ROUTE SELECTION AND TRADE-OFFS EVALUATION OF THE INTERMODAL FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION

Identification of optimum routes and mode of transport play vital roles in freight transport decision making. This paper presents the research carried out for the modelling and analysis of intermodal transport network. The study evaluates the trade-offs associated with different modes of freight transportation. Geographic Information System (GIS) and MATLAB were applied to design the hypothetical intermodal freight transportation network, modelling, analysis and user-interface design. An optimum route and transport mode for different pairs of origins and destinations were determined across decision objectives such as distance, time, emission and cost. The trade-offs among different modes of freight transportation were explored. Based on the assumptions of this study, the results showed that the road was the fastest mode, while waterway was not only the most costefficient but also was the most environmental-friendly transport mode in terms of carbon dioxide emission. Although the transport network of the study was small size and hypothetical, this paper demonstrates the potentiality of this methodology for analysing larger and real intermodal networks

GEOSTATISTICAL BASED SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPPING OF SOIL EROSION AND OPTIMIZATION OF ITS CAUSATIVE FACTORS: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Soil erosion hazard is the second biggest environmental challenges after population growth causing land degradation, desertification and water deterioration. Its impacts on watersheds include loss of soil nutrients, reduced reservoir capacity through siltation which may lead to flood risk, landslide, high water turbidity, etc. These problems become more pronounced in human altered mountainous areas through intensive agricultural activities, deforestation and increased urbanization among others. However, due to challenging nature of soil erosion management, there is great interest in assessing its spatial distribution and susceptibility levels. This study is thus intend to review the recent literatures and develop a novel framework for soil erosion susceptibility mapping using geostatistical based support vector machine (SVM), remote sensing and GIS techniques. The conceptual framework is to bridge the identified knowledge gaps in the area of causative factors’ (CFs) selection. In this research, RUSLE model, field studies and the existing soil erosion maps for the study area will be integrated for the development of inventory map. Spatial data such as Landsat 8, digital soil and geological maps, digital elevation model and hydrological data shall be processed for the extraction of erosion CFs. GISbased SVM techniques will be adopted for the establishment of spatial relationships between soil erosion and its CFs, and subsequently for the development of erosion susceptibility maps. The results of this study include evaluation of predictive capability of GIS-based SVM in soil erosion mapping and identification of the most influential CFs for erosion susceptibility assessment. This study will serve as a guide to watershed planners and to alleviate soil erosion challenges and its related hazards

Route/Modal choice analysis and tradeoffs evaluation of the intermodal transport network of Peninsular Malaysia

In Malaysia, containerized freight transport has been growing and is expected to continue in that trend in the future. This research aims to provide a model for the assessment of containerized freight movement through intermodal transport network of Peninsular Malaysia. To design such a model, ArcMap software was used to build the transport network and MATLAB software was used to design the user-interface and to develop shortest path algorithm for analyzing the transport network. The focus of the analysis was to identify the optimum route and mode(s) of transport from origin to destination for different objective functions such as distance, time, emission and cost. Besides, the study explored tradeoffs associated with least-distance, least-time, least-emission and least-cost routes. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model, two case studies were analyzed. The presented methodology and procedures are applicable not only on any origin-destination pair in the transport network of Malaysia, but also on any other intermodal transport networks