Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
38 State of the Practice Breakout Session J. Douglas Hunt, University of Calgary The objectives of this breakout session were toidentify issues and potential changes to the stateof the practice in freight modeling and to identify potential venues for needed research. Information from the breakout groups could be gen- eralized into four dimensions. The first was varying lev- els of geography, which we need to specify as we formulate the next discussion about where things need to go. The geographic levels are ⢠Urban and regional as a proxy, in general, for met- ropolitan planning organization and state (some metro- politan planning organizations are bigger than states, so it may be better to think in terms of urban and regional systems); ⢠National issues; and ⢠International issues (e.g., Pacific Rim). The next dimension, or set of issues, concerned under- standing of the systemâthe way the freight system works, what it is like in the real world, what is going onâand our use of this understanding to ensure the development of appropriate decision support tools. An understanding of the nature of modeling is also neces- sary. Several issues were identified concerning decision makersâ lack of understanding of what modeling does, what the role of modeling is in decision making, what is possible, and what is not possible. Finally, issues were identified with regard to understanding the nature of modeling by those of us who are doing the modeling work. Other issues include the role of education of deci- sion makers and modelers and identification of research concerning the nature of the system. The third dimension is data, and the fourth is model- ing techniques. These are the four dimensions, which could provide a useful structure for the second set of breakout groups to use in organizing their discussions to help extract ideas from participants of this workshop. Next, with regard to âunderstanding,â think about some elements that would be in an action plan, what the steps would be for research and what the steps would be for education. With regard to data, we are looking for identification of the current situation and the problems with it. Give us your ideas without getting too specific about individual elements, but be specific about the steps that you would see as appropriate to address these prob- lems. Consider the current situation with modeling tech- niques. The earlier sessions presented what is out there and what is available now, distinguishing the state of the practice from the state of the art and from what might be done in the future. We hope you will work through the matrix to identify some problems with the current situa- tion and steps to address these problems. We are inter- ested not only in what should be done but also in the sequence in which those things should be done.
