Search results

The field of transportation research, and the World Conferences on Transport Research Society (WCTRS), has an illustrious history. The challenge today is to look to the future in a deep and thoughtful way, to identify emerging issues and opportunities for practice and for research.

This chapter identifies several critical issues in transportation research. We then explore one issue in depth, the need to increase individual and collaborative effectiveness.

This issue points to the need for a new direction in transportation research. Historically, transportation research has focussed on two major thrusts. The analysis thrust has focussed on predicting the consequences of a given transportation plan, project, or service proposal. Associated “design” research has dealt with algorithmic and heuristic techniques for finding “good” plans or policies. The policy thrust has focussed on the organizational issues and processes around making decisions on and implementing transportation plans, projects, or services. This thrust includes public policy issues and approaches, market structures and regulatory processes, organization design issues, distributional consequences, environmental policy issues, and related areas.

Today, we see the need to add a third major thrust to the field of transportation — cognition and action:

• to manage transportation services and enterprises better;

• to use analysis more effectively to inform and influence decisions;

• to use computer support more effectively in transportation organizations and enterprises.

to manage transportation services and enterprises better;

to use analysis more effectively to inform and influence decisions;

to use computer support more effectively in transportation organizations and enterprises.

Research in cognition and action examines how people think and act, and aims to develop aids to thinking and acting that result in significant improvements in peoples' behaviours and performance. Promising research directions draw on cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and especially empirical research on managerial cognition and problem-solving. We introduce the theory of cognitive informatics, describe some applications to transportation management, and discuss relevant software tools.

Modelling has been a mainstay of conventional planning support tools (PSTs) since the 1960s and is instrumental in transport and land use planning decision-making. Numerous studies have been conducted to model the potential impacts of emerging vehicle automation and sharing technologies. A systematic review of recent modelling studies of autonomous and shared vehicles in the research literature examines the extent of their contribution to ‘smart’ mobility knowledge. The findings suggest a limited knowledge base from which to support future planning. PSTs that can offer more pluralistic, discursive, and transparent methods in order to understand and proactively shape a transition to a planned urban future are also needed.

There is significant amount of literature tackling different issues related to the port industry. The present chapter focuses on a single business unit of seaports aiming at the documentation of works related to container terminals.

An effort to review, collect and present the majority of the works present in the last 30 years, between 1980 and 2010, has been made in order to picture the problems dealt and methods used by the authors in the specific research field. To facilitate the reader, studies have been grouped under five categories of addressed problems (productivity and competitiveness, yard and equipment utilization, equipment scheduling, berth planning, loading/unloading) and four modelling methodologies (mathematics and operations research, management and economics, simulation, stochastic modelling).

The analysis shows that most works focus on productivity and competitiveness issues followed by yard and equipment utilisation and equipment scheduling. In reference to the methodologies used managerial and economic approaches lead, followed by mathematics and operations research.

In reference to future research, two fields have been identified where there is scope of significant contribution by the academic community: container terminal security and container terminal supply chain integration.

The present chapter provides the framework for researchers in the field of port container terminals to picture the so far works in this research area and enables the identification of gaps at both research question and methodology level for further research.

During the 2001 International Symposium on Forecasting in Atlanta, Peg Young approached me to inquire whether I would be interested in developing an output measure of the transportation sector for the purpose of macroeconomic forecasting. At that time, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) of the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT) was interested in developing such a project in order for it to join the company of other federal agencies that produce monthly U.S economic indicators. During next two years with a research grant from US DOT at the University of Albany, SUNY, entitled “The Theoretical Development, Selection, and Testing of Economic Indicators for the Transportation Industry,” I developed the transportation services index (TSI) with the assistance of Herman Stekler as the consultant and graduate student Wenxiong Yao as the research assistant of the project. Needless to say, we had to make numerous visits to Washington to consult with DOT staff and for presentations. Identifying monthly indicators for different sectors of the transportation sector was difficult because transportation indicators had virtually disappeared from business cycle research since the early 1950s. The research project was completed in a year and during the summer of 2003. I went to US DOT headquarters in Washington DC with Wenxiong Yao to train its staff to produce the index on a monthly basis. On January 2, 2004, after ringing the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, the U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta announced the roll out of the TSI as a new economic indicator intended to measure the total freight and passenger activity in the U.S. economy. Six weeks later, the first monthly release of the TSI on March 10, 2004, marked the official beginning of the series that has been released and updated every month since then, and all reports are now available at http://www.bts.gov/xml/tsi/src/index.xml. The new indicator did not escape the media attention. On April 5, 2004, issue of Business Week, columnist James Mehring noted, “The index provides another sorely needed measure of the service sector. Services constitute about two-thirds of the economy, yet few government reports cover the…[It] should become a new crystal ball for economists and investors to peer into.” On March 15, 2010, the front page of Wall Street Journal reported the recent upward movement in the freight component of TSI, suggesting that the latest recession might have turned around.