Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
Call for paper for the special issue: On best practice on Freight Transportation and Logistics in Emerging Markets
摘要截稿:
全文截稿: 2018-12-31
影响因子: 3.992
期刊难度:
CCF分类: 无
中科院JCR分区:
• 大类 : 工程技术 - 2区
• 小类 : 经济学 - 2区
• 小类 : 交通运输 - 2区
• 小类 : 运输科技 - 2区
Overview
The importance of freight transportation has grown quite fast during the last decades worldwide. The world economy depends on the efficient movement of freight because there is a strong correlation between transported ton-kilometers and real gross domestic product. Therefore, transportation and logistics become key activities to drive economic growth in diverse regions of the world. Actually, these activities let stakeholders move raw materials, sub products and finished products from multiple sources to the end consumers in an efficient way to guarantee the availability of goods everywhere. Nowadays, analyzing the practice of transportation and logistics has become much more sophisticated given the larger number of stakeholders located in different continents, and the increasing competition and the dynamic trends in the business environment. These trends are pushed by changes in socioeconomics, infrastructure and political situations that are uncertain. Emerging markets are regions that have grown rapidly but have not been able to couple this growth with the progress of infrastructure, regulation and good practices in transportation and logistics. In fact, emerging markets currently face the competitive challenge of integrating global value-added networks with more local needs and requirements. To do so, there are important barriers that impede achieving more efficient supply chains like hilly topography, low and middle socioeconomic levels and fragmented market challenges. Additionally, the practice of such systems has barely considered risks and the need that companies have to increase local demand, taking advantage of tax incentives, development of infrastructure and resources for specific purposes. Therefore, the logistics and transportation in markets, such as Latin America for example, are constrained by several factors that have not been entirely studied in the literature.
The MIT Global Supply Chain and Logistics Excellence (SCALE) network is an alliance of leading-edge research, education and outreach dedicated to the development and dissemination of innovative supply chain and logistics concepts in the world, mainly in emerging markets. The network helps companies, governments and organizations to compete in an increasingly complex business environment and engage academia, students, and partners to collaborate on projects that have in-depth economic, societal and environmental impact. More importantly, the mission of the network is to drive the knowledge of the discipline into practice.
To meet this mission, the SCALE Latin America network, composed of over 30 recognized Latin-American universities, organizes a conference every two years led by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics (CTL) and the Center for Latin-American Logistics Innovation (CLI). The main goal of the conference is to provide a forum for sharing high-impact educational and research in logistics and supply chain management relevant to Latin America. The 2018 MIT SCALE Latin America Conference was hosted at the MIT Campus on April 15-16, 2018. The Conference received around 150 short papers and 99 of these submissions were presented at the event that also hosted 180 attendees from Latin America and few other emerging countries.
For this reason and given the extensive work developed by the Latin-American scientific community, reflected in the number of submissions to this Conference, the scientific committee of the event aims to publish a selected number of high-quality papers in a Special Issue of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice. The committee has carefully selected 15 papers that are completely aligned with the goals of the journal to reflect the application and practice in terms of freight transportation and logistics in emerging markets. Besides, we propose to open the call for papers in this special issue to other authors to increase the quality of the publication. The special issue is important for the international research community given the fact that most of the practice is still scarce in emerging markets. Therefore, there is a huge gap, which the proposed Special Issue would allow to close by publishing an interesting set of applied research-based papers. The published papers will contain key insights in diverse topics that represent a challenge for these regions in terms of practice, policy, planning, analysis, modeling and management. Each of the papers will contain strong, novel methodologies that contribute to the scientific community and a case study that will help validate the implications of the methodologies, support the business development, and devise high-performance strategies, business models and operations for practitioners, public sector and society.
Consequently, driving questions for this special issue are formulated below:
- What is the current state of research in emerging markets related to practice in freight transportation systems and logistics? How do we currently use methods to support applied research for logistics of emerging markets? What are the new challenges faced by decision makers from these regions with regards to emerging technologies to drive knowledge into practice from freight transportation and logistics?
- How to drive efficient strategies in freight transportation and logistics into practice? What is the role that practitioners, academia, and public sector should play to leverage these efforts?
- What types of transportation and logistics decision making problems have been addressed? What methodologies have been used? What are the strengths, limitations for specific case studies?
- How can novel approaches provide a better understanding about the variables related to practice in the freight transportation and logistics processes? How should they be adapted to face the changing environments and context of emerging markets?
- What policies are more useful when looking for transferring logistics and freight transportation knowledge/experience among practitioners, authorities and academics in developing countries?
- What is the role that public stakeholders must play in this evolving context? How could authorities coordinate with practitioners and academics use to create data-driven policies and strategies?
This Special Issue intends to close the existent gap in the emerging-market community regarding practice in freight transportation and logistics. We seek to achieve three main goals: 1) Establish state-of-the-art (quantitative/qualitative) methodological and practical approaches used to improve the performance of freight transportation and logistics in emerging markets, 2) Get an in-depth understanding about why certain approaches are suitable/limited for specific logistics and transportation contexts and their empirical applications, and 3) Identify stimulating lessons and directions of future research to drive the knowledge about transportation and logistics into practice for these regions. All submissions will be subject to the normal peer-review process procedures followed at Transportation Research A.
Submissions of scientific results from experts in academia and industry are strongly encouraged. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following themes:
- Freight transportation operations and systems
- Urban transportation and last-mile operations
- Logistics and transportation public policy-making and infrastructure
- Data-driven and emerging technologies in transportation and logistics
- Transportation in agro-industry, mining and livestock
- Logistics and freight transportation for small firms and retailers
- Resilient transportation systems
- Humanitarian logistics and relief transportation operations
- Green transportation systems
- Maritime and port logistics and transportation operations
- Perishable product/produce transportation and logistics