TABLE OF CONTENTS Transportation systems affect many facets of daily life. A significant portion of a typical workday is spent traveling, including riding buses, trains, or airplanes, or more commonly, driving a car. Traffic congestion on terrestrial roads and flight lanes is now a familiar irritant, causing varying delays, pollution, and the occasional "road rage." While significant delays are typically encountered in metropolitan area highways and airports, it should be noted that maritime transportation has its own traffic patterns and delays due to weather conditions and tidal activity as well as equipment failures.
Monte Carlo simulation is an invaluable tool for studying transportation systems and solving their attendant problems (e.g., ATZ Consultants [1996], Soros Associates [1997]). Some common examples are listed below:
Designing new traffic routes and alternate routes to satisfy demand for additional road capacity, or eliminating bottlenecks and congestion points in existing routes by appropriate placement of traffic lights and tollbooths.
Designing traffic patterns on the factory floor, including transporters and conveyors, for efficient movement of raw material and product.
Designing port facilities, such as berths and piers, and allocating vessels to berths. Such designs include material handling systems (loaders/unloaders, transporters, conveyors, and others) for containers and bulk-material transport.
Designing new airports or adding runways to existing ones to satisfy demand for additional flight capacity. Such designs include air traffic patterns and routing, runway scheduling, and planning cargo operations.
Computer systems and telecommunication networks also have a transport component (information transfer and message transmission), but these will be treated separately...
