Development of an Intelligent Transportation Systems Education Module for Undergraduates (TTI/ITS RCE-98/02)

Professional capacity building (PCB) throughout the transportation profession is critical to the success of ITS nationwide. The purpose of this study was to develop an ITS educational module that could easily fit within any existing transportation undergraduate course or appropriate technical courses in other engineering and non-engineering disciplines. A case study analysis of specific job roles and tasks of staff from the various agencies that work at Houston Transtar revealed that individuals hired have a variety of skill levels expected by these agencies and the tasks that these staff perform can be enhanced by ITS knowledge. The desirability of these skills indicates that the transportation professional of today and the future needs a variety of skills that are not generally obtained in the traditional transportation engineering curriculum. The objectives of this educational module are to provide a definition of ITS; discuss the importance of ITS with respect to the future of transportation; discuss how ITS affects the user; outline the major areas of ITS in which transportation professionals work; describe how others around the country are using ITS technologies to operate their transportation systems more safely and efficiently; and outline potential career paths in ITS and transportation. The visual aids, lecture notes, and module exercises developed for this module were created from a variety of sources, including the FHWA ITS Awareness Seminar, reports, projects, workshops, transportation course materials, Internet sites, and other sources containing ITS-related information that was pertinent to the objectives of the module. They were designed to target an undergraduate engineering audience and were compiled on Microsoft Power Point for easy dissemination.|To obtain an electronic copy of the education module, please contact the author.