2nd International Conference on

Models and Technologies for ITS

Location: Provinciehuis Vlaams-Brabant

22nd-24th, June 2011 • Leuven, Belgium

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

The Second edition of the Conference on Models and Technologies is now past, but it will remain as a wonderful memory for very long time for us.

I am also confident that you will remember those days with pleasure, knowing that you were part of a network that in three days has expanded, tightened and reinforced its connections. In an era where people have more contacts and connections than ever thanks to social networks, mobile phones and many other media, following the 'traditional' way of meeting regularly in conferences has still its added value. It is also important, on the other hand, that these meetings evolve towards something that virtual contacts can never offer. That is why we made sure that the exchange of knowledge has been complemented with warm social events, interactive experiments, lively discussions, good food and (maybe too many) drinks.

The expectations we had at the beginning of this organizational experience went even beyond our best wishes. Including the four extremely interesting keynote speeches, the demos from five companies, we can enumerate 82 presentations for three days, among which 31 were from industry or a joint effort between academia and practice. This proves alone that we have found the correct chemistry for fruitful communication between the two worlds. To reinforce this statement everyone should look back at the 'Friday special', and how lively the discussion was during the workshop and the involvement of everyone during the walking experiment. For that I am (one more time!) deeply indebted to prof. Hans van Lint, which keep on surprising us for his talent in finding innovative education means and I envy TU Delft for having such a person as responsible of the Transport, Infrastructure and Logistics programme, and that is also why we will do our best to create a continuous exchange between TIL and our new Master in Traffic, Logistics and ITS, which will be our next challenge from this September.

To conclude this acknowledgment message, I wish to thank one more time the precious help of my closest partners in the organization of this conference. The Organizing Committee members, Ben Immers, Chris Tampere, Xin Lin and Willem Himpe, and the technical support of our secretaries, Anja Vansteenwegen and Evy Neyens, and our IT support Ronny Moreas. Thanks also to the Scientific and Technical Committees for helping us in the review process, together with more than 200 reviewers that guaranteed at least two thorough reviews per abstract. This will be a solid basis for the selection of the contributions to the two planned special issues in the Journal of ITS and in IET-Intelligent Transportation Systems. A great thank must go to Gaetano Fusco, organizer of the first edition, for having initiated this idea and for sharing its knowledge and experience to make this second edition possible. A big thank goes also to the great help and enthusiasm from the area of railways and air traffic management, more specifically to Dario Pacciarelli, Francesco Corman and Guglielmo Lulli, and above all to Andrea D'Ariano, who has coordinated all sessions on these two research streams. Above all, I wish to thank all of you for being there and providing and sharing with us the most important contribution to this event: your research. I must also acknowledge the groups from the universities of Dresden and Twente, more specifically their representatives Thomas Albrecht and Jaap Vreeswijk for offering their locations and facilities for the organization of the next edition. Next time will be Dresden, but both candidatures were perfectly in line with the vision of this stream of conferences and I am sure Twente will have the opportunity to host one of the following editions, maybe the fourth already.

A final thank I want to address it to those people that from the first day expressed their enthusiasm and satisfaction for our efforts, and that they are sending compliment emails to us since then. It is always difficult to judge how things go when you have a big share of the responsibilities, and a few words said or written make us feel proud and pays off more than everything.

We look forward to meeting you again in two years or hopefully sooner!

Francesco Viti on behalf of the MT-ITS organizing committee