EDITORIAL

This special section / cluster placed in Vol. 48:2 of the Journal of Advanced Transportation (JAT – ATR), focused on: “METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN EUROPEAN TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH” contains selected full-papers whose abridged versions were presented at the 14th EURO Working Group on Transportation (EWGT) Meeting “In Quest for Advanced Models, Tools and Methods for Transportation and Logistics”, 26th Mini-EURO Conference “Intelligent Decision Making in Transportation / Logistics. New Trends and Directions” and 1st European Scientific Conference on Air Transport: “Research Horizon”, held in Poznan, Poland on September 6-9, 2011 and included in the Proceedia series of Social and Behavioral Science (vol. 20), published in 2011. The EWGT Conferences are regular international meetings of transportation researchers (academics and practitioners) from all over the World, whose profile is focused on the application of operations research techniques in transportation. The conferences are organized since 1992 in different European cities. Usually, the dominant role at the meetings plays European academic community. Thus, the conferences present the state of the art in European Transportation Research. In many cases they are combined with Mini-EURO Conferences focused on a specific topic and addressed to a targeted, narrow audience. The Poznan Conference gathered 136 transportation researchers and practitioners from 28 countries. 127 papers were presented by the authors during the Conference. The authors of 79 selected papers were invited to submit the revised, extended versions of their contributions as potential publications in the Special Issues of 4 highly recognized international journals, such as: European Transport, Journal of Advanced Transportation, Transportation Research Part C, Transportation Part E. The selected papers included 32 contributions considered for publication in this Special Issue of JAT - ATR. After a stringent, peer review procedure 4 articles were accepted for publication in this special section / cluster on “METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES IN EUROPEAN TRANSPORTATION RESEARCH”. This special section / cluster covers the questions characteristic for different transportation modes, including air transportation, road transportation and railway transportation. It clearly demonstrates the methodological issues that are of critical interests of the European transportation researchers. The 4 finally accepted papers originate from 4 different European countries, including: Serbia, Spain, Italy and France. Major features of the papers included in this Special Section / Cluster of Vol. 48:2 are characterized below. B. Mirkovic and V. Tosic in the paper entitled Airport apron capacity: estimation, representation, and flexibility deal with the problem of airport apron capacity planning and management. The authors provide a thorough overview of existing apron analytical models for supporting apron capacity planning and optimizing the utilization of available resources. They discuss in detail different constraints on apron usage and their impact on apron capacity. Based on that an extension of existing apron capacity estimation models is suggested, including constraints both on aircraft types and dominant users. In addition, the authors define an apron capacity envelope that provides information on capacity for one apron configuration (with respect to stand size and policy of usage) and a given fleet mix, for different shares of dominant users in demand. Finally, the question of apron capacity flexibility is discussed in terms of capacity planning and management. It is suggested how to express and interpret apron capacity flexibility. D. Canca, E. Barrena, E. Algaba and A. Zarzo present the results of research on Design and analysis of demand-adapted railway timetables. The authors deal with the problem of timetable determination by means of building and solving a single-criterion, non-linear integer programming model, which fits the arrival and departure train times under dynamic conditions of demand behavior. They present their findings on a background of wider discussion of the existing works on railway scheduling and timetabling. The proposed model allows to generate cost-wise optimal timetables. The results of optimization are used to compute several measures that characterize the quality of the obtained timetables, considering jointly both users' and company points of view. The authors discuss the impact of train capacity on the quality of timetables and the validity of Random Incidence Theory in the considered case. They formulate different alternative objectives (measures) and analyze their influence on the resulting timetables. The proposed approach is applied and tested on a particular line of the Madrid rapid transit system. S. Nocera and F. Cavallaro in the paper entitled A methodological framework for the economic evaluation of CO2 emissions from transport analyze a methodological problem of determining the cost of CO2 emissions. They analyze different methods of CO2 emissions costs estimation. As a result they propose a method based on both, avoidance and damage costs as opposed to market-based prices. This method is then applied to analyze the construction of the Brenner Base Tunnel. In the case study the authors consider 3 options / scenarios, including: “Do-nothing variant” – no tunnel construction, “Trend variant” – tunnel construction combined with complete market liberalization and “Consensus variant” – tunnel construction combined with governmental intervention focused on transport sustainability. The authors contrast the latter two variants and prove that “Consensus variant” substantially decreases the costs of CO2 emissions. V. Aguiléra and A. Tordeux develop in their paper, entitled: A new kind of fundamental diagram with an application to road traffic emission modeling a new model of traffic flow speed distribution on a road segment. As opposed to the standard fundamental diagram where the mean-flow speed is expressed as a function of road segment occupancy the authors propose a model in which the distribution of vehicle speeds is a function of the road segment occupancy. The authors claim that their proposal fits well the Maxwell – Boltzman distribution. They agree that under critical occupancy the distribution of vehicles' speeds becomes bimodal. Low temperature distribution corresponds to high mode, while high temperature distribution corresponds to low mode. The authors believe that their redefinition of a fundamental diagram may have an important theoretical and practical impact on understanding and modeling of traffic flows. We would like to give our personal thanks to all authors who submitted their papers for publication in JAT – ATR and encourage them to further cooperation with the Journal. We are very grateful to more than 60 referees from 17 countries who responded willingly to our requests for reviewing the papers. The refereeing process required from the referees comprehensive and interdisciplinary knowledge, diverse expertise and fair justification of the submitted contributions. Their efforts are highly appreciated.

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