Commercial Aircraft are commonly acquired by an airline in a contract that specifies a fixed quantity of firm orders as well as options that allow the airline to obtain additional aircraft at a future time for an agreed price. This option purchasing process allows the customer to avoid taking...

This research explores the functional relationship between financial structure and agent's cost-reducing effort in the realm of public-private-partnership (PPP) contracting. I consider a canonical contracting problem where incomplete financial provisions are used to govern the execution of a...

A myriad of uncontrollable factors in airline operations make delays and disruptions unavoidable. Most conventional scheduling models, however, ignore the presence of uncertainties in actual operations in order to limit the complexity of the problem. This leads to schedules that are prone to...

Public transportation agencies, much like other service industries, have a constant churn of their customer base. New customers are entering and current customers are defecting every day. Traditionally, efforts to increase this customer base have focused on attracting more first-time users....

This study develops a model of a person's day activity schedule that can be used to forecast urban travel demand. It is motivated by the notion that travel outcomes are part of an activity scheduling decision, and uses discrete choice models to address the basic modeling problem-capturing...

Compared with investments in the conventional infrastructure, those in Intelligent Transportation Technology (ITS) include various uncertainties. Because deployment of ITS requires close public-private partnership, projects concerning the R&D and deployment of ITS technology involve project...

Major airlines aim to generate schedules that maximize profit potential and satisfy constraints involving flight schedule design, fleet assignment, aircraft maintenance routing and crew scheduling. Almost all aircraft and crew schedule optimization models assume that flights, aircraft, crews,...

This research identifies the challenges Chicagoland must confront to maintain a quality transit system. It analyzes the organizational and funding structure of the Regional Transportation Authority and its three service providers, including the Chicago Transit Authority. This investigation...