INFORMS Transportation and Logistics Society

Second Triennial Conference

Hosted at Loyola University Chicago
Chicago, Illinois, USA
July 23 – 26, 2023

The Transportation Science and Logistics Society Conference has been created to provide an opportunity for all members to gather on a triennial basis to present and discuss the state-of-the-art in transportation science and logistics. The conference focuses on all transportation science and logistics topics including but not limited to air transportation, facility logistics, freight transportation and logistics, intelligent transportation systems, and urban transportation planning and modeling. The conference also provides a platform to explore new problems that address major societal challenges such as aging, equity, and the environment.

Schedule at a glance:

Detailed Schedule: here

Know before you go: details on conference logistics

Map: here

Material for conference workshop: here

Dates of interest:

• Abstract submission deadline: December 1, 2022 EXTENDED: December 15, 2022
  
• Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2023
• Deadline for early registration: April 3, 2023 EXTENDED: April 14, 2023
• Conference: July 23 – 26, 2023

Registration:

Click here to register!  

The registration deadline for speakers is May 30. Speakers failing to register within that deadline will be understood as a withdrawal from the conference, and the submission will be excluded from the program.

Only one talk per speaker is allowed. However, one person may be a co-author on several submissions, so make sure that each has a different speaker registered.

All registrations include lunches for three days of the conference, an opening reception on Sunday, July 23, and the conference dinner on the evening of Tuesday, July 25.

All conference attendees are required to agree to INFORMS Meeting Code of Conduct.

The goal is to keep the conference small enough for deep interactions and large enough to accommodate the TSL Society's wide interests.  With this in mind, there may be at most one paper presentation per registered presenter.  Each presentation must be accompanied by at least one full paid registration.

Program:  The conference will be organized around a small number of parallel tracks.  The conference will also include plenaries and sessions designed specifically for PhD students.

PhD Student Travel Support: The United States National Science Foundation has granted the conference 30 $1000 scholarships to support the travel of PhD students currently studying at North American universities.  Flexport, a multinational corporation that focuses on supply chain management and logistics, has agreed to sponsor travel grants of up to $500 for 6 students studying at Universities outside US. Application details can be found here.

Social agenda: In addition to a broad look at the future of transportation, this workshop will provide numerous opportunities to network with colleagues and establish new working relationships. 

There will be a welcome reception on Sunday evening, and the conference dinner on Tuesday evening.

Lunches will be provided on site each day of the conference. 

Venue: The conference will be held on the Campus of Loyola University at the Quinlan School of Business (https://www.luc.edu/quinlan/).   The Campus is in downtown Chicago, just off Michigan Avenue. 

GPS Address (for mobile devices and Google maps): 16 E Pearson St, Chicago, IL 60611.

Where to Stay:  INFORMS has partnered with Stay 22 to provide you with all available accommodations (hotels, Airbnbs, etc.)  at the lowest price online. This pricing is equal or better than what you’ll find on any discount travel or hotel website. Book directly with the map below!

View 2023 INFORMS Transportation, Science & Logistics (TSL) Conference hotels and apartments on Stay22.    

Keynote Speakers

The 2023 TSL Conference features two keynote speakers, Dr. Kara Kockelman and Dr. Kevin Zhang:

Dr. Kara Kockelman is a registered professional engineer and holds a PhD, MS, and BS in civil engineering, a master’s in city planning, and a minor in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Kockelman has been a professor of transportation engineering at the University of Texas at Austin for 25 years. She has authored over 200 journal articles (and two books), and her primary research interests include planning for shared and autonomous vehicle systems, the statistical modeling of urban systems, energy and climate issues, the economic impacts of transport policy, and crash occurrence and consequences. Pre-prints of these articles (and book contents) can be found at www.caee.utexas.edu/prof/kockelman. 

OPTIMIZATION OPPORTUNITIES AND RESULTS FOR SHARED AUTONOMOUS (AND ALL-ELECTRIC) VEHICLE FLEETS ACROSS U.S. SETTINGS.

Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs or “driverless taxis”) can complement public transit systems by offering first-mile last-mile connections to line-haul transit. Smart fleets will rely on rapid optimization techniques to improve routing, battery charging, and repositioning decisions in order to deliver more reliable, safe, and cost-effective transportation options.

This presentation will describe how SAV trip requests across the 20-county Chicago region were matched to SAVs, to one another (shared rides), and to time-saving transit stations (for intermodal trips) using routing optimization modules. Joint routing increased transit ridership from 5.4% to 6.3% and SAV utilization levels by 12%, with only a 4% increase in SAV fleet VMT (as compared to routing all SAV trips door-to-door). 

When using all-electric SAEVs, battery-charging decisions become very important for optimal service. A simulation of SAVs serving the 6-county Austin region suggests that optimal SAEV-dispatch decisions lower traveler wait times by 39%, increase fleet use (non-idle periods) by 28%, and lower empty VMT by 1.6% points. If objectives include lowering electricity costs and emissions, optimal charging and dispatch of Austin SAEVs saves $0.79 per SAEV per day on energy costs while avoiding $0.43 in emissions damages. Scheduling charging to lower energy and emissions costs allows each vehicle to serve another trip and net another $8 per day in revenues.

Kevin Zhang, PhD, joined the U.S. DOT Volpe Center in 2020 as a data scientist in the Energy Analysis and Sustainability Division. He provides technical support on projects related to resilience of transportation networks, supply chain optimization, and alternative fuels. Zhang also provides support on project work related to the deployment of connected and automated vehicles. Prior to joining the U.S. DOT Volpe Center, Zhang received a doctorate in operations research at MIT. His research focused on developing analytical models for the real-time calibration of traffic simulators. He also worked previously as an operations research analyst at an analytics consulting firm in Boston.

ENABLING TRANSPORTATION OPTIMIZATION AND RESILIENCE ANALYSES

Transportation infrastructure is critical to freight movements and supply chain performance. Enabling scenario exploration, particularly under potential disruption conditions, is critical to making good decisions about freight movements and resilient infrastructure investments.  Yet there are limited open-source tools available to help supply chain participants and transportation planners evaluate the intersection between transportation infrastructure and freight. Open-source tools using inputs that users typically already possess or can easily acquire are particularly rare for resilience analyses.  The U.S. Department of Transportation has developed two distinct tools to support these kinds of analyses, the Freight and Fuel Transportation Optimization Tool, which optimizes supply chain freight movements across a multimodal transportation network, and the Resilience and Disaster Recovery Tool Suite, which helps estimate transportation network exposure to hazards and evaluate the return on investment for resilience projects aimed at mitigating uncertain future hazard conditions.  Dr. Lewis will discuss the approaches these two tools take to enable transportation optimization and resilience analyses.

SPONSORS:

	Flexport (represented by Dr. Richard Chen, Director of Data Science)
	Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange
	Warsaw School of Economics (represented by Dr. Przemyslaw Szufel)
	Department of Industrial Engineering University of Arkansas
	Milton Steward School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Georgia Tech
	University of Iowa, Tippie College of Business, Business Analytics
	Northwestern University

Organizing Committee

Sibel Alumur Alev – University of Waterloo
Jan Fabian Ehmke – University Vienna
Sandra D. Eksioglu (chair) – University of Arkansas
Mike Hewitt (local chair) – Loyola University Chicago
Maciek Nowak (local co-chair) – Loyola University Chicago
Barrett Thomas – University of Iowa
Alejandro Toriello – Georgia Institute of Technology

Student coordinator: Sara Reed – University of Kansas

Scientific Committee