Increasing capacity at ports and goods movement in the supply chain in general, while also satisfying environmental, economic, political, labor union, and other constraints is, arguably, the greatest challenge of modern transportation. With space at a premium and costs through the roof, it is increasingly obvious that the traditional solutions are not feasible in the short- or even medium-term. However, advances in information technology, telecommunications, data management, and computation tools, coupled with recent research in systems optimization and control, may provide promising new approaches.

Petros Ioannou received MS and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois in 1980 and 1982, respectively. He is currently a professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering-Systems, University of Southern California, director of the Center of Advanced Transportation. Technologies, and Associate director. for research of METRANS. He has been an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the International Journal of Control, Automatica, and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. Ioannou is currently associate editor-at-large of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and chairman of the IFAC Technical Committee on Transportation Systems. His research interests are in the areas of adaptive control, neural networks, nonlinear systems, vehicle dynamics and control, intelligent transportation systems (ITS), and intelligent flight control. He is a fellow of IEEE, fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and author/coauthor of 8 books and over 150 research papers in the area of controls, neural networks, nonlinear dynamical systems, and ITS.

Automated Container Terminals. Inland Port Concepts. Truck Dispatching and Routing. Advanced Container Technologies. Empty Container Reuse. Port Security: Container Inspection Concepts and Technologies.