A series built around one transport question

Transport systems used to be discussed mostly as civil engineering, vehicle design or traffic policy. ITST added the layer that now touches all three: the radio links, networks and software that let a vehicle, a track, a ship or an aircraft report what it knows and act on what it receives.

The series began in 2000, created by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Japan. It was among the earliest forums to treat transport communications as a research field in its own right rather than a footnote to vehicle engineering.

Its working premise has stayed stable. A transport network is only as useful as the information that reaches the right place at the right moment, and that information has to survive interference, delay, handover, weather and scale.

Earlier editions were hosted in Japan, Korea, Singapore, France, China, Thailand, Russia, Taiwan, Finland, Denmark and Poland. Each host brought a different transport problem into the room, from dense urban rail to long distance freight and maritime corridors.

That movement is part of the method. A conference that returns to the same city can become comfortable; a conference that changes host country has to explain its subject again to a new set of operators, regulators and laboratories.

The 16th edition took place at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon from 15 to 17 October 2023. The congress centre occupied the Civil Engineering building on the Alameda campus, on floors 01 and 02.

Teresa Vazão and Fernando Mira da Silva, both of INESC ID and Instituto Superior Técnico, served as general chairs. A steering committee drawn from the wider series supported the local team, while the technical programme committee handled review and session planning.

Lisbon gave the edition a useful setting. The city runs road, rail, ferry and air transport inside a compact area, and the campus sits within walking distance of a major underground interchange at Saldanha.

The call was wide on purpose. It invited work on radio networks, connected vehicles, network architecture, protocols, cooperative services and the testbeds that show whether any of it survives contact with a real road or railway.

The audience crossed institutional boundaries. University groups brought models and measurements. Operators brought constraints that models rarely capture. Equipment makers and software teams brought prototypes. Public authorities brought the question of deployment.

Doctoral students had a specific route into the programme through the student paper contest, which asked them to present work to which they had made a substantial contribution.

The published edition presented its material as one long page. This rebuild keeps every section of that record but gives each one a stable address, so a reader can link directly to the call, the fees, the committee or the venue.

All wording here is newly written for this edition of the site. Facts are limited to what the conference published: dates, venue, committee roles, paper limits, fees and the research topics named in the call.