Quality system for the implementation of STCW-95 in higher maritime education in Norway

This paper contains and presents the topics relevant for the construction of a quality system for higher maritime education in the Faculty of Maritime Studies at Vestfold College in Norway. The quality system determines how the Faculty shall present and supply its courses with regard to accepted international quality standards with reference to STCW-95.     

Comfort enhancement by an active vibration reduction system for a flexible railway car body

In order to improve the ride comfort of lightweight railway vehicles, an active vibration reduction system using piezo-stack actuators is proposed and studied in simulations. The system consists of actuators and sensors mounted on the vehicle car body. Via a feedback control loop, the output signals of the sensors which are measuring the flexible deformation of the car body generate a bending moment, which is directly applied to the car body by the actuators. This bending moment reduces the structural vibration of the vehicle car body. Simulations have shown that a significant reduction in the vibration level is achieved.     

Assessing the effects of a mixed-mode design in a longitudinal household travel survey

The German Mobility Panel (MOP) is a national household travel survey, which has been collecting data on travel behavior in Germany since 1994. One of the MOP’s central assets is its ability to provide time-series data on travel behavior. Thus, the comparability of survey results from different years is a major objective of the survey method used. Declining survey participation rates in the last decade in various socio-demographic groups resulted in the implementation of a mixed-mode design for the MOP in 2013, both for the sampling stage (landline and mobile phone recruitment) and the data collection stage (paper and web). In this study, we analyze whether the adaptations in the survey mode do indeed improve the results and, if so, why and to what degree. Ideally, the survey mode adaptions have increased the representativeness of the MOP. However, measurement biases due to the mixed-mode design are also conceivable. To decompose survey mode effects, we applied the propensity score weighting method. This method imputes the hypothetical responses participants would have given in different survey modes; disparities between actual responses and hypothetical responses under another mode are then traced back to the mixed-mode design. Our analysis indicates that trip-rate biases on shopping, leisure, and short trips are partly caused by the mixed-mode design; in contrast, quantities of time spent in the transportation system, trips made by car and public transportation, and commuting trips are hardly biased.

     

Mass rapid transit systems for cities in the developing world

Abstract

In 2004, one of the biggest ferry operators in Norway was found guilty of having intentionally attempted to defraud the state of about 113 million Norwegian kroner in subsidies by underreporting revenues and overstating costs during the period 1992–2002. The company and five of the top managers were convicted and the case was regarded as one of the most serious subsidy offences ever committed in Norway. The aim of this article is to show that standardized revenue and cost norm models from the state can deter operators from committing such offences and when relevant detecting the fraud attempts at an early stage. Our model suggests that the operator in question overstated costs by about 19% and that the actual subsidy fraud attempt was about three times higher than concluded by the Court.     

Women’s complex daily lives: a gendered look at trip chaining and activity pattern entropy in Germany

It has long been argued in feminist studies that women’s daily lives are more complex than men’s. This is largely due to the gendered division of work, according to which women juggle more varied obligations, including employment, household work and caregiving. Complex activity patterns in turn encourage women to organise their trips in a more efficient manner in trip chains. This paper studies the complexity of activity patterns (measured by Shannon entropy) and trip chaining patterns from a gender specific perspective. The data used is the German Mobility Panel 1994–2012 which records respondents’ trips over the period of a week. The outcome variables are regressed on sociodemographics, residential and workplace spatial context attributes, cohort and period effects. Gender differences in the effects of variables are tested using interaction terms. The results suggest that women’s patterns are more complex than men’s. Some effects differed distinctly between men and women, suggesting that men and women are differently affected by circumstances impacting the complexity of their lives, most notably by having children and by having a partner.     

Gender structures in car availability in car deficient households

This paper studies the intra-household allocation of cars in car deficient households from a gender perspective. An individual’s car access is measured in terms of duration of car use over a week. Car deficient households are defined as households with fewer cars than drivers. We develop a set of hypotheses that serve to explain gender differences in car availability, and empirically test some of these hypotheses by using multiple regression analysis. The data we use is the German Mobility Panel 1994–2008. Our findings provide evidence for the importance of social roles and economic power in intra-household negotiations about the limited resource of the household car. We cannot clearly decipher whether patriarchal structures and/or gender preferences are relevant as well, but our data suggest that both may play a role.     

Autonomous vehicles in mixed motorway traffic: capacity utilisation,impact and policy implications

In upcoming years, the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will reshape the transport system. The transition from a regular to an autonomous transport system, however, will take place over many years and lead to a long period with a mixed driving environment where AVs and regular vehicles (RVs) operate side by side. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the utilisation of the road capacity degrades as a function of heterogeneity in congested motorways. The analysis is based on a dedicated traffic simulator, which enables the investigation of complex dynamic spillback from congestion while allowing for different degrees of heterogeneity. The representation of autonomous vehicles is based on a modified intelligent driver model (IIDM) presented by Treiber et al. (Phys Rev E 62(2):1805–1824, 2000) and Treiber and Kesting (Traffic flow dynamics, Springer, Heidelberg, 2013), while the behaviour of drivers of RVs relies on a stochastic version of the IIDM. Three main conclusions stand out. Firstly, it is shown that in an idealised environment in which AVs operate alone, a substantially improved capacity utilisation can be attained. Secondly, when drivers of RVs are mixed with AVs, capacity utilisation degrades very fast as a function of the share of RVs. Thirdly, it is shown that the improved capacity utilisation of AVs comes in the form of reduced travel time and increased throughput, with indications that travel time reductions are the most important. From a strategical planning perspective, the results underline that dedicated lanes are preferable to attain the positive effects of AVs. Specifically, we compare a stylised situation with three lanes with a share of 33% AVs to a situation with two regular lanes and a single dedicated AV lane. The latter represents a tripling in consumer surplus all other things being equal.

     

Potential last-mile impacts of crowdshipping services: a simulation-based evaluation

Transportation - Crowdsourced delivery services (crowdshipping) represent a shipping alternative to traditional delivery systems, particularly suitable for e-commerce. Although some benefits in...     

Spatial efficiency in the bulk freight market

In the short run, there can be substantial differences in spot freight earnings between geographical regions of the global freight market for bulk carriers. Such differences can be consistent with an efficient market if they are temporary and if they cannot be exploited financially by pursuing chartering strategies that are based on publicly available information. In this paper, we apply a simple optimal switching model to evaluate whether such chartering strategies exist. We model the spot freight rate differential between the Atlantic and Pacific basins as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process and the entry–exit decision using the discount factor approach, which results in optimal trigger values for the entry/exit from each basin. Our empirical results suggest that the market is spatially efficient during normal freight market conditions when there is a surplus of vessels. The tight market conditions during the 2003–2008 freight market boom caused a persistent upward bias in Atlantic freight rates, but also here we find little added value from pursuing an active switching strategy.