As President of the Organizing Committee of the 2nd International Seminar on Tunnels and ITS Applications, I am pleased to invite you all to participate in this new edition of the Seminar which will be held in the City of Buenos Aires, Argentina, between the 23rd and 26 March, 2010. This will be an excellent opportunity to share experiences among professionals, technicians and official decision-makers who take part, in various ways, in tunnel development and intelligent transport system applications.

In current times, when the surface space to develop new infrastructure is ever more at a premium while, at the same time, communications means and needs are growing steadily, underground tunneling has become a very attractive alternative to solve this contemporary issue. On this account, we understand that this International Seminar comes propitiously to allow the decision-makers be informed on the state-of-the-art technology and world-wide trends on these fields.

This time the Seminar is organized by The National Roads & Highways Bureau of Argentina (Dirección Nacional de Vialidad), the World Roads Association (la Asociación Mundial de la Carretera), the Mountain Road Engineering School of the National University of San Juan, Argentina (Escuela de Ingeniería de Caminos de Montaña de la Universidad Nacional de San Juan), the ITS Argentine Chapter and the ITS Chilean Chapter. This seminar will congregate well-known experts and foremost professional leaders in this field from all over the world who will discuss, among other subjects, on the importance of technology transfer, the improvement of tunnel operational safety and on the contribution of ITS for risk detection, analysis and prevention. As a well-known triggering factor, the tragic accidents occurred in the tunnels of Mont Blanc (France-Italy) and Tauern (Austria) have urged the pertaining consulting experts and technical commissions to devise preventive measures and to engineer constructional and technological solutions aimed at minimizing the risks on tunnels users. At present, the conclusions of their work are entering the reporting and institutionalizing phases.  » Read more