U.S.-India Collaboration Tackles Transportation

In India, where bullock carts, bicycles, motorcycles, cars, trucks and 1.2 billion people vie for space on jam-packed roads, managing transportation is a critical concern.

"Emerging Trends in Intelligent Transportation," a workshop co-sponsored by UNL and the Indian
Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-Madras) in Chennai, India, in February 2010 tackled these issues.

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) integrate advanced information and communications technologies to monitor traffic flow, weather and other factors affecting transportation. These data can be used to manage traffic flow and congestion through real-time traveler information systems, emergency networks, automated highways and other applications.

"The great part about the workshop was that it brought together key Indian and U.S. representatives from the private sector, public sector and academia to discuss critical transportation issues. While India and the U.S. face similar problems, such as safety, congestion and pollution, we use different components of ITS to address these issues so the conference provided tremendous benefits in learning about key successes in our different countries," said Larry Rilett, director of UNL’s Nebraska Transportation Center and workshop co-organizer with Lelitha Devi Vanajakshi from
IIT-Madras.

The workshop featured 27 ITS experts from the U.S. and India, including Rilett and UNL colleagues Anuj Sharma and Elizabeth Jones, and more than 100 Indian and American participants. One outcome was a mechanism enabling student and faculty exchanges between UNL and IIT-Madras to work on complementary research projects. Also in development is a proposal for an Indo-US Joint Centre of Intelligent Transportation Systems involving UNL, Purdue University, IIT-Madras and IIT-Mumbai.

The workshop was sponsored by the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum, with the support of executive director Arabinda Mitra and Michael Cheetham, director of the Forum’s U.S. Secretariat.