Urban mobility is not only one of the pillars of modern economic systems but also a key issue
in the quest for equality of opportunity once it can improve access to other services.
Currently however there are a number of negative issues related to traffic especially in
mega-cities such as economical issues (cost of opportunity caused by delays) environmental
(externalities related to emissions of pollutants) and social (traffic accidents). Solutions
to these issues are more and more closely tied to information and communication technology.
Indeed a search in the technical literature (using the keyword ``urban traffic to filter out
articles on data network traffic) retrieved the following number of articles (as of December 3
2013): 9 443 (ACM Digital Library) 26 054 (Scopus) and 1 730 000 (Google Scholar). Moreover
articles listed in the ACM query relate to conferences as diverse as MobiCom CHI PADS and
AAMAS. This means that there is a big and diverse community of computer scientists and computer
engineers who tackle research that is connected to the development of intelligent traffic and
transportation systems. It is also possible to see that this community is growing and that
research projects are getting more and more interdisciplinary. To foster the cooperation among
the involved communities this book aims at giving a broad introduction into the basic but
relevant concepts related to transportation systems targeting researchers and practitioners
from computer science and information technology. In addition the second part of the book
gives a panorama of some of the most exciting and newest technologies originating in computer
science and computer engineering that are now being employed in projects related to car-to-car
communication interconnected vehicles car navigation platooning crowd sensing and sensor
networks among others. This material will also be of interest to engineers and researchers
from the traffic and transportation community.
