Modeling and Simulation for Decision Support in Urban and Transportation Systems
A special issue of Systems (ISSN 2079-8954). This special issue belongs to the section "Systems Engineering".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2026 | Viewed by 245
Editors
Interests: transportation systems; urban modeling; simulation; geospatial analysis; infrastructure resilience; electrification; energy justice
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Urban and transportation systems are fundamental to economic activity, social well-being, environmental sustainability, and regional resilience. Yet these systems are becoming increasingly complex due to rapid urbanization, aging infrastructure, climate-related disruptions, digital transformation, shifting travel behavior, and the growing integration of emerging technologies such as connected systems, electrified mobility, sensing platforms, and artificial intelligence. These changes have reinforced the need for robust analytical approaches that can capture interdependencies, evaluate uncertainty, and support decisions across planning, operations, and policy.
Modeling and simulation provide powerful means to represent the dynamic behavior of urban and transportation systems, test alternative scenarios, assess system performance, and identify unintended consequences before implementation. Decision support methods help translate analytical insights into actionable strategies for practitioners, planners, engineers, and policymakers. These approaches are essential for addressing contemporary challenges such as congestion mitigation, multimodal integration, infrastructure resilience, mobility equity, emissions reduction, evacuation and emergency planning, and the coordination of transportation with energy and land-use systems.
This Special Issue aims to advance modeling, simulation, and decision support for urban and transportation systems. It seeks contributions that develop new methodologies, integrate diverse data sources, improve system understanding across scales, and demonstrate real-world applications, with attention to the dynamic interactions among infrastructure, mobility, technology, environment, and society.
In this Special Issue, original research articles and review articles are welcome. Research areas may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Systems modeling of urban and transportation networks;
- Simulation of travel behavior, traffic operations, and multimodal mobility;
- Decision support tools for transportation planning and policy evaluation;
- Agent-based, system dynamics, and discrete-event simulation approaches;
- Optimization and scenario analysis for urban mobility systems;
- Resilient and adaptive transportation systems under climate and hazard disruptions;
- Transportation electrification and the transportation-energy nexus;
- Smart cities, cyber-physical systems, and digital twins for infrastructure management;
- Data-driven and AI-enabled methods for urban and transportation systems analysis;
- Equity, accessibility, and social vulnerability in transportation decision-making;
- Emergency response, evacuation modeling, and infrastructure preparedness;
- Integrated modeling of transportation, land use, environment, and public services;
- Spatio-temporal analytics for urban infrastructure systems;
- Validation, uncertainty analysis, and interpretability in systems models;
- Applications of modeling and decision support to sustainable and inclusive urban development.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Dr. Francesco Rouhana
Prof. Dr. Amvrossios C. Bagtzoglou
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Systems is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- urban systems
- transportation systems
- systems modeling
- simulation
- decision support
- resilience
- smart cities
- mobility planning
- data analytics
- optimization
Benefits of Publishing in a Special Issue
- Ease of navigation: Grouping papers by topic helps scholars navigate broad scope journals more efficiently.
- Greater discoverability: Special Issues support the reach and impact of scientific research. Articles in Special Issues are more discoverable and cited more frequently.
- Expansion of research network: Special Issues facilitate connections among authors, fostering scientific collaborations.
- External promotion: Articles in Special Issues are often promoted through the journal's social media, increasing their visibility.
- Reprint: MDPI Books provides the opportunity to republish successful Special Issues in book format, both online and in print.
Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.
