A Survey of Application of Fuzzy Logic in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and Rural ITS

The number of vehicles in rural areas and surrounding highways running through our rural areas continue to increase and the existing road conditions, in many instances, are not adequate enough to handle this increased traffic. Also, driving conditions on our rural roads are different from the urban roads and comprises of uncertainty. This is because of increasing numbers of elderly drivers, aging vehicles, road patterns, animals and pedestrians. This has increased the level of congestion on our rural highways, increased number of accidents and travel delays, and must be effectively addressed. These, along with ever changing weather patterns, have increased the number of accidents and traffic related fatalities and are continuing threat to travel safety and security. Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) concept is being increasingly used to ease this strain but many of the existing ITS applications are designed with ideal driving conditions and are not suitable for changing conditions. They don't include the human intelligence, the driver behavior. New methodologies must be incorporated to improve the effectiveness of these controllers. One way to achieve this is through the use of fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic is capable of modeling uncertainty and is being used by many researchers in ITS and rural ITS applications. Unfortunately the literature on this topic is distributed and is not easily accessible. A survey and discussion of this topic would be beneficial to the research community and the public. This may help the ITS community to conduct their research effectively and this paper aims to address this objective