Publications

Summary:
The rapid growth in e-commerce activities and the constant specialization of industries have aroused an unparalleled demand for trucking in urban areas, leading to growing concern over its interference to the transportation system.

Summary:
Establishment level employment data indicate that the warehousing industry has experienced rapid growth and restructuring since 1998. This restructuring has resulted in geographic shifts at the national, regional, and local scales. Uneven growth in warehousing establishments across the Pacific Northwest has likely exerted a significant impact on the regional transportation system, but the extent of these transportation impacts remains unknown.

Summary:
The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology for forecasting freeway vehicle travel time reliability for transportation planning using probe GPS data. Travel time reliability is measured using the coefficient of variation of the GPS spot (instantaneous) speed distribution. The proposed approach establishes relationships between travel time reliability and roadway traffic density in order to forecast reliability given future traffic conditions.

Summary:
Predicting truck (heavy vehicle) travel time is a principal component of freight project prioritization and planning. However, most existing travel time prediction models are designed for passenger vehicles and fail to make truck specific forecasts or use truck specific data. Little is known about the impact of this limitation, or how truck travel time prediction could be improved in response to freight investments with an improved methodology.

Summary:
In automated container terminals, rail based horizontal transfer systems are newly proposed and regarded to be more suitable to intermodal transportation [1]. However, improvements are required in operations scheduling in rail based transfer automated container terminals (RBT-ACT) to take advantage of the infrastructure improvement [2].

Summary:
Travel demand models are used to aid infrastructure investment and transportation policy decisions. Unfortunately, these models were built primarily to reflect passenger travel and most models in use by public agencies have poorly developed freight components. Freight transportation is an important piece of regional planning, so regional models should be improved to more accurately capture freight traffic.

Summary:
Freight systems are a critical yet complex component of the transportation domain. Understanding the dynamic of freight movements will help in better management of freight demand and eventually improve freight system efficiency. This paper presents a series of data-mining algorithms to extract an individual truck’s trip-chaining information from multi-day GPS data.

Summary:
The ability to fully understand and accurately characterize freight vehicle route choices is important in helping to inform regional and state decisions. This project recommends improvements to WSDOT’s Statewide Freight GIS Network Model to more accurately characterize freight vehicle route choice. This capability, when combined with regional and sub-national commodity flow data, will be a key attribute of an effective statewide freight modeling system.

Summary:
This paper quantifies the benefits to drayage trucks and container terminals from a data-sharing strategy designed to improve operations at the drayage truck-container terminal interface. This paper proposes a simple rule for using truck information to reduce container rehandling work and suggests a method for evaluating yard crane productivity and truck transaction time.

Summary:
The adoption of defensible performance measures and establishment of proven results has become a necessity of many state Transportation Departments. A major factor in demonstrating results is the impact a transportation infrastructure improvement project has on the region’s economic climate.

Summary:
This article will explore the reliability of the port drayage network. Port drayage is an important component of the marine intermodal system and affects the efficiency of the intermodal supply chain. Sharing and utilizing drayage truck arrival information could improve both port drayage and port operational efficiency. In this article two reliability measures are used to evaluate how the travel time reliability changes with trip origins and across drayage networks.

Summary:
Onboard monitoring systems (OBMSs) can be used in commercial vehicle operations to monitor driving behavior, to enhance safety. Although improved safety produces an economic benefit to carriers, understanding how this benefit compares with the cost of the system is an important factor for carrier acceptance. In addition to the safety benefits provided by the use of OBMSs, operational improvements may have economic benefits.

Summary:
North American rail terminals need productivity improvements to handle increasing rail volumes and improve terminal performance. This paper examines the benefits of double cycling in wide-span gantry terminals that use automated transfer management systems.

Summary:
Future reauthorizations of the federal transportation bill will require a comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the freight benefits of proposed freight system projects.

Summary:
Shippers and motor carriers are impacted by and react differently to travel time variability due to their positions within the supply chain and end goals. Through interviews and focus groups these differences have been further examined. Shippers, defined here as entities that send or receive goods, but do not provide the transportation themselves, are most often concerned with longer-term disruptions, which are typically considered within the context of transportation system resilience.