As a result of economic development, urbanisation, and in particular, the growing trend for “just-in-time” delivery of goods within the manufacturing industries, there has been a phenomenal increase in transportation demand leading to significant traffic congestion problems on the national highway system. With the realisation that significant expansion of the existing highway infrastructure would be socially unacceptable and unsustainable, Governments in many countries have devoted significant resources to the application of modern computer and electronic technology to transport. In particular, USA, Europe and Japan have been involved in extensive programs to research, development and implementation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to better manage, operate and optimise the operational effectiveness of existing transportation infrastructure.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is defined as the application of advanced and emerging technologies (computers, sensors, control, communications, and electronic devices) in transportation to save lives, time, money, energy and the environment. In other words, it is the integration of information and communications technology with transport infrastructure, vehicles and users.

ITS has proven to be an innovative means of alleviating, or at least lessening, the problems for both passenger and goods transport. Studies have shown that invaluable benefits and advantages could be accrued through the deployment of ITS applications. Among these benefits are:

• Greater efficiency in the use of highways, hence increasing road capacity
• Improved road safety
• Reductions in travel cost and time
• Enhancement in the quality of environment through reduction of carbon dioxide and other harmful vehicular emissions

Since the benefits of ITS are primarily to the community, much of the ITS deployment in most countries has been initiated by Government agencies.

The ITS Architecture for Malaysia provides a unified framework for integration to guide the coordinated deployment of ITS programs within the public and private sectors. It is a framework of interconnected subsystems that together provide ITS User Services through allocated functionality and defined interfaces. It offers a starting point from which stakeholders can work together to achieve compatibility among ITS elements to ensure unified ITS deployments for the country.

The Architecture defines the functions that must perform to implement the transportation services via the definition of ITS User Services. The Logical Architecture then defines the actual processes and data flows which support the ITS User Services. The Logical Architecture also serves as support to the Physical Architecture where architecture flow indicates one or more data flows. The various processes identified in the Logical Architecture are assigned to the subsystems and terminators defined in the Physical Architecture. In additional, the communication channels for the architecture flows are defined in the Physical Architecture.

With the Physical Architecture defined and established, definition of Deployment Packages and selection of ITS standards come next. Deployment Packages allow the ITS System Architecture developer to acquire the proper package from the market place while ITS standards ensure interoperability of future systems.