IEICE TRANS. FUNDAMENTALS, VOL.E103–A, NO.1 JANUARY 2020

225FOREWORD
Special Section on Intelligent Transport Systems
Intelligent transport systems (ITS) have been recognized as a major field in both academia and industry
since the 1980s. It has now (2020) been improved to the point of being able to discuss autonomous
driving, and autonomous vehicles with limited level of automation have been put on the market thanks tothe remarkable improvements in vision sensing, control, and communication technology.
ITS range over vast areas, not only in autonomous driving, and the above-mentioned technologies must
converge more to improve the next-generation ITS to solve growing problems such as accidents caused
by elderly drivers and difficulty in sustaining mobility in depopulated areas. I hope this special issue willcontribute to the progress of ITS.
As a result of promoting submissions from collaborative research areas, 11 papers have been submitted and4 papers have been accepted for the publication in the special issue. The special issue invited Mr. Koichi
Sakai from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism to publish an invited paper onMobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), which is an important concept in achieving sustainable transportation systems.
I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the authors of all the submitted papers, reviewers, andeditorial committee members for their significant contributions to the special issue. I would like to express
special appreciation to Prof. Tetsuya Manabe and Prof. Kenshi Saho as Guest Editors on the editorialcommittee.
Special Section Editorial Committee:
Guest Editors:
Tetsuya Manabe (Saitama University), Kenshi Saho (Toyama Prefectural University)
Guest Associate Editors:
Naohisa Hashimoto (AIST), Kazunori Onoguchi (Hirosaki University), Jeyeon Kim (Tsuruoka College), Yusuke Takatori (Kanagawa Institute of Technology), Takaaki Hasegawa (Saitama University),Shunsuke Kamijo (The University of Tokyo), Hiroyuki Hatano (Mie University), Hiromasa Habuchi(Ibaraki University), Satoshi Makido (Toyota Central R&D Labs), Tomotaka Wada (Kansai University), Kiyoshi Mizui (Kanto Gakuin University), Hidekazu Murata (Kyoto University), Takaya
Yamazato (Nagoya University), Yanlei Gu (Ritsumeikan University), Masahiro Fujii (UtsunomiyaUniversity), Tomotaka Nagaosa (Kanto Gakuin University), Kohei Ohno (Meiji University), SimonThompson (AIST)

Takayoshi Yokota (Tottori University), Guest Editor in Chief

Takayoshi Yokota (Member)has been a professor of the Graduate School of Engineering at Tottori University since 2012. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the Tokyo
Institute of Technology in 1979, 1981, and 1984. He worked for the Hitachi Research Laboratory of Hitachi Ltd. from 1984 to 2008. He contributed to Hitachi’s R&D of intelligent transport systems and car navigation systems from 1993 to 2008. He was a professor of Advanced
Transport Logistics (Hanshin Expressway) at Kyoto University from 2009 to 2011. His current research interests include analysis, modeling, and spatio-temporal information processingof vehicles and traffic flow. He is a member of IEEE, IPSJ, and SICE.

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