A dramatic change in transportation research is imminent. Conditions are right for the creation of a new information-intensive discipline called transportation informatics – the science of information as applied to transportation. The available transportation data set is reaching the critical mass necessary to enable this field, as more and more transportation data is produced by entities like On-Star, commercial vehicle fleets, and other sources. 

Yet, virtually no one is currently studying transportation informatics. The industry lacks technologies and ways to apply the science of information to this increasingly large and available aggregate transportation data set.

Instead, transportation technology research and commercialization efforts are being directed toward a myriad of discrete transportation technologies and applications, each working with its own provincial data. Hundreds of federal, state, university, and commercial institutions are creating technologies and applications, with the vast majority of this work being performed in relative isolation.

This isolation causes four key problems.

1.      Solutions that do not scale commercially.
2.      Solutions that lack interoperability at scale.
3.      Un-noticed and therefore un-commercialized research.
4.      Most importantly, a lack of solutions that leverage a broad set of the aggregate data being produced.

The Commercialization Center for Transportation Informatics (CCTI) is chartered to identify and help commercialize the key technologies and applications which will grow the transportation informatics field to its true potential.

CCTI will address this challenge in three ways:

• By providing a global view of the many technologies and applications being developed, particularly as they relate to the aggregate data set being created.
• By identifying the issues that cross over multiple applications, technologies, and data sets.
• By stimulating directed research and commercialization efforts toward those issues.