José Telhada

Managing construction supply chain

Construction industry involves several players in a same project. Defining and coordinating such players and their activities is a very complex task. Hence, an information system capable of aggregate and display the relevant information, in the right time, is an extraordinary tool to help the construction site managers. There is a diversity of software available in the market that is very powerful in many specialised areas, but lacks the supply chain management overview. An integrated web portal to assist the managers in their daily tasks and simultaneously effectively control the entirely construction project is a partial result of a research project in a Portuguese construction company. This paper intends to show the main developments and preliminary conclusions in the implementation of this web portal to assist the logistics of construction projects.

An Integrated Simulation and Business Intelligence Framework for Designing and Planning Demand Responsive Transport Systems

Transportation planners, analysts and decision-makers usually make use of simulation tools in order to accurately predict the performance of new practices and policies before their implementation. Additionally, most of them, recently introduced new auxiliary Business Intelligence decision support tools in order to transform their available huge amount of real operating data into timely and accurate information for their decisions. However, although both of those types of automated decision support are valuable, very few attempts were already made by researchers to integrate them into a unified tool.

Urban logistics: A systematic literature review

City Logistics aims to reduce the nuisances associated to freight transportation in urban areas while supporting the economic and social development of the cities. Sustainable freight transport today are on the political, social and technological agenda of many actors operating in urban contexts. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review (SLR) that aims to consolidate the knowledge on urban logistics by reviewing the developments of the last 17 years in the field of Freight Transport research and innovation. The majority of articles focused on issues like commodity flows and economic modelling aspects, but there has been relatively little research reported on issues like collaboration among stakeholders, usage of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and E-commerce. Finally, based on the findings from the literature review, future research directions are proposed in an attempt to stimulate further studies on emerging trends and innovative strategies in the broad area of urban logistics.

Bus Fleet Management Optimization Using the Augmented Weighted Tchebycheff Method

This paper presents a multi-objective optimization model for the buses fleet management problem. This model is solved using the Augmented Weighted Tchebycheff method. The aim is to minimize three objective functions, \(Z_1\) (CO\(_2\) emissions), \(Z_2\) (other types of emissions) and \(Z_3\) (total costs), for a bus fleet that uses four types of buses: diesel, electric bus, electric bus of fast charging, and Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). A public transport (PT) company of Joinville, Brazil, where it operates three different PT lines, owns the fleet. The respective data was modelled and optimized using the MS Excel solver. Results provided interesting insights concerning the most adequate strategy for bus selection according with public transport line characteristics and taking into account trade-off between costs and emissions. The results indicate that optimal solutions include the diesel in the Itinga line and the CNG in the South line. The electric bus is more adequate in the South-North line due to the large number of stops and low average speed. However, when the costs are disregarded, in some scenarios, the best option is the electric bus for all lines.

Incorporating economic issues in the design of sustainable DRT systems: Insights from the case of a Portuguese municipality

Demand responsive transport (DRT) may be a feasible alternative when conventional transportation services provided by private companies are not available at a satisfactory level in terms of both price and quality. Nevertheless, these unconventional transportation systems are still not consolidated due to technical and economic issues. Beyond technical feasibility, DRT needs to be based on prices and pricing policies that ensure the attractiveness of the service without compromising its economic viability. Nevertheless, there is little evidence on the conditions of economic viability of DRT services and on the cost structure of such systems. In this article, we use a strategic activity based costing model to analyze the conditions of economic viability of a DRT system in a Portuguese rural municipality. The case presented was analyzed in terms of costs and profitability. They were defined a set of important variables which should be taken into account in the design and economic evaluation of DRT projects namely, ticket price, trip distance and passengers. Thus, this costing model can be used to assist decision making and support strategic and operational decisions. Furthermore, it can be embedded in a decision support system designed to support the real time operation of intelligent flexible transportation systems.

Characterization of the Portuguese SSS into the Europe: A Contribution

Nowadays, Short Sea Shipping (SSS) is an essential part in European multi-modal transport system, representing approximately thirty-seven per cent of intra-Community transactions in tonnes per kilometre (tkm). Since 2001, the European Shortsea Network (ESN) in partnership with the short-sea Promotion Centres (SPC) of each Member State of the European Union (EU) have managed to make significant progress in the promotion and development of this mode of transport.

An integrated decision support system to assess the sustainability of demand responsive transport systems

The provision of conventional public passenger transport services in rural areas have shown to be very inefficient and ineffective due to low levels of population density and high spatial and temporal dispersion. Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) systems have been seen as an interesting alternative solution, adopted in several countries as a way to increase user’s mobility, providing flexible transport services to meet trip requests and mitigate social exclusion. However, some DRT systems have revealed to be inadequate or even unsustainable, mainly because they are highly dependent on the correct tuning of organizational and functional parameters, namely the level of flexibility of schedules, routes and stop locations. Despite the existence of a vast literature concerning DRT systems, very few contributions have been put forward concerning comprehensive approaches to tackle these problems and to assess sustainability. This paper proposes a new integrated multi-disciplinary decision support system (DSS) to help decision-makers design and plan DRT systems, and assess their sustainability. The proposed DSS comprises analytical and simulation tools and consists of a procedure that iteratively simulates and evaluates alternative specifications of the system until an adequate and sustainable solution is encountered. The new tool has been applied to a case study in a rural area of the northwest of Portugal, and preliminary results suggest that the proposed approach was able to identify a set of conditions under which a DRT system can be sustainable.