The occurrence of natural disasters or accidents causes the obstruction or interruption of road traffic connectivity and affects the transportation of essential materials, especially for cross-regional transportation under emergency situations. For example, after the occurrence of an emergency, government administrators usually need to establish cross-regional roadblocks to reduce the recurrence of accidents and the risk of transmission caused by cross-regional transportation. Collaboration and sustainability have been advocated as proactive and complementary strategies to study emergency transport resource configuration problems from a practical perspective.

The emergency transport resource configuration provides a better understanding of intelligent transportation, multimodal transport, resource sharing modes, and coordinated configuration of emergency resources, etc. This interest is supported by recent new advances of emerging information technologies, such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and blockchain, which bring opportunities for transport enterprises to overcome obstacles to collaboration. In addition, collaboration among transport enterprises is a promising approach to increase enterprise operational efficiency by sharing the limited transport resources under emergency situations, and then promote the sustainable development of urban transportation systems in the long term. Several issues have been raised on the use of traditional models and algorithms, such as the new model establishment and solution algorithm issues of the emergency transport system, warehousing, and the validation of collaborative schemes.

This Special Issue aims to publish original theoretical and/or applied research articles to further our understanding of how emerging technologies and methods will propel emergency transport network design efficiently. In this issue, novel contributions are invited to address the research problems related to the collaboration, operation, resource configuration, and optimisation of the emergency transport network.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Emergency transport schemes and performance evaluation
• Resource sharing modes and strategies
• Collaborative mechanisms (i.e., how to facilitate collaboration among transport entities) in emergency transport network operations
• Multi-modal transport (e.g., Truck-drone collaborative transport)
• Emergency and sustainable transportation network modelling
• Application of intelligent algorithms for solving transportation network modelling
• Multiperiod resource configuration in the time-space transportation network
• Emergency vehicle routing and scheduling with dynamic customer demands
• Application of emerging technologies in emergency transportation network
• Operations management and optimisation in important transport hubs, e.g., warehouses and ports