VEHICLE INTELLIGENCE & TRANSPORTATION ANALYSIS LABORATORY
University of California, Santa Barbara

VITAL is the Transportation wing of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA), engaged in research projects on transportation applications of geospatial information technologies.

Projects cover transportation problems such as infrastructure management (from construction to maintenance and renewal), operations and traffic, transit planning, transportation security and Intelligent Transportation Systems. Geospatial techniques applied to these problems include remote sensing, GPS, spatial data architecture, traffic microsimulation, and spatial optimization modeling.

Projects are funded by the Federal and State governments and private firms.

A major continuing project at VITAL is the National Consortium on Remote Sensing in Transportation (NCRST) — Infrastructure Management (2000) and Metropolitan Freight-Ports (2007-).