24-11-2012, 05:49 PM
Transportation systems analysis
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Characteristics
1. Multi-modal: Covering all modes or transport; air, land, and sea and both passenger and freight.
2. Multi-sector: Encompassing the problem,s and viewpoints of government, private industry, and public.
3. Multi-problem: Ranging across a spectrum of issues that includes national and international policy, planning of regional system, the location and design of specific facilities, carrier management issues, regulatory, institutional and financial policies.
4. Multi-objective: National and regional economic development, urban development, environment quality, and social quality, as well as service to users and financial and economic feasibility.
5. Multi-disciplinary: Drawing on the theories and methods of engineering, economics, operation research, political science, psychology, other natural and social sciences, management and law.
Context
1. Planning range: Urban transportation planning, producing long range plans for 5-25 years for multi-modal transportation systems in urban areas as well as short range programs of action for less than five years.
2. Passenger transport: Regional passenger transportation, dealing with inter-city passenger transport by air, rail, and highway and possible with new modes.
3. Freight transport: routing and management, choice of different modes of rail and truck.
4. International transport: Issues such as containerization, inter-modal co-ordination.
Goal of TSA
In spite of the diversity of problems types, institutional contexts and technical perspectives their is an underlying unity: a body of theory and set of basic principles to be utilizes in every analysis of transportation systems. The core of this is the transportation system analysis approach. The focus of this is the interaction between the transportation and activity systems of region. This approach is to intervene, delicately and deliberately in the complex fabric of society to use transport effectively in coordination with other public and private actions to achieve the goals of that society. For this the analyst must have substantial understanding of the transportation systems and their interaction with activity systems; which requires understanding of the basic theoretical concepts and available empirical knowledge.
Role of TSA
The methodological challenge of transportation systems is to conduct a systematic analysis in a particular situation which is valid, practical, and relevant and which assist in clarifying the issues to debated. The core of the system analysis is the prediction of flows, which must be complemented by the predication for other impacts. Refer Fig. 1 Predication is only a part of the process of analysis and technical analysis is only a part of the broader problem, and the role of the professional transportation system analysis is to model the process of bringing about changes in the society through the means of transport.