Publications

Summary:
There are more than 212,000 at-grade railroad crossings in the United States. Several feature paths running adjacent to the railroad tracks, and crossing a highway; they serve urban areas, recreational activities, light rail station access, and a variety of other purposes. Some of these crossings see a disproportionate number of violations and conflicts between rail, vehicles, and pedestrians and bikes.

Summary:
  With the rapid development of ports in China, competition for cargo is growing. The ability of a port to attract hinterland traffic is affected by many factors, including distance to the hinterland destinations. This paper studies the effects of distance on import cargo flows from a port to its hinterland. Two major findings are reported.

Summary:
There are more than 212,000 at-grade railroad crossings in the US. A number of them features paths running adjacent to the railroad tracks, and crossing a highway; serving urban areas, recreational activities, light rail station access and a variety of other purposes. Some of these crossings see a disproportionate number of violations and conflicts between rail, vehicles and pedestrians and bikes.

Summary:
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a model-based approach to quantify where, and in what form, energy and materials are used in industrial production. The “life cycle” refers to the production of raw materials for fuels, infrastructure and energy conversion equipment, use, maintenance, after life options, and relevant health and social factors. This is sometimes referred to as a “cradle to grave” approach when assessing environmental impacts.

Summary:
Container terminals are important intermodal interfaces between marine and land transport networks. These interfaces have historically been sources of congestion and logistical inefficiencies. Exacerbated by growing trade volumes, the terminals have become bottlenecks in the port-related supply chain. This research explores using truck arrival information to integrate drayage truck and container terminal operations and improve intermodal system efficiency.

Summary:
This report provides a guidebook for conducting benefit-cost analyses of proposed infrastructure investments on multimodal, multi-jurisdictional freight corridors for public and private decision-makers and other stakeholders at local, state, regional, and national levels to arrive at more informed investment decisions.

Summary:
As available data have increased and as the national transportation funding bills have moved toward objective evaluation, departments of transportation (DOTs) throughout the United States have begun to develop tools to attempt to measure the effects of different projects. Increasingly, DOTs recognize that the freight transportation system is necessarily multimodal. However, no DOTs have clearly stated objective tools with which to evaluate multimodal freight project comparisons.

Summary:
Loading ships as they are unloaded (double cycling) can improve the efficiency of a quay crane and container port. This paper describes the double-cycling problem, and presents solution algorithms and simple formulae to determine reductions in the number of operations and operating time using the technique. We focus on reducing the number of operations necessary to turn around a row of a ship. The problem is first formulated as a scheduling problem, which can be solved optimally.

Summary:
The violation of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS) is a precursor to the majority of collisions. These violations may indicate a poor safety culture within shipping or they may indicate the failure of the COLREGS to capture the modern ordinary practice of seamen. The COLREGS are a mix of rules and regulations. Regulations are a form of explicit, externally applied control; while the text of a rule is ambiguous and requires observing the system it refers...

Summary:
The Clean Trucks Program is a Clean Air Action Plan initiative currently being adopted by the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This paper examines the Clean Trucks Program’s current requirements and estimates the impact on terminal operations. Using terminal operations data supplied by three terminal operating companies, we conduct a simple queuing analysis and present a regression model that allows us to consider the potential impact of the policy changes.

Summary:
A series of field operational tests completed by Washington State over a 10-year period has shown that electronic container door seals (E-seals) can increase the efficiency and improve the security of containerized cargo movement. Universal use of E-seals, along with the associated infrastructure, could provide notable improvements in security, container tracking, and transaction cost reductions.

Summary:
The Clean Trucks Program is a Clean Air Action Plan initiative currently being adopted by the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. This paper examines each of the Clean Trucks Program’s current requirements and estimates the impact on terminal operations. Using terminal operations data supplied by three terminal operating companies, we conduct a simple queuing analysis and present a regression model which allow us to consider the potential impact of the policy changes.

Summary:
In order to support WSDOT in development of the Washington State Freight Mobility Plan, this document presents recommendations for criteria to be used in defining the Washington state truck intermodal network. The state does not have an existing definition of the freight truck-intermodal system.

Summary:
This paper discusses the transport of containers between the Port of Prince Rupert and the hinterland. The result of several data collection and analysis efforts, we present a set of findings regarding the role Prince Rupert might play in North American transportation, and the particular strengths or weaknesses of this facility. In the short term, there will be no facilities for container rehandling in Prince Rupert.

Summary:
This article provides an overview of the applications of operations research (OR) techniques to marine container terminals. The article begins by providing a summary of marine container terminal operations. Following this, a series of decision problems are identified, to which OR techniques have been applied. These include quayside, yard, and landside decision problems. In each section, the problems, technical approaches, and outcomes are described.