The Hiroshima University Transportation Engineering Laboratory (HiTEL), presently under the Graduate School for International Development and Cooperation (IDEC) of Hiroshima University, was established in 1971 by two academic staff members, Prof. H. Monden and Dr. Y. Sugie, to supplement the education program in Faculty of Civil Engineering. The Laboratory has contributed to the development of the transport systems in Hiroshima and its surrounding regions. After succeeding to the directorship in 1993, Prof. Sugie tried to improve the research environment and also deployed the research activities internationally. In April 2002, Prof. Fujiwara became the head of the Laboratory. As the program sub-leader, Prof. Fujiwara assisted the IDEC research team to successfully win the competition of 21st Century COE (Center Of Excellence) Program “Social Capacity Development for Environmental Management and International Cooperation” (2003~2007), supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). The 21st Century COE Program scheme started in 2002 to selectively encourage and support universities in Japan to become the world’s centers of excellence in various research fields by providing higher quality of education and research. In 2008, under the strong leadership of Prof. Fujiwara (program leader), IDEC further won the “Global Environmental Leaders Education Program (called GELs Program. Details refer to the program homepage: http://hicec.hiroshima-u.ac.jp) for Designing a Low-Carbon Society (2008~2012)”, financially supported by the Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology, which is a budget for implementing science and technology promotion from the MEXT.

Prof. Junyi Zhang first joined the Laboratory as an Associate Professor in October 2002, after working as a transportation consultant in Japan and a visiting researcher in the Netherlands. Since then, making full use of his consultant experiences, he has actively extended the research topics to cover much wider research fields related to transportation, city, environment, and tourism from both academic and practical perspectives. In the 21st Century COE Program, as one of the core members, he took the initiative in proposing an interdisciplinary framework “DPSIR+C (D: driving force; P: pressure; S: state; I: impact; R: response; C: capacity)” to support the joint research in the program. In the GELs program, he’s been serving as the leader of the sub-program “Urban System Design to Prevent Global Warming (USD)”. Dr. Hiroshi Shimamoto joined the Laboratory as an Assistant Professor in 2007 and has opened up some new research fields, especially the optimization of public transportation systems. In October 2008, Dr. Sudarmanto Budi Nugroho (specialized in air quality studies) and in May 2010, Dr. Makoto Chikaraishi (specialized in travel behavior modeling and sustainable transport studies) joined the Laboratory as Specially Appointed Assistant Professors to especially assist the operation of the GELs program.

Currently, HiTEL is also doing some joint research and education activities with the Infrastructure and Transportation Planning Lab (HitPlan) , Graduate School of Engineering, Hiroshima University. These two labs are jointly called Transport Studies Group (TSG) .