It is 20 years since Abbas and Bell (1994) evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of system dynamics as an approach for modelling in the transportation area. They listed 12 advantages of the approach and in particular suggested it was well suited to strategic issues and that it could provide a useful tool for supporting policy analysis and decision-making in the transport field. This paper sets out a review of over 50 peer-reviewed journal papers since 1994 categorising them by area of application and providing a summary of particular insights raised. The fields of application include the take-up of alternate fuel vehicles, supply chain management affecting transport, highway maintenance, strategic policy, airport infrastructure and airline business cycles and a set of emerging application areas. The paper concludes with recommendations for future application of the system dynamics approach.
Integration as a principle in urban transport policy is frequently advocated but rarely defined. We suggest a range of types of integration, and highlight the problems in developing an effective integrated strategy, given the number of variables involved. We argue that integration should be designed to serve agreed objectives of transport policy, rather than being an objective in its own right.We then consider the principles for designing an effective integrated strategy. We define the concept of synergy, which is often advocated as a benefit of integration, and discuss whether it, and other aggregation benefits short of true synergy, are achievable. We then consider the alternative approach of using integration to overcome barriers, an approach which is likely to be in conflict with pursuit of synergy, but more likely to lead to readily implemented strategies.We then review a number of examples where these principles have been applied, and investigate them to assess whether synergy has been demonstrated. Generally we find little evidence of synergy in outcome indicators. We conclude with some more general guidance on approaches to integration.
The derivative based approach to solve the optimal toll problem is demonstrated in this paper for a medium scale network. It is shown that although the method works for most small problems with only a few links tolled, it fails to "converge" for larger scale problems. This failure led to the development of an alternative genetic algorithm (GA) based approach for finding optimal toll levels for a given set of chargeable links. A variation on the GA based approach is used to identify the best toll locations making use of "location indices" suggested by Verhoef (2002).
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