CEE New Millennium Colloquium
March 20-21, 2000
Wong Auditorium, Tang Center, MIT Building E51
The New Transporation Faculty: The Evolution
to Engineering Systems
JOSEPH M. SUSSMAN
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
In 1995 I wrote "Educating the 'New Transportation Professional'". Inspired by the changes in our field induced by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), it described a broad concept of what knowledge the transportation professional in the 21st century will need to be effective. The paper discussed the "T"-shaped professional; this professional would have a broad understanding of technology, systems and institutions in the transportation domain, represented by the horizontal bar on the "T" and in-depth knowledge in one of these specialties, represented by the vertical bar.
BREADTH IN:
- TRANSPORTATION
FUNDAMENTALS IN-DEPTH KNOWLEDGE
- TECHNOLOGY WITHIN A
- SYSTEMS TRANSPORTATION
- INSTITUTIONS SPECIALTY
With this combination of breadth and depth, the New Transportation Professional could contribute substantively to the solution of transportation problems, both through detailed knowledge and through an enhanced understanding of the contributions of other professionals in what is inherently an interdisciplinary field.
But the question arises, "Who will educate this New Transportation Professional?" The responsibility for this education falls on the transportation faculty in our nation's colleges and universities. So this paper focuses on that "New Transportation Faculty", the educator of our New Transportation Professional.
TRANSPORTATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
In the 1960s, many transportation faculty, recognizing the maturity of the physical design paradigm for transportation, led a radical change by introducing a systems perspective to both transportation research and education. This perspective focused on quantitative analysis of transportation as a complex, network-oriented system. Rather than concern with design of individual physical components, this approach recognized the systemic nature of transportation, and used operations research methodologies along with transportation economics and simulation as the appropriate tools for considering the planning and operation of the transportation system as a whole. The approach was inherently integrative in nature, adopting methodologies from many areas. Hundreds of students have been educated in this manner, in a number of educational programs around the country and the world.
But the world moves forward, and as the 21st century approaches, we recognize that this "new" system paradigm needs re-thinking, as did the "old" physical design paradigm in the 1960s.
TRANSPORTATION -- A BROADER AND DEEPER DEFINITION
Transportation has always been understood to be a vital force for the social, political and economic well-being of a society. Further, it is a field long viewed as amenable to complex systems analyses that can give great insight into transportation investment, operations and design. However, the last 20 years have seen both a broadening and a deepening of the transportation field.
The transportation field now deals with operations on a global scale, considering the global economy and the implications for economic development and international competition among the regions and nations of the world. Indeed, one can argue that advances in transportation enabled this globalization trend. This geographic broadening has important implications for the future of the field.
Technology has always been a key element in the transportation field. In the past several decades, advances in information technology and communications technologies have had profound implications on the way in which transportation systems are operated. This will certainly continue. New opportunities for control of transportation systems -- particularly in real time -- is of fundamental importance.
We have long recognized the impact of transportation on the fabric of society, but recent years have seen a substantially increased focus on the externalities that relate to and shape our transportation decisions. Transportation impacts on economic development around the world were noted above but, in addition, we see the increased importance of externalities in the areas of environment (with the importance of policies concerning clean air and water, and global warming), energy, societal equity, use of scarce land resources and the fundamental tie of land-use to transportation -- our concerns with all of these drive much of what we do in the transportation field.
Finally, we have seen profoundly changing organizational and institutional relationships among entities concerned with providing and using transportation services. Among these changing relationships are a re-thinking of public and private roles in transportation service provision, as embodied in such trends as deregulation and privatization of the transportation enterprise. From an intragovernmental point of view, around the world we have seen trends towards devolution, as federal governments have pushed power out to regional entities, such as states, provinces, and large metropolitan areas, recognizing the key role of regions in economic competitiveness.
The trend toward intermodalism in both passenger and freight transportation, enabled by technology and demanded by the marketplace, requires important changes in interrelationships among transportation providers, for example, rail, truck and ships in the case of freight intermodalism. Integrated supply chain management, a central aspect of the logistics revolution, has fundamentally changed the relationship between transportation providers and their customers in, for example, the manufacturing industries, where transportation has become an integrated component of the overall logistics system of the customer.
All of these represent fundamental changes in the transportation field in geographic scale, in technological scope, in the timeframes for dealing with transportation issues, in the relationships of the transportation system to societal and economic priorities and, in the organizational relationships among transportation providers, customers and other stakeholders. It creates new challenges for transportation researchers, educators, and practitioners.
EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES
The above suggests a re-definition of the boundaries of the transportation field. We need to think on a broader, more ambitious scale on several dimensions; in addition, we need to create greater depth in our models and frameworks for analysis, as our problem space becomes more complex and vital. We need to create better methodologies for the increased scale of the transportation networks we deal with -- networks that we must control and operate in real time -- and we need to provide broader, more useful frameworks for qualitatively considering transportation issues as well. We need to focus not only on the operation of individual modes, but additionally on the way in which these modes interact intermodally, providing high-quality, low-cost service integrated with customers' operations.
We need a new definition of the field of transportation, both broader and deeper, more advanced technologically, and more sensitive institutionally. Our view goes beyond the systems analysis perspective invented in the 60s to a broader triplet in technology, systems and institutions,
As before, our educational approach is inherently integrative, but on an even broader scale than before -- we require a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative methodologies with transportation domain knowledge to deal in an integrated manner with our field.
ACADEMIA
While the field of transportation has undergone remarkable changes over the last three decades, these changes are no more remarkable than those in the academic environment. The post-World War II period in the United States gave rise to enormous growth in higher education and the development of the American research university. Blueprinted by Vannevar Bush during the war, and documented in his landmark paper "The Endless Frontier", the research university established close working relationships with the federal government, which actively supported research and graduate education. Now, however, the close compact between universities and the federal government has atrophied as the Cold War ended with the implosion of the old Soviet Union.
So, as a result, we find the research university reaching out much more actively to the private sector and abroad for the support of research and education.
This change in the support base implies the need for academia to be more relevant and to respond more quickly than ever. Further, U.S. society, feeling heavily invested in higher education, is looking to the nation's universities for effective contributions to solving the many problems that contemporary humankind faces, often on a global scale.
So the modern research university is recognizing the need to be a central player in the solution of major issues facing society in a shorter timeframe than has been our wont.
It is in this search for university relevance that the importance of interdisciplinary, integrative research becomes clear. For it would be difficult to identify any critical societal issue that is not interdisciplinary in nature. As stated by Charles Vest, President of MIT, "Humankind's advances will depend increasingly on new integrative approaches to complex systems, problems and structures. Design synthesis and synergy across traditional disciplinary boundaries will be essential elements of both research and education."
TOWARD THE NEW TRANSPORTATION FACULTY
It is in this challenge for academia that the "New Transportation Faculty" comes to the fore. For we can argue that this kind of integrative approach is precisely what we have been about for the last 30 years, bringing together various technologies, mathematical approaches, microeconomics, political science, management and institutional studies into an integrated set of methodologies germane to our field.
The transportation field has become the exemplar of the nascent field of modern engineering systems, characterized by a cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approach to research and education. This integrative approach, motivated both intellectually and pragmatically as a result of changing relationships between academia, the federal government as well as the private sector, is the competitive edge for the new transportation faculty.
So, what is the future role for the New Transportation Faculty in academia? Think about what attracted many of us to the field of transportation. First, it was the notion of working on a real and serious societal issue in which improvements could have a direct effect on quality of life and economic development, and, second, it was our interest in integrating new intellectual approaches, that is, new methodologies, into the study of that domain.
But there are broader challenges accessible to the "New Transportation Faculty". Consider the broader idea of "Complex, Large, Integrated, Open Systems" (CLIOS). What do we mean by these terms?
A system is complex when it is composed of a group of related units (subsystems), for which the degree and nature of the relationships is imperfectly known. Its overall emergent behavior is difficult to predict, even when subsystem behavior is readily predictable. The time-scales of various subsystems may be very different (as we can see in transportation -- land-use changes, for example, vs. operating decisions). Behavior in the long-term and short-term may be markedly different and small changes in inputs or parameters may produce large changes in behavior.
CLIOS have impacts that are large in magnitude, and often long-lived and of large geographical extent.
Subsystems within CLIOS are integrated, closely coupled through feedback loops.
By open, we mean that CLIOS explicitly include social, political and economic aspects.
Often CLIOS are counterintuitive in their behavior. At the least, developing a model that will predict their performance can be very difficult to do. Often the performance measures for CLIOS are difficult to define and, perhaps even difficult to agree about, depending upon your viewpoint. In CLIOS there is often human agency involved.
Transportation systems are simply a special case of CLIOS and we as the "New Transportation Faculty" have special capabilities to bring to the table.
So as we look to the future, to go along with our T-shaped transportation professional, described earlier, consider the I-Beam-Shaped New Transportation Faculty. (The "I-beam" image was suggested by Professor Lester Hoel of the University of Virginia.)
Methodologies /
Domain Knowledge in Transportation
Unify
Codify
Identify
(new applications)
Re-apply to New Domains
THE "I-BEAM-SHAPED" NEW TRANSPORTATION FACULTY
The top flange represents the disciplines that we have worked to integrate into the transportation domain. The web represents the unification and codification of these disciplines into a coherent approach to transportation applications and the identification of new areas within the engineering systems domain, to which our integrated approach can be relevant. And finally, the bottom flange represents a re-application of these concepts to other applications' domains.
Why am I confident that our integrated approach may well be valid in other applications? Transportation can be characterized by big infrastructure investments, a network structure for delivery of services, a (relatively recent) application of real-time control, a global scale and a changing institutional structure, particularly between public and private sectors. Some or all of these characteristics are germane to other domains of societal relevance: telecommunications and energy are but two examples of systems with big infrastructure investments and a network structure. The urban region as a system could also be characterized in this way.
So the future for the New Transportation Faculty is clear. Building on our strengths in integrating new disciplines, we can help create the new unified field of engineering systems and help in the application of this approach to a broad set of societal issues.
So what becomes of transportation, you may ask, if the New Transportation Faculty focuses on a broader applications domain? First, I emphasize this is an evolution, not a revolution, and there is still much richness in integrating new ideas and codifying those ideas in the transportation domain. That well is by no means dry. Indeed, if we interpret the word "faculty" as a collective noun, there will always be individual faculty members focusing on the core transportation applications.
But more importantly, through the re-application to broader issues of the engineering systems approach developed by transportation faculty, I suggest we will invent new concepts and discover new relevant disciplines that can be applied within the transportation domain. We will also attract specialists in those disciplines to transportation studies.
Those of us in academia should never lose sight of the fact that transportation is part of a broader set of societal systems. The interconnections between transportation and other domains is fundamental to our broad-based understanding of our own field. So I see no conflict in this evolutionary re-application of transportation concepts within a broader application space and, indeed, envision us integrating still more interesting concepts into the study of the transportation enterprise.
CONCLUSION
The challenges of the transportation field continue and expand and the New Transportation Faculty -- the I-Beam-Shaped New Transportation Faculty -- has a special role therein in integrating knowledge, innovating and effectively instructing the T-shaped "New Transportation Professional".
But here we argue that the challenge and opportunity is broader. Consider transportation as a special case of "Complex, Large, Integrated, Open Systems" (CLIOS) and the special advantage the "New Transportation Faculty" has, given the inherently integrative nature of their intellectual approach and their track record in establishing how this integrated approach can impact the important societal domain of transportation. The future role of the New Transportation Faculty can include an engineering systems attack on societal issues using the CLIOS construct.
This positions us to make important broader contributions to society and provides an intellectual growth path within academia, one which is in total concert with the new post-Cold War mission of the university for relevant, shorter-timeframe approaches to important societal and industry problems.
Nor is the transportation field disadvantaged by this. The intellectual stimulation for the "New Transportation Faculty" can only make our approaches to the core issues of transportation more effective.
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