection issues, application of microscopic data (trajectory, floating car data), model benchmarking, and real-life validation studies.

Special Session on "DSRC and Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII)"

Organizers:

D.J. Lovell (), University of Maryland, USA

This session concerns the applications of dedicated short range communications (DSRC) to traffic information systems. The vehicle infrastructure integration (VII) program in the United States is one such example, but other models have been proposed. The primary interest for this session is the use of such systems to collect and disseminate data that on-board units can use for information and decision support services in the vehicle, and that roadside units can use to aggregate and present traffic information via a centralized source, such as the web page for a traffic management center. The papers in the session need not be confined to the parameters of first-generation systems whose testing and/or deployment might already be planned; this will remain an active research topic for many years and many opportunities for improvement should present themselves.

The special session on DSRC and Vehicle Infrastructure Integration invites all contributions that focus on vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-roadside communications with the intent of forming a distributed data collection and dissemination network. Topics of specific interest are:

(1) Protocols for vehicular mobile ad hoc networks

(2) Simulation of information propagation and degradation

(3) Algorithms for in-vehicle devices exploiting data from mobile ad hoc networks

(4) Integration and data fusion between mobile sources and fixed data beacons

(5) Robust system designs to accommodate outages and increasing market share

Special Session on "Study and Potential Solutions to Evacuation Planning Issues"

Organizers:	Heng Wei (), University of Cincinnati, USA
	Yi-Chang Chiu (), University of Texas at El Paso, USA

How to effectively deal with potential either large-scale or small area�s natural and manmade threats via surface transportation infrastructure systems have brought up challenges to practitioners and researchers in multiple areas, including evacuation modeling, travel demand modeling, transportation systems analysis, logistics & operation research analysis, advanced traffic information and management systems, travel behavior and characteristics of the transportation system, as well as computing applications in transportation systems. Effective emergency management and evacuation via surface transportation infrastructure systems frequently relies on understanding potential evacuation options�their feasibility and the optimal response strategies associated with each.

This special session invites papers that refer to both theoretical principles and practical experiences in, but not limited to, the following focuses:

(1) Development of new and innovative practices and policies related to emergency transportation

     scenarios

(2) Travel behavioral analysis and forecasting for evacuation planning

(3) Planning and design of transportation infrastructure for evacuation

(4) Analysis and modeling of evacuation transportation operations

(5) Evacuation traffic control and enforcement

(6) Applications of intelligent transportation system (ITS) data and technologies in evacuation

     planning and implementation

(7) Use of mass-transit and other means for the evacuation implementation

(8) Software and computing methods for evacuation planning and decision-making process

(9) Comparative and critical assessments of the state-of-the-practice solutions in emergency

     transportation preparedness, management, and response

(10) Other evacuation and transportation systems security-related topics