Workforce Development Resources

This paper is motivated by a need to examine the characteristics of commercial vehicle movements in an urban area. It studied the aggregate travel patterns of commercial vehicle movements in urban areas, i.e., the trip length distributions, the tour length distributions and the affecting factors of them, using a travel diary data collected by the Denver Regional Council of Governments (DRCOG) for the Denver Metropolitan area, Colorado, USA. The detailed statistical analyses reveal that the mean trip travel time and mean tour travel time of commercial vehicles vary by vehicle body type, fleet size and type of the company where the vehicles belong to. Meanwhile, the regression modeling results indicate that the trip airline distance and the vehicle body types are good predictors for trip travel time while the tour airline distance and the number of stops along a tour can be used to determine tour travel time.

Funding has been set up for community college student to receive grants in order to develop skills to succeed in local or regional industries.

The global freight distribution system has been impacted by convergence in terms of
technology, infrastructure, modes and terminals. Still, in spite of strong converging forces, it
can be argued that logistical practices are far from being uniform. This paper analyses the
regionalism in freight transport systems by providing a comparative analysis of gateway
logistics practices in North America and Europe. It is demonstrated that Europe and North
America are not walking the same paths when it comes to the configuration of transport and
logistics networks, via operational decisions and the setting of a regulatory framework. The
attributes of gateways, corridors, hinterlands, regulation, governance, value chains and labor
provide an analytical framework to understand the regionalism of freight distribution in the
North American and European contexts, as well as anywhere else.

International trade has long been considered an important resource for local economic development in the United Stats (US). Local and state governments generally see ports as valued regional economic resources, and they have many policy tools to attract port-related trade, from favorable tax policies to infrastructure investment to direct subsidies. However, port-related trade also generates externalities that may affect local public support. Thus local and state governments may be faced with both promoting trade and addressing local concerns. At the same time, governance structures in the US have become more fragmented and decentralized, making it more difficult to manage such competing concerns. This paper examines programs to reduce landside congestion at two US west coast port complexes, Los Angeles-Long Beach and Seattle-Tacoma. The programs focused on grade separations to reduce conflicts between rail and highway traffic. Differences in outcomes are explained by both institutional and contextual factors. The ability to effectively address local externalities is emerging as a major factor in port competition on the US west coast.

During the 1960's, Berlin's city planners, inspired by Los Angeles' Modernist "city of tomorrow" sought to rearrange the urban form so automobiles would be unchallenged as they sped through the city on spacious roads. This led to the construction of car-centric locales such as the Bundesplatz and the Bundesallee, which contrast and conflict with the 19th Century urban fabric of much of the rest of Berlin. Professor Christ and a group of students are visiting Los Angeles with a group of students from Berlin to again seek inspiration from this city - this time to undo the car-centric ethos and return control of the city to its human inhabitants. This seminar will focus on the relationship between function and form in Modernist locations and the quest to develop place-making strategies that balance form and function to regain the quality and values of the traditional European city.

Training opportunities offered to companies, organizations, and new and/or incumbent workers in hopes to answer the growing need for skilled workers in the transportation industry

The road network in the Keihanshin area (the second most populated urban region in Japan encompassing the metropolitan areas of the cities of Osaka in Osaka prefecture, Kobe in Hy_go Prefecture, and Kyoto in Kyoto prefecture) is modeled as two layers from the viewpoint of the frequency of use of roads by freight vehicles. This model was derived ,tested and validated from the probe car data of 300 trucks operated by 21 freight companies in the Keihanshin area. The two layers are called high-frequency-network and low-frequency-network layers. Characteristics, such as the density of probe data, average driving time, and speed of both network layers, were estimated. This analysis revealed that trucks spend a duration about 6 times longer on the high-frequency network even though it is 1/4 the size of the low-frequency network. The instantaneous velocity histograms indicated a significant difference in speeds between the two network layers of 25.03 km/h in the high-frequency layer and 16.87 km/h in the low-frequency layer. Service-level evaluations, reliability analysis, and route-selection modeling should become easier to deal with in the future by introducing these layered networks.

The most popular dispatching rule for double-track segments is to dedicate one track for trains traveling in one direction. However, today passenger trains are able to travel at a much faster speed compared to freight trains, but the limitation of the rail infrastructure makes it more cost effective to allow the passenger trains to share some portions of the railway tracks with the slower freight trains. The drawback of this dedicated rule is that a fast train can be caught behind a slow train and experience significant knock-on delay. The new dispatching rules enable the fast train to pass the slow train by using the track travelled by trains in the opposite direction if the track is empty. Simulation experiments show that a switchable policy can reduce the average train delay by 21% over a dedicated track policy and with the existence of crossovers the reduction in the average train delay can be as high as 41.9%.

Partner institutions in the Council of University Transportation Centers

CSIS is introducing new resources in order to enhance teaching youths about international trade and shipping. Includes a video with pop quizzes, and an online project that follows a shipping container around the world.

The urban network is a highly dynamic system. Thus, a modern and efficient fleet management in urban areas should account for dynamics of traffic conditions and variability in travel times, since they significantly affect the distribution of goods and the provision of services. For the proficient dynamic fleet management decisions it is proper instead of relying exclusively on the experience of a dispatcher, to base the freight management decisions on information provided by a professional Decision Support System (DSS), which facilitates the consideration of all the factors conditioning the addressed problem. This paper provides a proposal of such DSS for real-time freight management. Its design is based on integration of selected pickup and delivery vehicle routing model and dynamic traffic simulation models, which objective is to carefully emulate the evolving traffic conditions. The optimal dynamic routing and scheduling of a vehicle fleet is obtained due to dynamic modifications of the current routing and scheduling plan on the basis of the newly revealed information conditioning the addressed problem.

Collaborative transportation systems are relatively new concepts in research, but are very popular in practice. In the last years, collaborative transportation seems a good city logistics alternative to classical urban consolidation centers, but it is still in a development stage. This paper proposes a framework to define and evaluate collaborative urban transportation systems. This framework is organized in the following modules: a knowledge management system, a scenario simulator, a transportation management system, an environmental module, a risk factor estimation module and a multi-criteria decision support method. Finally, five realistic scenarios for the urban area of Lyon (France) are simulated and discussed to illustrate the proposed framework possible applications.

This paper presents a specific modelling system which simulates the commodity, delivery and vehicle goods movements, developed in order to support ex-ante assessment of city logistics measures. A review of models developed to simulate the urban freight transport demand is also reported. The review analysis highlights the limits of models for the ex-ante assessment of city logistics measures. For this reason this paper proposes a new modelling system made of different steps approaching problems related to: quantity OD flows, service-type OD flows, delivery OD flows, delivery OD flows for delivery time and vehicle type, and vehicle OD flows. This modelling system has been specified and calibrated using some surveys carried out in the inner area of Rome, where more than 500 truck drivers and more than 600 retailers have been interviewed.