This synthesis will be of interest to transportation planners, environmental analysts, and government officials at the federal, state, regional, and local levels. It describes the state of the practice with respect to the procedures and methodologies used by planning agencies at all levels to plan and evaluate alternative multimodal passenger transportation and to integrate these plans with related land use and environmental issues. This report of the Transportation Research Board describes the federal studies and guidelines that are available and presents the findings of an extensive survey of state, regional, and local agencies to identify the evaluation methods that are being used in the practice. Selected case studies for five types of modal evaluation are presented: intercity corridor, regional study, regional screening, urban corridor, and regional programming.

The objectives of this project were to review currently used methods of evaluating the economics of alternative transportation systems, develop a framework within which to evaluate the economics of alternative multimodal metropolitan transportation systems, and develop quantification methods for such factors as accessibility and capacity that relate them to all modes. The research was to include sensitivity analysis to identify those aspects of a modal investment policy that have major impacts on the output variables and therefore should be included in the results presented to transportation decision makers.

The use and management of multimodal transport systems, including car-pooling and goods transportation, have become extremely complex, due to their large size (sometimes several thousand variables), the nature of their dynamic relationships as well as the many constraints to which they are subjected. The managers of these systems must ensure that the system works as efficiently as possible by managing the various causes of malfunction of the transport system (vehicle breakdowns, road obstructions, accidents, etc.). The detection and resolution of conflicts, which are particularly complex and must be dealt with in real time, are currently processed manually by operators. However, the experience and abilities of these operators are no longer sufficient when faced with the complexity of the problems to be solved. It is thus necessary to provide them with an interactive tool to help with the management of disturbances, enabling them to identify the different disturbances, to characterize and prioritize these disturbances, to process them by taking into account their specifics and to evaluate the impact of the decisions in real time. Each chapter of this book can be broken down into an approach for solving a transport problem in 3 stages, i.e. modeling the problem, creating optimization algorithms and validating the solutions. The management of a transport system calls for knowledge of a variety of theories (problem modeling tools, multi-objective problem classification, optimization algorithms, etc.). The different constraints increase its complexity drastically and thus require a model that represents as far as possible all the components of a problem in order to better identify it and propose corresponding solutions. These solutions are then evaluated according to the criteria of the transport providers as well as those of the city transport authorities. This book consists of a state of the art on innovative transport systems as well as the possibility of coordinating with the current public transport system and the authors clearly illustrate this coordination within the framework of an intelligent transport system. Contents 1. Dynamic Car-pooling, Slim Hammadi and Nawel Zangar. 2. Simulation of Urban Transport Systems, Christian Tahon, Thérèse Bonte and Alain Gibaud. 3. Real-time Fleet Management: Typology and Methods, Frédéric Semet and Gilles Goncalves. 4. Solving the Problem of Dynamic Routes by Particle Swarm, Mostefa Redouane Khouahjia, Laetitia Jourdan and El Ghazali Talbi. 5. Optimization of Traffic at a Railway Junction: Scheduling Approaches Based on Timed Petri Nets, Thomas Bourdeaud’huy and Benoît Trouillet. About the Authors Slim Hammadi is Full Professor at the Ecole Centrale de Lille in France, and Director of the LAGIS Team on Optimization of Logistic systems. He is an IEEE Senior Member and specializes in distributed optimization, multi-agent systems, supply chain management and metaheuristics. Mekki Ksouri is Professor and Head of the Systems Analysis, Conception and Control Laboratory at Tunis El Manar University, National Engineering School of Tunis (ENIT) in Tunisia. He is an IEEE Senior Member and specializes in control systems, nonlinear systems, adaptive control and optimization. The multimodal transport network customers need to be oriented during their travels. A multimodal information system (MIS) can provide customers with a travel support tool, allowing them to express their demands and providing them with the appropriate responses in order to improve their travel conditions. This book develops methodologies in order to realize a MIS tool capable of ensuring the availability of permanent multimodal information for customers before and while traveling, considering passengers mobility.

The growing mobility needs of travellers have led to the development of increasingly complex and integrated multi-modal transit networks. Hence, transport agencies and transit operators are now more urgently required to assist in the challenging task of effectively and efficiently planning, managing, and governing transit networks. A pre-condition for the development of an effective intelligent multi-modal transit system is the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) tools that will support the needs of transit operators and travellers. To achieve this, reliable real-time simulation and short-term forecasting of passenger demand and service network conditions are required to provide both real-time traveller information and successfully synchronise transit service planning and operations control. Modelling Intelligent Multi-Modal Transit Systems introduces the current trends in this newly emerging area. Recent developments in information technology and telematics have enabled a large amount of data to become available, thus further attracting transport researchers to set up new models outside the context of the traditional data-driven approach. The alternative demand-supply interaction or network assignment modelling approach has improved greatly in recent years and has a crucial role to play in this new context.

Transport networks evolved from DCS (Digital Cross-connect Systems)-based mesh architectures, to SONET/SDH (Synchronous Optical Networking/Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) ring architectures in the 1990’s. In the past few years, technological advancements in optical transport switches have allowed service providers to support the same fast recovery in mesh networks previously available in ring networks while achieving better capacity efficiency and resulting in lower capital cost. Optical transport networks today not only provide trunking capacity to higher-layer networks, such as inter-router connectivity in an IP-centric infrastructure, but also support efficient routing and fast failure recovery of high-bandwidth services. This is possible due to the emergence of optical network elements that have the intelligence required to efficiently control the network. Optical mesh networks will enable a variety of dynamic services such as bandwidth-on-demand, Just-In-Time bandwidth, bandwidth scheduling, bandwidth brokering, and optical virtual private networks that open up new opportunities for service providers and their customers alike. Path Routing in Mesh Optical Networks combines both theoretical as well as practical aspects of routing and dimensioning for mesh optical networks. All authors have worked as technical leaders for the equipment vendor Tellium who implemented such capabilities in its product, and whose product was deployed in service provider networks. Path Routing in Mesh Optical Networks Presents an in-depth treatment of a specific class of optical networks, i.e. path-oriented mesh optical networks. Focuses on routing and recovery, dimensioning, performance analysis and availability in mesh optical networks. Explains and analyses routing specifically associated with Dedicated Backup Path Protection (DBPP) and Shared Backup Path Protection (SBPP) recovery architectures. As most of the core backbone networks evolve to mesh topologies utilizing intelligent network elements for provisioning and recovery of services, Path Routing in Mesh Optical Networks will be an invaluable tool for both researchers and engineers in the industry who are responsible for designing, developing, deploying and maintaining mesh optical networks. It will also be a useful reference book for graduate students and university professors who are interested in optical networks or telecommunications networking. With a foreword by Professor Wayne D. Grover, author of the book Mesh-Based Survivable Networks.