Human society needs still more intensive exploitation of all kinds of
transportation facilities. This need has already lasted for several decades and will be much more imperative in future. Mobility is one of the basic requirements for survival, besides the energy and food resources, health care and security. The requirements on transportation systems concern not only the quantitative and qualitative aspects of transportation activities, but still more also the aspects of their reliability and safety. This concerns not only the transported subjects or goods but also the environment.
The losses caused by failures of transportation activities reach even now a very high level and if not limited by systematic research and preventive activity, they will reach quite a tremendous level soon.
However, practically all the conternporary transportation vehicles, trains, ships and planes and also all the transportation systems need, for their proper operation, the interaction with human beings, which drive them, controls them or uses them and maintains them.
In spite of the fact that significant progress was made in recent years as concerns the transportation systems automation, the fully automatic transportation systam in use is still foreseen in the considerably far future.
Analyzing the reliability and safety of transportation, one finds that the activity of a human being is the weakest point. The technical reliability of almost all transportation tools has improved quite a lot in the past years; however, the human subject interacting with them has not changed too much, as for his/her reliability and safety of the respective necessary interaction.
Therefore there is a vital necessity to improve it and the possibilities how to implement it will stay more and more in the focus of our interest.
In this paper an overview of the related problems is made, the challenges for further research and development in this area are discussed and the outline of a vision, with respect to human interaction reliability, of optimized transportation systems is presented.