Mathematical Methods on Optimization in Transportation Systems

Book excerpt: This book contains selected papers from the presentations given at the 7th EURO-Working Group Meeting on 'Iransportation, which took place at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT), Finland, during August 2-4, 1999. Altogether 31 presentations were given and 14 full papers have been selected in this publication through a peer review process coordinated by the editors. The papers in this book cover a wide range of transportation problems from the simulation of railway traffic to optimum congestion tolling and mode choice modeling with stated preference data. In general, the variety of papers clearly demonstrates the wide areas of interest of people who are involved in the research of transportation systems and their operation. They as well demonstrate the importance and possibilities of modeling and theoretical approaches in the analysis of transportation systems and problem solving. Most of the papers are purely theoretical in nature, that is, they present a theoretical model with only a hypothetical example of applica tion. There are, however, some papers, which are closer to the practice or describe applications of and give interesting results of studies made by known methodologies. It is especially noteworthy, that half of the accepted papers deal with planning and operation of public transport.