Special issue: Some recent advances in transportation modeling

Abstract

The planning, management, and operation of transportation systems requires sophisticated modeling tools that closely reflect reality (Ortuzar and Willumsen, 1994), so that the cost and benefits of different scenarios and options can be effectively and efficiently evaluated. In the past decade, new approaches have been developed to augment and improve the components of existing platforms and to seek new modeling paradigms. It is timely to take stock of what has been developed so far and to provide a preview of what lies ahead. This special issue is a collection of advanced papers that were presented at the International Conference on the Application of Information and Communication Technology in Transport Systems in Developing Countries, which was held in Sri Lanka from 5 to 7 August 2004. These papers cover some of the most recent modeling advances in the planning, management, and operation of transportation systems. The emerging modeling issues for the planning of transportation systems include land use and transportation interaction (Haghani et al., 2003; Lee et al., 2003), network reliability (Lam, 1999; Bell and Cassir, 2000), network design problems (Magnanti and Wong, 1984; Yang and Bell, 1998; Szeto and Lo, 2005), and sustainable transportation problems (Bernstein, 2001; Black et al., 2002). In the first paper of this special issue, Chootinan et al. present a reliability-based network design problem in which a new capacity-reliability index is introduced to measure the probability of network failure. A continuous network design problem is formulated as a bi-level program, and is solved by means of a genetic algorithm.