Search

China launched an ambitious strategy known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013 with an objective to promote regional economic growth and integration. The initiative was implemented primarily through massive investment in transportation infrastructure development among the Belt and Road countries to improve transportation connectivity and reduce trade costs. While such a strategy has been implemented for more than seven years, it remains unclear to what extent the investment of transportation infrastructure has affected the regional economic performance in various countries. To clarify this question, this study provides an in-depth assessment of BRI investment in transportation infrastructure using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. Different from previous studies, the regional economic impact was evaluated through CGE simulations based on the actual investment data obtained from various sources. In addition, both the change of intraregional and interregional trade costs as a result of BRI transportation infrastructure investment was estimated. The results show that the transportation infrastructure investment in BRI has generated different impacts among regions. In particular, China, Central and West Asian countries have gained significant growth in GDP, employment, and economic welfare, whereas the economic impact of transportation infrastructure investment in the Central and West Europe is relatively minor. Overall, the research findings provide important policy implications for future transportation infrastructure investment in BRI countries and beyond.

Onset of a major disaster requires immediate effort to save human lives. The annual global cost of natural disasters is expected to exceed $300 billion by the year 2050. Saving lives or minimizing suffering, is the prime driver of humanitarian relief. It requires multiple capabilities: fund raising, logistics expertise, medical care, aid dispensing, evacuation, and rehabilitation. As individual organizations cannot possess every capability, multiple organizations comprising the UN, relief organizations, governments, and the military must collaborate. Logistics activities include prepositioning of inventory, setting up warehouses, rapid delivery of supplies in real time, managing a mix of transportation modes, transporting equipment and workers, repairing communication and transportation infrastructure, devising procurement contracts with suppliers, and using 3rd party service providers where feasible.

Electric mobiles are one of many possible answers regarding the increasing costs of fossil fuels and carbon emission reduction targets. The main contraint is that the new technology must cover the users’ mobility needs which are still rising. Due to the technical restrictions of electric vehicles, a switch to electromobility is bound to the need for a sufficient charging infrastructure taking into account current and future mobility behavior as well as the characteristics of electric vehicles. This paper explains a methodology to design and assess the charging infrastructure layout without having a significant amount of electric vehicles available. This approach includes the use of the simulation tool TrIAS (Transportation infrastructure assessment by simulation). The basis is a planning model that is able to represent concepts and parameters like users’ mobility patterns, regional street layout, available parking infrastructure as well as the e-car and its technical characteristics like range or battery capacity itself. This model is the input for a simulation-based analysis. The approach is applied in the region Bremen/Oldenburg to analyze the requirements towards a sufficient charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.

Along with the rapid development of the national economy, as well as the increasing of transportation on road, China’s road traffic infrastructure faces major challenges. It has been already widely accepted that it is imperative to protect the environment in the process of road transportation infrastructure construction and further realize the sustainable development of the transportation infrastructure. In this paper, the current situation of China’s road transportation infrastructure is analyzed; and the philosophy and connotation of the sustainable development of road transportation infrastructure is elaborated; at last, the corresponding countermeasures concerning the legal, fiscal and demonstration policies are provided.

Landslides represent a major threat to human life, property, buildings, infrastructure and natural environments in most mountainous and hilly regions of the world. The purpose of this work is to present the results of the analysis carried out by ISPRA on main landslide events and available databases in Europe. The major landslide phenomena occurred in Europe have been collected from the analysis of global disaster databases. For the period 2003–2010, 112 major landslides were recorded. These events, which often occurred at multiple sites for the same triggering factor, claimed a total of 152 fatalities and damaged or destroyed several buildings and transportation infrastructure.

Aufgrund des dynamischen Wachstums der Gutertransportstrome sowohl im Strasen- als auch im Schienenverkehr steht die Schweiz vor der Herausforderung, das Verkehrsangebot den steigenden Anforderungen anzupassen. Da ein Infrastrukturausbau nur noch bedingt moglich ist, mussen andere Moglichkeiten zur Kapazitatserhohung und Nutzungsoptimierung der Infrastruktur gefunden werden. Eine Option stellt dabei der verstarkte Einsatz von IT-Anwendungen zur Nutzungsoptimierung der vorhandenen Infrastruktur dar. Im Rahmen eines Projektes „Informationstechnologien in der zukunftigen Gutertransportwirtschaft“ hat das IVT diejenigen IT-Funktionalitaten zu ermittelt, bei denen eine besonders grose Wirkung auf die Infrastrukturnutzung erzielt werden kann. Da zukunftige technologische Entwicklungen nur schwierig quantitativ abzubilden sind, wurde ein auf einer Prozessanalyse der Transportprozesse im Strasen-, Schienen- und kombinierten Guterverkehr basierender qualitativer Ansatz gewahlt. So konnten die wirkungsvollsten Ansatze zur Optimierung der Infrastrukturnutzung durch ITEinsatz identifiziert werden.

In this paper, we explore a distributed cyber-physical solution using connected vehicle technology (CVtech) to substantially mitigate transportation systems' safety and efficiency problems. Future vehicles, by communicating with other vehicles (V-V), roadside infrastructures (V-R), and personal communication devices (V-P), will adapt to the external regional environment and consequently avoid collisions and congestion. We proposes to seamlessly integrate networked and embedded sensing, computational intelligence, and real-time communication (cyber) into transportation infrastructure including vehicles and roadsides (physical) to facilitate self-organization and system coordination. Specifically, this research addresses two specific themes: Foundations by advancing basic theories in component fields and abstracting the particular knowledge into core principles that integrate cyber and physical processes; and Methods and Tools by designing alternative architectures, modeling a unified online system of cyber and physical elements. The integration of research and education will prepare the future workforce to operate and advance CPS.

It is difficult to explode the encumbrance of trip decision choosing for traffic participants because that is deliberate. The origin of encumbrance of trip choosing for urban traffic participants is analyzed. Depending on the research of the sustainable development of urban transportation and summarizing the transportation development history and foreign cities’ experiences, a comprehensive strategy system to explode the encumbrance of trip decision choosing is proposed which includes mechanism construction, political, and capital construction (transportation infrastructure construction) as well as the technique system.

Nanomaterials use in asphalt and concrete pavement infrastructure is gaining ground among researchers and scientists. In this chapter, an attempt is made to provide insight on nanomodification of transportation infrastructure, with the primary focus on asphalt binder systems. It further reveals ongoing work being conducted on the use of nanoclay materials to enhance the mechanical properties of the asphalt binder cement system. From the preparation of the nanoclaymodified asphalt binder to the SuperpaveTM characterization process, it has been proven that nanoclay materials holds great potential in the design and construction of sustainable and durable asphalt pavement infrastructure.

Sustainable construction technologies for transportation infrastructure promises to provide full and lasting environmental, social and economic benefits to not only present-day users but also future generations. Recycled pavements can be both economically and environmentally sustainable when their structural adequacies meet the requirement. Rubblization of deteriorated concrete highways is considered to be a green pavement recycling technology that is both cost-effective and yields long-lasting performance. This chapter introduces two approaches - Deflection Basin Parameters (DBPs) and a hybrid Shuffled Complex Evolution (SCE)-Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) - to characterize structural condition of rubblized concrete pavements using Non-Destructive Test (NDT) deflection measurements. The utilization of these approaches in real word case scenarios is demonstrated to provide alternative solutions to the complex structural condition assessment problem for sustainable pavements.

The advent of modern monitoring applications such as location based services, presents several new challenges when dealing with continuously evolving spatio-temporal information. Spatio-Temporal data analysis plays a central role in many security-related applications including those relevant to transportation infrastructure, border and inland security. This paper reviews a novel binary encoding scheme to store location information and proposes a trigger based security alarming scheme when an object enters into a sensitive area with proper messages to the security people.

Driving simulator is an important facility for driving safety study. This paper introduced three well-know large-scale moving-base driving simulators and two fixed-base simulators. Driving simulator has a broad range of applications of driving safety study, from driver's behavior study to vehicle device and technology study, the paper reviewed seven main research aspects including behavior study, driver education and training, transportation infrastructure, medicine and therapy, ergonomics, Intelligent Transportation System, and administrative method.

Tel Aviv is the largest metropolitan area in Israel and serves as the country’s main financial and cultural centre. The Tel Aviv Metropolitan Areal stretches over 1,475 square kilometres and is inhabited by 2.6 million people, of which 90 percent are living in urban areas. Data from 1999 show that the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area produced 50 percent of the GDP and was responsible for 46.4 percent of the jobs in Israel. Because of its geographical position and for historical reasons, the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area is a transportation focal point. All traffic between the north and the south of Israel, as well as traffic connecting the main cities (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beer Sheba) to each other, must pass through the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area. Thus, the metropolitan transportation infrastructure must fulfil two major functions: a) supply the demand for transportation on the national level; and b) supply the demand for transportation within the metropolitan area on the regional and local levels.

In economically lagging regions, infrastructure, transportation infrastructure in particular, is seen as an essential prerequisite for economic development. Even in industrialized regions, where the existing infrastructure’s performance is deteriorating due to increasing inadequacy to cope with enlarging travel demand or superannuated transportation systems, there is still interest in the effects of new or improved transportation infrastructure. At the same time, governments are concerned with the cost of providing and maintaining infrastructure when there are pressures to reduce public expenditure. This requires governments or planners to give a rigorous explanation about the needs of the infrastructure that, in turn, implies a need for more accurate assessment of the incidence of the wider economic benefits from the infrastructure.

In a very broad sense, the network design problem (NDP) is a topic that has captured the attention of many researchers. This is mainly due to the immense importance of strategic capital investment decisions involving transportation infrastructure. For the purposes of this paper we limit the scope of the network design problem to highway systems. Design related decisions relevant to highways include a rich and wide variety of strategic (e.g., new right of way), tactical (one way street assignment, HOV assignment) and operational (traffic signalization, ramp metering) decisions that typically arise in transportation planning.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the results of that portion of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on “Regional Challenges to Improve a Deteriorated Transportation Infrastructure Within Poland and It’s Neighboring Countries” which dealt with nondestructive evaluation of bridges.

The need to invest substantial resources in the effort to rebuild Poland’s transportation infrastructure is evident. Deciding precisely what to do, how to do it, who should be involved, how to pay for it, and how to effectively utilize the capabilities of existing and new organizations is an exciting and challenging series of tasks. A major objective of our efforts here in Wroclaw is to help identify the series of processes that ultimately will achieve those ends. These challenges go well beyond the difficult technical issues. The task becomes one of gaining the commitment and support of the various transportation constituencies to agree on and then work toward the achievement of a common set of goals.

Connectivity is a basic characteristic of societies and economies all over the world. Communications and transactions cannot take place, unless there is (social or spatial) connectivity between different actors (individuals, firms, regions, countries etc). For example, social contacts presuppose a language which forms the vehicle for verbal or written interactions. International or interregional trade takes for granted the existence of a transportation infrastructure which connects various countries or regions.