Reasons for nomination:
Dr. Reinhard Pfliegl is committed to ITS for a very long time: In Austria he was one of the pioneers in ITS and contributed to build up the Austrian ITS community from the scratch. He initiated and developed the first strategic projects which helped to raise awareness on ITS not only in Austria, but also on European level. He also became a forerunner for harmonized ITS implementation in Europe and beyond by being one of the brains behind trendsetting European R&D projects. His strong personal engagement in community building activities helped the ITS sector to increase its importance also on political level. After so many years of highly professional engagement he is still looking for new approaches to bring the ITS sector forward.
From the very beginning he was very much involved in the national research and implementing activities: Starting in 1994 he headed at Alcatel different development teams. Among them a team for developing a full electronic scheduling system for public transit in the City of Vienna, the Austrian Motorway tolling system tendered by ASFINAG and a commercial system for seamless tracking and tracing for parcel services, which was based on GPS and GMS/SMS the first time in Austria. As a strategic research manager in Via Donau, a state owned company for the development of the waterway Danube, he developed and tendered the system specification for the national Austrian River Information Services (DORIS), which was implemented in Austria by Via Donau in the beginning of the nineties the new Millenium. Because of his broad experiences in ITS the Austrian Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology assigned him to establish an Austrian ITS Development Agency, which he successfully headed as a Managing Director between 2007-2011. During his time as Managing Director he launched the first national ITS Masterplan in Austria and several national ITS projects. Besides, he established the national ITS platform called ITS Austria and organized several national ITS Conferences and implemented the first academic training program for ITS in Austria.
The professional engagement of Dr. Pfliegl in different Austrian companies was always accompanied by a strong commitment to international activities. He was coordinating and so an important player in large strategic European projects like CORVETTE, INDRIS, COMPRIS, CONNECT, EASYWAY, Freightvision 2050 and COOPERS. His involvement was very much committed to foster harmonized ITS solutions to develop interoperable, seamless solutions within Europe and beyond. In this function Dr. Pfliegl worked in close cooperation with the European Commission and other ITS relevant European and international institutions and organizations like ERTICO.
Knowing the importance of conferences for the development and deployment of ITS solutions he was successfully organizing several international conferences, which took place in Vienna and which was the meeting point of researchers and relevant stakeholders worldwide: IEEE ITSS 2005 in Vienna, Smart River Conference, 2007 in Brussels, 1. FISTS (Forum Integrated Sustainable Transport System), 2009 in Vienna. Having been a continuous, strongly engaged active participant of the ITS World Congress since 1994 his highlight was organizing the ITS World Congress in Vienna together with ERTICO and the regional ITS platforms. As a co-chair he was mainly responsible for this great success, reflected by more than 10.000 attendees for the first time of more than 91countries and impressively technical demonstrations. Under his patronage the 3rd ICCVE Conference will take place in Vienna 2014 dealing with connected and automated vehicles and 300-400 participants are expected to come to Vienna.
With these life time achievements in ITS Dr. Pfliegl branded not only the Austrian ITS approach, but also contributed strongly to the European ITS Development .
