Workforce Development Resources

For almost 10 years now, the CIVITAS Initiative has supported the implementation of more than 730 innovative urban mobility measures in 59 European cities. These 730+ individual measures relate to one of 8 CIVITAS thematic groups.
This video highlights "Urban Freight". The delivery of goods makes up a significant share of traffic in European cities and is a major contributor to deteriorating air quality, rising carbon emissions and congestion. Many CIVITAS cities encourage the use of cleaner freight vehicles and are developing solutions to better coordinate freight logistics to tackle traffic flows and congestion, protect competitiveness of shops and the quality of life of the citizens, and last but not least influence the image of the city.

Within the ten years of its existence, the CIVITAS Initiative supported the implementation of more than 730 innovative urban mobility measures in 59 European cities. These 730+ individual measures relate to one of 8 CIVITAS thematic groups. This video highlights "mobility management" measures.

CIVITAS cities try to influence travel behavior through mobility management, which includes marketing, communication, education and information campaigns. The aim of mobility management is to change attitudes and travel behavior with the ultimate goal to create a new mobility culture.

For almost 10 years now, the CIVITAS Initiative has supported the implementation of more than 730 innovative urban mobility measures in 59 European cities. These 730+ individual measures relate to one of 8 CIVITAS thematic groups. This video highlights "Demand Management Strategies". Demand management strategies can reduce traffic through a variety of economic incentives, regulatory measures and modern communication technologies. CIVITAS cities experiment with a range of demand management measures to learn about the merit of different initiatives and share lessons learned.

One of the major obstacles to urban freight demand forecasting is the lack of aggregate-level models that consider commercial vehicle tours. To bridge the gap, this paper describes two variants of entropy maximization formulations that are aimed to estimate the tour flows of commercial vehicles given the number of trips produced by or attracted to each node, and the impedance to travel. The first and second order conditions are derived to gain insight from the entropy maximization formulations. The first-order conditions show that the flow of commercial vehicles traveling along a given tour is a function of the Lagrange multiplier associated with the number of trips produced by each node along that tour, and the tour impedance. The second-order conditions indicate the convexity of the formulations. A case study in the Denver metropolitan area shows the efficiency of this approach: the estimated tour flows closely match the observations with the mean absolute percentage error as 6.71% and 6.61% for the two formulations respectively. Based on the findings, the paper discusses two possible ways of applying this approach to forecast urban freight demand.

In this paper we present a new insertion-based construction heuristic to solve the multivehicle pickup and delivery problem with time windows. The new heuristic does not only consider the classical incremental distance measure in the insertion evaluation criteria but also the cost of reducing the time window slack due to the insertion. We also present a non-standard measure, Crossing Length Percentage, in the insertion evaluation criteria to quantify the visual attractiveness of the solution. We compared our heuristic with a sequential and a parallel insertion heuristic on different benchmarking problems, and the computational results show that the proposed heuristic performs better with respect to both the standard and non-standard measures.

We consider the Multiple Vehicle Pickup and Delivery Problem (MVPDP) with objective of minimizing the total travel cost and the fixed vehicle cost. Most of the optimization based approaches for solving the MVPDP are developed for a restrictive hard time window or tight capacity environment that depend significantly on the reduction of the feasible solution space. We develop an alternative optimization solution approach for the MVPDP that does not require these constraints to be tight. The problem is formulated as a 0-1 integer-programming problem. A branch-and-cut algorithm is developed to optimally solve the problem. Four classes of valid inequalities for the MVPDP are proposed. By using the proposed solution approach, we were able to optimally solve problem instances of up to 5 vehicles and 17 customers on problems without clusters and up to 5 vehicles and 25 customers on problems with clusters within a stopping criterion of three CPU hours on a Sun Fire 4800 Server.

A billion people in the world lack access to all-season roads. Could the structure of the internet provide a model for how to reach them? Andreas Raptopoulos of Matternet thinks so. He introduces a new type of transportation system that uses electric autonomous flying machines to deliver medicine, food, goods and supplies wherever they are needed.

Renault Trucks puts forward ideas and solutions for an effective, energy efficient and environmental friendly urban freight mobility.

A number of innovative modelling approaches for the analysis of urban freight demand and its impact upon the built environment and transport infrastructure have been proposed over the past several years. These range from new and more robust synthetic models to tour-based formulations based on truck survey data to agent-based microsimulation models. As impressive as these contributions are, most have only included nominal validation efforts, typically limited to comparing the flow estimates to observed traffic counts. In many cases in both research and practice the quality and quantity of these counts are disappointing, and definitive conclusions about model validity and accuracy are difficult to draw from them. Fortunately, increasing the number of counts is far from the only option open to modelers. A far more expansive practice known as process validation can not only overcome the limitations of count data, but admit a far wider spectrum of information, data, and knowledge to the task. This paper illustrates how the process was applied to a tour-based microsimulation model of urban freight, and offers suggestions how it can be more widely applied to freight and logistics models.

Provides ten different lessons for using networks to manage in the public sector: represent your agency and the network, share the administrative burden, operate with an agenda, recognize other team members expertise, stay within the network's jurisdiction when making decisions, exercise flexibility without losing purpose, be creative, be patient, recruit, stress incentives.

The American way of life relies on the U.S. transportation system to move goods and services effectively and efficiently. Much of this movement occurs in urban areas, so it is natural that we wonder about what form our urban freight systems will take in the next millennium. This article is divided into five sections. It begins with a historical snapshot of urban transportation planning and national transportation policy in relation to the movement of urban freight. It then presents the influences on freight demand. Next, it examines the potential effects of research and technology on urban freight movement, particularly how the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act is changing urban freight transportation planning and policy development. It then addresses the topic of educating future decision makers, planners, and engineers. Finally, it considers the direction that urban freight movement might take in the next millennium.