Route guidance: State of the art vs. state of the practice

Route guidance is an essential component of intelligent transportation systems and a necessary ingredient to any automatic piloting system. Looking at the literature on Route Guidance, one can quickly see a chasm in how the problem is seen in the academic community and how it is seen in the automotive, industrial world. There seems to be different levels of interest in this problem and divergent assessment of its level of difficulty and the nature of challenges that are inhibiting its becoming a reality. In this paper, we examine the literature in the field, identify the prerequisites for a viable implementation of Route Guidance, and examine the state of development of each of these pre-requisites.