Workforce Development Resources

Stated choice experiments have proven to be a powerful tool in eliciting preferences across a broad range of choice settings. This paper outlines the elements of a group-based experiment designed for interdependent urban freight stakeholders, along with the procedure to administer the questionnaire sequentially. The focus is on the design of a computer-assisted personal survey instrument and the value in disseminating the details of a new approach to design and collect stated choice data for interacting agents. The paper also discusses how to specify a reference alternative, and then how to recruit appropriate real-market or representative decision-making group members to participate in a subsequent phase of the survey, which incorporates the reference alternative and contextual information from an initial phase. The empirical strategy, set out in some detail, provides a new framework within which to understand more fully the role that specific attributes, such as variable user charges, influencing freight distribution chains might play, and who in the supply chain is affected by specific attributes in terms of willingness to pay for the gains in distribution efficiency.

The evaluation of urban freight distribution initiatives is an essential process to the successful and effective implementation. The ultimate goal is to identify solutions where economic, social and environmental objectives can be combined, in order to achieve sustainable urban freight transport development. This paper presents the development of a conceptual framework for modelling the dynamic behavior of various stakeholders in urban freight distribution and evaluates different strategic policies. The framework allows decision makers to conceptualize the promising initiatives and the factors that will be integrated into the model development. The methodology proposed takes into consideration the behavior of several stakeholders and their interactions using the multi-agent system approach. Then the urban freight distribution initiatives can be prioritized. The case study of Rundle Mall Precinct, Adelaide is introduced and will be the test case for the model developed.

The Transport Planning Society (TPS) launched a planning skills initiative in the UK. TPS identified needs for stronger personal identity for transport planning and has been working with the Universities Transport Partnership to develop planning skills requirements (National Occupational Standards).

Partly supported by FHWA, the TRB report outlines challenges to developing leaders in transportation agencies and suggests areas for focus. The report stresses the importance of recruitment, candidate selection, and mentoring among other strategies. At the time of the report's research, it indicated that 63% of state Departments of Transportation relied on outside providers for leadership training.

DHL SUPPLY CHAIN SPAIN are planning a new Urban Consolidation Centre in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat in the metropolitan area of Barcelona.

"While most firms have given a great deal of thought to logistical design and management, very few focus their attention on market distribution. In fact, there is considerable evidence that this critical arena of business strategy is simply treated as a given in most firms and not subject to the same rigorous analysis as other aspects of strategy. Firms have even changed, added, or modified market distribution structures with little consideration of the impact on overall business performance and the logistical consequences of such changes. Distribution Fulfillment covers the critical topics to help you learn how to develop, implement and manage a market distribution strategy for your logistical operations." View the website for more details.

This is a program to educate the public on the importance of organ and tissue donation

To attract qualified students to the fields of transportation education and research, and advance transportation workforce development.

E-commerce, like many other information technology (IT)-based activities, also offers the potential substitution of telecommunications for travel, resulting in a trade-off between virtual and physical travel. The aim of this paper is to explore whether and how the increasing opportunities for purchasing and information gathering offered by information technologies affect shopping-related travel. The paper will attempt to explore the question of substitution by modelling output of consumer decisions on mode of purchase. Then, this will be combined with clustering the population according to their affinity to IT and finally by identifying the differences in the socio-economic attributes of the different clusters.

Report that studied and discussed the lack of facilities necessary to educate the influx of students that will enter the education systems in the future. Report suggests that appropriate funding needs to be made to alleviate these issues

This is an engineering outreach program

The most natural and popular dispatching rule for double-track segments is to dedicate one track for trains traveling in one direction. However, sometimes passenger trains have to share some portions of the railway with freight trains and passenger trains are traveling faster and faster nowadays. The major drawback of this dedicated rule is that a fast train can be caught behind a slow train and experience significant knock-on delay. In this paper, we propose a switchable dispatching policy for a double-track segment. The new dispatching rule enables the fast train to pass the slow train by using the track traveled by trains in the opposite direction if the track is empty. We use queueing theory techniques to derive the delay functions of this policy. The numerical experiments show that a switchable policy can reduce the fast train knock-on delay by as high as 30% compared to a dedicated policy. When there are crossovers at the middle of the double-track segment, our proposed switchable policy can reduce the delay of the fast trains by as high as 65%.

End-consumer movements, defined as the movements made by the consumer transporting the purchased goods, are identified with shopping trips. Whereas the logistics movements (freight distribution and urban part of the supply chain) are well studied in city logistics and urban planning, the end-consumer movements are usually related only to people movements. This paper presents a new modelling approach to characterize the shopping trips within a city logistics point of view, in order to connect these movements with those belonging to urban freight distribution in the supply chain. We present a trip generation model built from the data of recent household trip surveys, more precisely for the urban community of Lyon (France). We present the main results produced by the various simulations in a short-term planning horizon.

The complementary effect produced by e-commerce integrated with home delivery service creates tremendous opportunities. These opportunities enable marketers to develop new services, allowing online shoppers to not only shorten their order cycle time but also allowing them multiple options to satisfy their shopping desires. Some studies have been performed to examine the issue of new service development (NSD) in an emerging market, but research is lacking on the development of home delivery services (HDS) for specialty foods from traditional markets. This study analyzes a Taiwan's home delivery company and uses an NSD model and quality function deployment (QFD) to develop a home delivery service model. In the voice of customer (VOC) area, the results reveal that online shoppers emphasize the security of personal information and trading mechanisms of that information. As for HDS for specialty foods from traditional markets, online shoppers focus on the speed of the delivery service, the freshness of the foods and quick responses from HD companies when problems occur during delivery. Furthermore, in the voice of engineering (VOE) area, the main suggestions for improvement are training staff, setting up a brand, and strengthening system effectiveness and information safety.

The objective of the formulation is to allow to evaluate easily the costs of the urban distribution of goods by means of wheeled vehicles, and to formalize a methodological outline for the mentioned evaluation, which allows its updating and amplification when it was necessary. The sensitivity of the model illustrates the behavior of the social costs in front of variations of the parameters which intervene in the model. The social costs which are analyzed in this article are the costs of the polluting emissions of the commercial vehicles, the costs of the noise emitted by the same ones, the costs which generate these vehicles in congestion and the costs of the accidents associated to their circulation. The costs of polluting emissions are considered with a matrix model based on an updating of the deliverable 22 of the project MEET. The costs of the noise are associated to the cost of using asphalt noise reducer in the streets with a high daily average intensity. The congestion costs are evaluated starting from the losses of time of the drivers of the commercial vehicles in Barcelona. The costs of accidents are quantified starting from the accident rate studies and mobility in the city of Barcelona.

We present a method for estimating intra-metropolitan freight flows on a highway network. The work is part of a larger project aimed at developing an automated, integrated system for freight flow analysis and planning. To overcome the limitations of current estimation methods for commodity flows, we use reliable secondary sources, including small-area employment data, and derive estimates in a plausible way by means of a computational workflow. When available, we extract the data automatically from online sources, so that estimations can be continuously updated. Using widely available data sources allows for transferability. In this paper we provide an overview of our modeling approach and the major data sources used. We apply the model using data from the Los Angeles region, and compare our traffic assignment results with available screenline counts. Results are encouraging. Our approach should be easily applied to other metropolitan areas, allowing planners and policymakers to make more informed decisions by utilizing the most recent data from many sources and enhancing the ability to explore different scenarios.