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Workshops and Presentations

Staff and Students Present Papers

Papers written by several MPC students and staff members were recently selected for presentation at national meetings.

NDSU Ph.D. student Chris Enyinda presented "Managing value chain through lean supply chain logistics: A comparison of military and commercial organizations" to the American Society of Business and Behavioral Sciences 14th annual conference Nov. 8 in Las Vegas, NV. The paper was also published in the conference proceedings.

Enyinda returned to Las Vegas in January to present another paper at the Society of Advancement of Management's 2007 International Business Conference. The paper, "Mitigating and managing global supply chain risks and security: Leveraging RFID technology," was also published in the conference proceedings.

NDSU Ph.D. student Subhro Mitra's paper, "Analyzing satellite imagery to develop freight generation data" was selected in the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials' Geographic Information Systems for Transportation (GIS-T) 2007 Student Paper Contest. He will present his paper March 26, at the GIS-T Symposium in Nashville, TN. The paper will also be published on the GIS-T website.

In addition to his GIS-T paper, Mitra was also selected to present his paper, "Analyzing the effects of spring highway load restrictions on North Dakota's agricultural freight flows" at the 86th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board in January in Washington, D.C.

University of Utah student Aleksandar Stevanovic presented "VISGAOST: VISSIM-based genetic algorithm optimization of signal timings" at the TRB meeting. The paper outlined research with advanced signal control methods in both a hypothetical grid network and a real-world arterial of actuated-coordinated intersections in Park City, Utah. University of Utah program director Peter Martin and student Jelka Stevanovic were coauthors.

University of Wyoming program director Khaled Ksaibati was coauthor of two papers presented at the TRB meeting: "Gravel Road Surface Performance Modeling" and "Recycled Glass Utilization in Highway Construction."

Magdy Abdelrahman, an assistant professor of civil engineering at NDSU, was another TRB presenter. His paper, "Field evaluation of implementation issues for Superpave on low-volume roads," was part of a session on pavement management for low-volume roads and identified potential issues of concern with using Superpave on low-volume roads.

The TRB Annual Meeting is the nation's largest gathering of transportation professionals with more than 2,800 presentations in 500 sessions addressing topics of interest to policy makers, administrators, practitioners, researchers and representatives of government, industry and academic institutions from around the world.

Rural Road Safety Workshops Held in Wyoming

The University of Wyoming held several transportation safety workshops around the state in October to help rural units of government improve rural road safety.

Local Safety Tools Workshops were held in Rock Springs, Casper, and Gillette. The workshops are outgrowths of the Federal Highway Administration's Local Road Safety program. That program was developed specifically for local rural governments and is based upon the international concept called the Road Safety Audit (RSA). These workshops were presented by Eugene Wilson, consultant, and Paul Harker of the Federal Highway Administration.

"The Local Road Safety Program is a powerful tool to make local rural roads safer. It can also be adapted for local city governments as well as for state departments of transportation," says Wyoming MPC director Khaled Ksaibati. "For most local rural agencies there are fewer new projects being constructed and therefore the focus presented in these workshops was upon the existing roadways. The key to the success of the program is that safety issues are the entire focus."

As a follow up to the local safety tools workshops, the University of Wyoming organized a Low Cost Safety Improvements Workshop. This one-day workshop was held on the Transportation Learning Network. Participants from DOT's and local governments across region 8 attended the workshop. The course opened with an overview of highway safety issues with an emphasis on "do it now" solutions. Steps for identifying high-risk crash locations were then described. The rest of the workshop concentrated on learning a host of countermeasures to fix high-risk locations.

Presenting safety related workshops will increase the regional and local awareness in safety. The University of Wyoming will follow up the training with wide distribution of safety-related "Tech Briefs" in the near future.

MPC to Sponsor Transit Coordination Workshop

The MPC will sponsor a transit coordination workshop for tribal entities this spring in Bismarck.

The idea for the workshop came from tribal representatives involved in transit management. The Small Urban & Rural Transit Center (SURTC), a part of the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute at North Dakota State University, recently completed a transit development plan for the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation and Rolette County in North Dakota. The plan emphasized coordination between existing transit agencies and human service providers and inspired interest among other tribes in coordination efforts.

The federal highway bill, SAFTEA-LU, mandates transit projects have coordination plans established between traditional transit providers and human services entities to extend mobility opportunities. With this workshop, MPC hopes to address the requirements of the federal legislation and enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of transit systems that operate on North Dakota's four major Indian reservations.

UGPTI staff members Carol Wright, Gary Hegland, and Jon Mielke will conduct the training which will:

• educate tribal representatives on the mandates that exist for coordination;
• give specific examples of the benefits of coordination;
• help to identify potential agencies and organizations with whom tribal agencies may want to coordinate;
• provide information to tribal representatives on how to initiate coordination efforts; and
• educate tribal representatives on how to monitor their results and sustain coordinating efforts into the future.

The materials for this workshop will be specifically designed for transit systems that serve Indian reservations. The material will take into account the challenges faced by transit operators on Indian reservations which often include poverty, remote locations, and low levels of personal mobility. The development of a coordination plan will position tribal transit operators to take advantage of expanded federal funding under the federal highway bill.

MPC has a five-year strategic plan, which has identified coordination and planning of rural transit services as one of its priorities. This training is part of the overall strategic plan.

MPC Sponsors Attendance at RFID Conference

The MPC sponsored a trip for several NDSU faculty and students in October to a national conference on transportation applications for radio frequency identification technology (RFID).

More than 80 experts in transportation, technology and research policy from universities, government, and private industry attended the Washington, D.C., conference. The conference was organized and hosted by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies of Science.

"The presence of a major RFID manufacturing firm in NDSU's Research and Technology Park as well as NDSU's research program into RFID, gives us some unique opportunities as to incorporate the technology into our research and education programs," noted MPC director Denver Tolliver. "The conference allowed us to see how RFID is being viewed on a national scale and how we can contribute to both policy discussions and research direction."

Joseph Szmerekovsky, assistant professor of management at NDSU, attended with support from the MPC. "The best part of the conference for me was the small-group breakouts where we were able to participate in a lot more discussion and a lot more interaction," he says. "Getting a feel for what other people were thinking and doing was very helpful, particularly the need for research on return on investment and cost-benefits. Those are the sort of things that I'm involved in."

Participants at the conference gathered in break-out groups to discuss RFID policy and institutional issues and RFID applications in the supply chain, construction, and operations, safety and security.

The MPC provided funding to support attendance at the conference for additional NDSU faculty and students, including: Ergin Erdem, graduate student in industrial and manufacturing engineering; Jing Shi, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering; David Wells, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering; and Hai Zeng, Ph.D. student in transportation and logistics.