Special Issue on Freight Transport Modelling. European Transport/ Trasporti Europei

This special issue of the European Transport/Trasporti Europei Journal on \u201cFreight Transport Modeling\u201d publishes a selection of the papers presented at the XIII Euro Working Group on Transportation Meeting "Advances in Transportation Systems Analysis", held in Padova, Italy, on September 23 - 25, 2009. The Euro Working Group on Urban Traffic and Transportation was founded in July, 1991 in Cetraro (Italy) during the 7th Euro Summer Institute on Urban Traffic Management. The name was changed during the Meeting in Glasgow in July, 1994 to \u201cTransportation\u201d, in order to enlarge the topics to be addressed and to involve more people in the participation. Until now thirteen meetings have been hosted by several Universities in Europe having a great success. The main targets of the Group are providing a forum to share information and experiences of research activities on the field of transportation, encouraging joint researches and the development of both theoretical methods and applications, and promoting the cooperation among different institutions and organizations, leaders at national level in the field of traffic and transportation systems. In this sense EWGT promotes Workshops and international Conferences where researchers exchange knowledge and experiences in the field of transportation systems analysis and modeling. The Euro Working Group on Transportation Meeting is an annual international scientific conference that provides a high quality forum for the presentation of methods and models and case studies, and for the exchange of ideas and scientific discussions on advanced applications and technologies in transportation. The EWGT2009 Meeting took place in Padova, Italy, on September 23 - 25, 2009. Scientists from all around the world met at this conference to present the state-of-the-art of their research in the fields of operational research, management science, computer science, and mathematical modeling applied to transportation problems. The high standards of the conference are ensured by a wide and competent scientific committee and by a selective review process. The reviewing of the manuscripts submitted for possible publication in the special issue \u201cFreight Transport Modeling\u201d started in October 2009 with at least 2 reviewers per paper with further revision by the guest editors. The revision and selection process has been completed in September 2010. Among the 8 contributions selected for publication, advances in the state-of-theart related to several fields of freight transportation are illustrated and discussed. We would like to thank the participants to the EWGT2009 Meeting for submitting high quality papers, allowing us to edit this special issue of the European Transport \Trasporti Europei journal. A special thanks to all the reviewers for a professional work carried out