Traveler-Oriented Advanced Traveler Information System Based on Discovery and Exploitation of Resources: Potentials and Challenges

An Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) aims at providing travelers with multi-modal trip planning, route guidance services and advisory functions. Most ATIS’s provide travel solutions that cover only specific geographic areas, travel modes and/or transport operators, and are insufficiently personalized. Moreover, the solutions are normally constructed upon a fixed set of resources (e.g. data sources and services), and thus are not highly adaptable to travelers’ diverse needs. Considering numerous existing ATIS’s and other resources on the Web, our vision is to use them complementarily to improve the adaptability, completeness, and personalization of the solutions. We envision an ATIS design, called traveler-oriented ATIS, that discovers and exploits web resources in an integrated manner to construct travel solutions tailored to travelers’ needs. In this paper, we discuss common approaches to managing resources, upon which the solutions are built, employed in various ATIS’s and their limitations that lead to our vision. Challenges of the vision are investigated, and a possible approach to address them is presented along with potential applications of Semantic Web and Multi-Agent Systems in the approach to demonstrate a promising direction to concretize the traveler-oriented ATIS design.