The sustainability of the freight transportation system is an important topic, with many open research questions. In this project, you will review one paper that addresses some aspect of sustainable freight transportation. You will then discuss this paper with your peers, and present a synthesis of the group's papers. After a class-wide discussion, you will be asked to articulate one important ...

The study of various countries rail transportation indicators is an appropriate criterion for evaluating the existing performance of Iranian railways. The experiences of other countries can be used to improve the efficiency of Iran’s rail transportation. At the beginning of the study, in order to compare the Iranian railway performance with railways of other countries, various efficiency indica...

Freight transportation is characterized by highly dynamic information processes: customers call in orders over time to move freight; the movement of freight over long distances is subject to random delays; equipment failures require last minute changes; and decisions are not always executed in the field according to plan. The highdimensionality of the decisions involved has made transportation ...

Integrating passenger and freight flows creates attractive business opportunities because the same transportation needs can be met with fewer vehicles and emissions. This paper seeks an integrated solution for the transportation of passenger and freight simultaneously, so that fewer vehicles are required. The newly introduced problem concerns scheduling a set of vehicles to serve the requests s...

The efficient and safe movement of freight is one of the important goals of urban transportation systems and vital to not only the local economy, but nationally as well. Given the importance of the freight transportation system, opportunities to utilize state of the art Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies are increasing to improve the operation of the existing infrastructure t...

We consider the two-level uncapacitated facility location problem with singleassignment constraints (TUFLP-S), a problem that arises in industrial applications in freight transportation and telecommunications. We present a new Lagrangian relaxation approach for the TUFLP-S, based on solving a single-level uncapacitated facility location problem (UFLP) as the Lagrangian subproblem. We also devel...

Pricing schemes have been proposed to address the negative externalities of freight transportation. Literature related to the following pricing strategies are reviewed: pricing programs aimed at changing shipper’s mode choice, and schemes aimed at shifting freight deliveries to off-peak hours. Evidence from empirical and theoretical studies suggests that pricing strategies may have limited effe...

Collaborative transportation planning (CTP) within a coalition of small and mid-sized freight carriers can be used as a powerful instrument to improve the operational efficiency of the coalition members. In such coalitions, transportation requests acquired from different freight carriers are exchanged among coalition members in order to reduce the total fulfillment costs. We consider the CTP fo...

This paper develops a simple analytical model of price and frequency competition among freight carriers. In the model, the full price faced by a shipper (a goods producer) includes the actual shipping price plus an inventory holding cost, which is inversely proportional to the frequency of shipments offered by the freight carrier. Taking brand loyalty on the part of shippers into account, compe...

We present the main freight transportation planning and management issues, brie y review the associated literature, describe a number of major developments, and identify trends and challenges. In order to keep the length of the paper within reasonable limits, we focus on long-haul, intercity, freight transportation. Optimization-based operations research methodologies are privileged. The paper ...