Transportation Statistics and Microsimulation

47

4Chapter

Probability and

Random Variables

4.1 INTRODUCTION

Transportation engineering is concerned with planning, designing, build-

ing, operating, and maintaining all aspects of the transportation system.

To accomplish this, transportation engineers must have a deep under-

standing of the demands on the system (number of vehicles wanting to

use a highway, number of trains on railway tracks, number of ships in a

port), the supply of the system (number of roads, miles of railway tracks,

trac signal settings), and their interactions. is is a very complicated

process that is compounded by the random or probabilistic nature of the

variables.