BENEFITS OF ITS APPLICATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF SUSTAINABLE ECO TOURISM IN ROMANIA CleanProd-2007 Conference, Suceava, Romania November 22 nd 2006 Conf. dr. ing. Marius MINEA As. drd. ing. Mihai NICULESCU POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest

Current situation Explosive growth of traffic in the road network infrastructure Expansive evolution of the number of vehicles A huge offer for tourism services and business emerged Tourists visiting Romania depend more and more on the satellite positioning technologies, combined with the use of digital maps Tourists expect from our country the same detail level and services that they are used with in Western Europe or USA

What is ITS ? ITS stands for Intelligent Transport Systems ITS are defined as “the usage of IT and telecommunications technology for a better management of the transport process” Typical ITS applications include: –traffic monitoring and management –fleet management –navigation systems –active vehicle safety systems –public transport management

How navigation systems work (1/2) There are two basic types: –on board vehicles –handheld Any device has a digital processing unit and a GPS receiver The devices can be loaded with digital maps and it then superimposes GPS coordinates over the map Besides maps, other information can be stored about any location on the map

How navigation systems work (2/2) There is the possibility to select the destination as an interest point, general city or as street number in a city An automatic route is computed from the present location to the selected interest point, or between two interest points, using an user imposed criteria such as „the shortest route” or „avoiding highways” Vocal guidance on route is possible every time the driving direction has to be changed

How can ITS applications help eco tourism ? Better promotion and knowledge of local and national tourist assets Local community development because of increased number of tourists The tourist knows exactly where to travel therefore will use fuel more efficiently thus contributing to the decrease of environment pollution

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (1/7) “Digital Romania” initiative - RoAD –fully routable digital map of Romania –can be used with Garmin navigation devices –thousands of Points of Interest (POI) –hundreds of citys mapped to street number level –new POI can be added directly on the map

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (2/7) “Digital Romania” initiative – RoAD – Romania, Atlas Digital –d–digital elevation pattern

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (3/7) “Digital Romania” initiative - RoAD –r–route vertical profile

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (4/7) “Digital Romania” initiative - RoAD –m–map detail of Bucharest

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (5/7) “Digital Romania” initiative - RoAD –m–map detail of Sibiu

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (6/7) “Digital Romania” initiative - RoAD –a–around a POI a virtual perimeter can be defined and extra information (text, audio, video) are presented when entering that area

Navigation systems and services R&D in Romania (7/7) “SAIGHID” research project –financed by CEEX2006 national programme –will analyse the national and international status of digital map based navigation technologies –will define and elaborate tourist information services, cultural information services and administrative information services –as support for the above services, a database structure will be designed and a software application to generate, exploit and develop this database will also be developed

Conclusions Navigation systems, belonging to ITS applications, have known a sharp increase in the last years Navigation systems provide for better informed tourists which in turn is the basis for cleaner, environment friendly eco tourism Romania has a huge tourist potential which can be better and more efficiently exploited if digital maps are developed for navigation systems and services

Thank you for your attention !