The First Transportation and Vehicle Engineering Discipline Development Strategy Forum was held on March 27-28 at the Jiading Campus of Tongji University. Hosted by Tongji University, this Forum was initiated by Tongji University jointly with Beihang University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Chang’an University, Central South University, Dalian Maritime University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Southeast University, Jilin University, Southwest Jiaotong University, Tsinghua University and Wuhan University of Technology.
The Forum was attended and addressed by more than 20 preeminent experts from the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), China Railway, Tongji University and other transportation-related leading companies and universities. More than 300 scholars and experts from academia and industry shared their opinions at the Forum.
The Forum was proposed to serve the needs of national development strategies and in answer to the new calls of “building China into a country with strong transportation network”, “building China into an aerospace power” and “aligning comprehensive transportation development with the new situations in the new era”. In an effort to address the basic problems hampering the development of China’s transportation and vehicle engineering sector and to achieve key technological breakthroughs, the Department of Engineering and Materials Sciences of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) designed in 2020 the primary application code for the transportation and vehicle engineering discipline to fund basic research in the fields of transportation and vehicle engineering.
The Forum kicked off on March 27th with welcome remarks by Prof. TONG Xiaohua, Vice President of Tongji University who initiated this event. The purpose of this Forum is to pool together forces underlying discipline development, to promote the integrated development of the transportation engineering discipline and the vehicle engineering discipline, to discuss strategies for discipline development, to make clear discipline priorities and the direction of funding for major projects, to set up a normalized exchange mechanism for the two disciplines in the field of basic research, and to align frontier research with the major needs of national development.
Themed on “eyeing frontiers, achieving consensus, making plans and pursuing development”, this one-and-a-half-day Forum featured a broad spectrum of discussions over hot topics such as the connotations and extensions of the transportation and vehicle engineering discipline, the core scientific problems and challenges facing the discipline, the development trends of the discipline, and the identification of major projects.
Keynote speeches were delivered in succession by the following: WANG Zhizhong, Director for the Transportation and Vehicle Engineering Discipline, National Natural Science Foundation of China; FANG Shouen, Leader of the National Road Traffic Accident Prevention Expert Group and Secretary of the CPC Committee of Tongji University; ZHAO Guotang, Deputy Chief Engineer of China Railway and Director of Sichuan-Tibet Office; ZHANG Jun, President of Beijing Institute of Technology and Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE); YAN Xinping, Member of CAE and professor at the Wuhan University of Technology; ZHONG Zhihua, Vice President and Member of CAE; ZHAI Wanming, Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Foreign Member of National Academy of Engineering (USA) and professor at the Southwest Jiaotong University; TIAN Hongqi, President of Central South University and Member of CAE; LIU Weidong, Director and Researcher of the Second Research Institute of the Civil Aviation Administration of China; ZHANG Ning, Senior Secretary-General and Researcher of China Society of Automotive Engineers; GUAN Jizhen, professor-level senior engineer and Vice President of China Intelligent Transportation Systems Association; ZHAO Xiangmo, Vice President of Chang’an University; WANG Jianqiang, Secretary of the CPC Committee of the School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University; and LIU Pan, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Committee of Southeast University.
The titles of their speeches were: “Overview of the Transportation and Vehicle Engineering Discipline”, “Theoretical Research on the Intrinsic Safety of Road Transport Systems”, “Technical Requirements and Related Scientific Problems in the Development of High-speed Railways”, “Reflections on the Future Development of the Aerospace Transportation Engineering Discipline”, “Future Development Trends of Waterway Transportation and Key Suggestions for Basic Research”, “Technological Innovation Needs and Prospects of the Civil Aviation Industry in the ’14th Five-Year Plan’ Period”, “Prospective Innovations of Future Urban Road Transport System”, “Basic Scientific Problems with the Intelligent Operation and Maintenance of High-speed Railway Wheel-Rail Systems”, “Prospects for the Frontier Basic Research on the Aerodynamics/Crashworthiness of High-Speed Trains”, “Interpretation of the ‘Technical Route for Energy-saving and New Energy Vehicles'”, “Innovation and Development of Intelligent Transportation Research under the New Situations”, “Reflections on the Future Development of Road Transportation and Vehicle Engineering Discipline in the New Era”, “Common Scientific Problems and Technical Explorations of Smart Cars”, and “Transportation Engineering in Change: Problems and Practices”.
On the morning of March 28, the Roundtable Discussion was held in two parallel sessions themed on “Road Transportation and Vehicle Engineering” and “Railway Transportation, Waterway Transportation, Aerospace Transportation, Integrated Transportation and Vehicle Engineering”, at which professors from Tongji University, Southeast University, Chang’an University, Tsinghua University, Jilin University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Southwest Jiaotong University, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beihang University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Wuhan University of Technology discussed major research plans, key project proposals and scientific challenges related to the two themes, as well as the secondary discipline code, research direction and the proposed keyword revisions.
2021 marks the first year of the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, an official said, and while China is stepping up the drive of building itself into a country with strong transportation network, its enormous and sprawling road network is serving and shoring up the high-quality socioeconomic development of China. He added that the new situations in the new era is calling for groundbreaking changes to the transportation systems and transportation means, and that the “transportation and vehicle engineering discipline” came into being at the right moment.
As the organizer of the first Forum, Tongji University firmly adheres to the strategy of building an integrated transportation system through the integration of multiple disciplines, and aligns its academic work closely with the strategic needs of China’s drive to build itself into a transportation and manufacturing power, putting a particular focus on the intelligent management and control of advanced ground transportation equipment, advanced infrastructures and advanced systems. Centering upon intelligent transportation system, advanced road and airport facilities, intelligent new energy vehicles, maglev transportation system and rail transit system, Tongji University has set up top-notch research teams led by 5 CAS/CAE members, established 5 national-level innovation platforms, completed nearly 600 national-level research projects over the past decade, and built a broad array of best-in-class major research facilities such as an intelligent networked vehicle testing base, an 8-DoF driving simulator, an accelerated road and airport pavement testing system, a new energy vehicle testing and trial production center, an automotive wind tunnel, and a magnetic levitation test line, making it a domestically and globally leading gathering place of ground transportation system specialists, the cradle of pacesetting scientific and technological research, the base of major public services, and the highland of talent fostering.
Text: HUANG Zerong;
Pictures: ZHOU You et al.;
Video: WU Yixiang
