Communications in Transportation Research: Vision and scope

Other text in scientific journal, 2021

Transportation is a vibrant, practical and public-oriented field that has undergone rapid and sustained growth. Traditionally, this growth was largely due to urbanization and increased trade and travel between countries and regions across the world. At most research universities worldwide, transportation engineering, as a sub-discipline under civil engineering, mainly analyses relationships among travelers, vehicles, transport infrastructure, and environment, using highly aggregated data (e.g., origin-destination matrix, traffic volume, speed, density). In recent years, thanks to the rapid advancement in data collection and processing (e.g., high-resolution individualized real-time data), vehicular technologies (e.g., connected, automated and electric vehicles), and computational and communication enhancement (e.g., real time automatic control, cloud and edge computing), transportation engineering keeps expanding its borders, encompassing more and more emerging inter-disciplinary components (e.g., shared mobility, modular vehicles, flying cars, hyperloop, boring). Not surprisingly, more and more researchers with a diverse background are involved in transportation related studies, including but not limited to computer science, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, control engineering, psychology, urban planning, business, law. This is because transportation is essentially interdependent with a number of other large-scale systems, including electricity grid (e.g., via electric vehicles), communication networks (e.g., via connected vehicles), emergency management systems (e.g., via emergency vehicles), and even societal systems (e.g., via residential development and house valuation), which overhauls human mobility/travel behaviors, infrastructure systems, and societal awareness. Indeed, our next generation urban mobility system will become a system of multiple systems. We believe that the future transport discipline can be characterized as an inter-disciplinary system of systems with emerging components that are enabled and empowered by huge amount of data that are collected, communicated, and processed in real time and in various forms. This journal Communications in Transportation Research (COMMTR) is focused on the above characteristics.