Rail Security: Critical Insights and Applications

The Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) presented a workshop at the request of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Committee. The half-day discussion was offered on a timely, relevant, and critical topic, given the revelations that Osama bin Laden and al Qaida may have been planning rail attacks in the United States. While these plans were not well developed, it did underscore that terrorists do plan to expand their attacks beyond Europe and Asia. MTI presented the forum because it strongly believes that passenger rail security must be given much greater attention, especially because of the open nature of the mode and the millions of people who travel by rail each day, whether on intercity rail, subways, light rail, or commuter rail. The panel addressed the areas of primary concern and vulnerability

Investing in Mobility: Freight Transport in the Hudson Region

Proposes a framework for assessing alternative investments in freight rail, highway, and transit capacity that would increase the ability to improve mobility and air quality in the New York metropolitan area

Models of intermodal node representation

This paper analyses three different approaches of supply representation for intermodal nodes and proposes some functional and topological models for the representation of ports and Freight Villages. Besides in the paper functional and topological representation of container port and freight village are proposed. Further research is directed to the specification and calibration of cost functions, useful for cost estimation for different components of node network, with a view to facilitate the analyses of freight mobility on multimodal large networks

An ETA Prediction Model for Intermodal Transport Networks Based on Machine Learning

Transparency in transport processes is becoming increasingly important for transport companies to improve internal processes and to be able to compete for customers. One important element to increase transparency is reliable, up-to-date and accurate arrival time prediction, commonly referred to as estimated time of arrival (ETA). ETAs are not easy to determine, especially for intermodal freight transports, in which freight is transported in an intermodal container, using multiple modes of transportation. This computational study describes the structure of an ETA prediction model for intermodal freight transport networks (IFTN), in which schedule-based and non-schedule-based transports are combined, based on machine learning (ML). For each leg of the intermodal freight transport, an individual ML prediction model is developed and trained using the corresponding historical transport data and external data. The research presented in this study shows that the ML approach produces reliable ETA predictions for intermodal freight transport. These predictions comprise processing times at logistics nodes such as inland terminals and transport times on road and rail. Consequently, the outcome of this research allows decision makers to proactively communicate disruption effects to actors along the intermodal transportation chain. These actors can then initiate measures to counteract potential critical delays at subsequent stages of transport. This approach leads to increased process efficiency for all actors in the realization of complex transport operations and thus has a positive effect on the resilience and profitability of IFTNs

Collaborative Funding to Facilitate Airport Ground Access, Research Report 11-27

This report presents the findings and conclusions from a research study that has examined the challenges of funding airport ground access projects and the role of collaborative funding strategies between the different agencies that typically become involved in such projects. The report reviews the recent literature on funding airport ground access projects, as well as funding transportation projects more generally. This is followed by a detailed review of current federal transportation funding programs relevant to airport ground access projects, as well as a discussion of state and local funding programs and potential opportunities for private-sector funding. A major component of the research described in the report consists of detailed case studies of seven selected airport ground access projects, including a major intermodal center, two automated people-mover projects, two airport access highway projects, and two airport rail links. These case studies examine the history of each project, the costs involved, and the funding programs and mechanisms used to finance the projects. Based on the literature review, the review of current funding programs, and the case study findings, the report identifies potential funding strategies for intermodal airport ground access projects, requirements for effective implementation of these strategies, and a recommended approach to facilitate successful project development and implementation. The report also presents recommended changes to transportation funding program rules and regulations that could facilitate and simplify development of intermodal solutions to future airport ground access needs

Technical, economic and energetic competitiveness of rail-road combined transport: evaluation of the effects of possible ITS applications on intermodal terminal.

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Analytical approaches to protection planning in rail-truck intermodal transportation

A significant volume of traffic uses a rail-truck intermodal transportation network, making it the preferred transportation medium for customers. Thus, the associated infrastructure of rail-truck intermodal transportation should be considered critical, i.e., systems and assets whose destruction (or disruption) would have a crippling effect on security, economy, public health, and safety. Disruptions could be induced by nature such as hurricane Katrina in 2005, or man-made disturbances such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. This thesis proposes an analytical approach to preserve, as much as possible, the functionality of a rail-truck intermodal transportation system in the wake of worst-case attacks. As such, it will serves as an aid to the top managers to compare the cost of implementing protective measures with the benefits that such measures could bring. A tri-level Defender-Attacker-Defender (DAD) approach is proposed to model this situation, where the outermost problem belongs to the network operator with a limited budget to protect some of the terminals, the middle level problem belongs to the attacker with enough resources to interdict some of the un-protected terminals, and the innermost problem belongs to the intermodal operator who attempts to meet the demand on a reduced network with the minimum cost. Since the resulting model is very difficult to solve by any optimization package, efficient solution techniques have been developed for solving this model. Finally, the proposed framework is applied to the rail-truck intermodal transportation network of a Class I railroad operator in North America to discover the optimal way to protect the system

Designing robust schedule coordination scheme for transit networks with safety control margins

We propose a robust schedule coordination scheme which combines timetable planning with a semi-flexible departure delayed control strategy in case of disruptions. The flexibility is provided by allowing holding for the late incoming bus within a safety control margin (SCM). In this way, the stochastic travel time is addressed by the integration of real-time control and slacks at the planning phase. The schedule coordination problem then jointly optimises the planning headways and slack times in the timetable subject to SCM. Analytical formulations of cost functions are derived for three types of operating modes: uncoordinated operation, departure punctual control and departure delayed control. The problem is formulated as a stochastic mixed integer programming model and solved by a branch-and-bound algorithm. Numerical results provide an insight into the interaction between SCM and slack times, and demonstrate that the proposed model leads to cost saving and higher efficiency when SCM is considered. Compared to the conventional operating modes, the proposed method also presents advantages in transfer reliability and robustness to delay and demand variation