Transportation Systems

Botswana is one of the countries experiencing major transportation issues especially in relatively high populated areas such as Gaborone. The traffic lights are rarely working due to power cuts, and even then they have a fixed configuration for controlling traffic. This has lead to the deployment of traffic police officers to control traffic, especially at peak hours. The officers are an indication of how Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can be used to solve this problem because they are “intelligent” and can communicate with each other. Their efficiency helps people get to work on time, but still it could be better with ITS solutions because they could receive update on current and predicted traffic to circumvent any potential build ups. The same goes for planning; with archived data optimal solutions can be devised under existing constraints way before the problem arises, and so forth.
Objectives

To exploit the benefits of ITS, it is important to engage in
• Smart road sensors
• Automated data/statistics collection
• Signal processing for ITS
• ICT for ITS
• Driver assistance systems
• Driver/passenger information systems
• Road condition monitoring
• Road safety and obstacle detection
• Distributed sensing via ITS sensors
• Data mining for ITS