The Latsis 2012 Symposium sponsored by the J. S. Latsis Public Benefit Foundation, “hEART 2012: 1st Symposium of the European Association for Research in Transportation”, took place at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) on September 4–7, 2012. The Urban Transport Systems Laboratory (LUTS), the Transport and Mobility Laboratory (TRANSP-OR) and the EPFL Transportation Center (TraCE) have contributed to the successful preparation of this event. The symposium was an interdisciplinary intermediate-size research conference on transportation research, in general, and quantitative methods for transportation systems, in particular. It brought together major experts and most promising young researchers in the fields of transportation modeling, operations research, economics, physics and logistics in a setting highly suitable for scientific discussion and active interaction in relatively small groups.

The hEART 2012 conference accelerated the creation of hEART, the European Association for Research in Transportation. Its objective is to promote excellence in transportation research in Europe, with a strong emphasis on the promotion of PhD students and young researchers. The main activities of the association are the organization of an annual international conference for the transportation research community, and networking and exchange of information among the members. Many well-established institutions have joined the association (see http://heart-web.org/).

This special issue is devoted to the 1st conference of hEART. Following a strict three round review process, 7 high quality papers were accepted out of 24 full paper submissions, using the quality standards of the journal. These papers cover a wide range of quantitative methods in transportation science from traffic flow theory, congestion pricing, travel time variability, traffic assignment, infrastructure and the macroscopic fundamental diagram. The papers of this special issue are by no means an exhaustive collection of all emerging theories and quantitative methods in transportation science. However, we believe that this special issue can highlight recent developments and novel research directions in multi-disciplinary areas and advance the contributions of the transport research community.

The guest editors.

Nikolas Geroliminis and Jack Haddad.