Advances in Data Science permeate every field of Transportation Science and Engineering,
resulting in developments in the transportation sector that are data-driven. Nowadays, Intelligent
Transportation Systems (ITS) could be arguably approached as a “story” intensively producing and
consuming large amounts of data. A diversity of sensing devices densely spread over the infrastructure,
vehicles or the travelers’ personal devices act as sources of data flows that are eventually
fed into software running on automatic devices, actuators or control systems producing, in turn,
complex information flows among users, traffic managers, data analysts, traffic modeling scientists,
etc. These information flows provide enormous opportunities to improve model development and
decision-making. This work aims to describe how data, coming from diverse ITS sources, can be used
to learn and adapt data-driven models for efficiently operating ITS assets, systems and processes;
in other words, for data-based models to fully become actionable. Grounded in this described data
modeling pipeline for ITS, we define the characteristics, engineering requisites and challenges intrinsic
to its three compounding stages, namely, data fusion, adaptive learning and model evaluation.
We deliberately generalize model learning to be adaptive, since, in the core of our paper is the firm
conviction that most learners will have to adapt to the ever-changing phenomenon scenario underlying
the majority of ITS applications. Finally, we provide a prospect of current research lines within
Data Science that can bring notable advances to data-based ITS modeling, which will eventually
bridge the gap towards the practicality and actionability of such models.This work was supported in part by the Basque Government for its funding support through the EMAITEK program (3KIA, ref. KK-2020/00049). It has also received funding support from the Consolidated Research Group MATHMODE (IT1294-19) granted by the Department of Education of the Basque Government