An Overview of Funded Research Projects in The MENA Region on Intelligent Transportation Systems

With the growing number of vehicles and increasing traffic complexity, the development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has become essential in managing traffic flow, reducing congestion, and improving road safety. As a result, numerous research initiatives and projects have been launched in recent years in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the ITS projects funded in this region. We then evaluate these projects based on three criteria: security and data privacy, data analysis, and sensing techniques. The main objective is to identify common threads among these projects and explore potential opportunities for developing an open-source platform that can benefit the research community in the MENA region with similar research objectives.