Environmental standard adoption in Marinas: A spatiotemporal analysis of a special form of maritime transportation hubs

The growth of both commercial and recreational boating has posed significant environmental challenges to waterways. As an effort by the U.S. government and other public service organizations to prevent and mitigate the environmental impact, Clean Marina Programs (CMP) have been developed to encourage marina owners and operators to meet environmental standards and become better stewards of the environment. This study examines the impact of geospatial proximity on the adoption timing and diffusion of a CMP in marinas, a special form of a maritime transportation hub. Drawing upon case study methodology and literature on geography and organizational clusters, we find that the adoption timing of an environmental standard varies with the density of the market within which it is promoted. These results lend support to the notion that firms in close proximity can accelerate standard adoption, hastening information flow about environmental standards through local labor pools, customer interactions, and resources.     

The Green Ship Routing and Scheduling Problem (GSRSP): A conceptual approach

Recent reviews of the literature on ship routing and scheduling note the increased attention to environmental issues. This is an area of paramount importance for international shipping and will be even more so in the future. This short communication is motivated by the increasing attention to ‘green’ routing and scheduling and outlines some possible ways to incorporate the air emissions dimension into maritime transportation OR. The main contribution of this note vis-a-vis the state of the art is that it conceptualizes the formulation of the ‘Green Ship Routing and Scheduling Problem’ (GSRSP) based on existing formulations and highlights all the important parameters of the problem.     

Aligning the purchase of green logistics practices between shippers and logistics service providers

This paper explores shippers’ (i.e. logistics buyers) and logistics service providers’ (LSPs) perceptions of green concerns under diverse contractual settings during the key phases of the logistics purchasing process: request for proposal, negotiations, contracting and execution. Accordingly, it derives recommendations that could increase the actors’ inter- and- intra-organisational alignment on green targets throughout these phases. Empirical data are obtained from eight individual cases of three shippers and five LSPs, representing the buyer/seller roles within logistics arrangements. Contrary to previous literature holding the view that setting more green demands by shippers would guarantee green outcomes, the findings show that shippers’ green demands may hinder green logistics applications due to impediments to LSPs’ asset-sharing strategies. Also, a deadlock situation is revealed in the negotiations phase, where both actors await each other to introduce additional demands/offers—calling for further regulatory intervention to release this deadlock. Moreover, this paper shows how a mismatch of interests in contractual periods between shippers and LSPs can obstruct green investments—signalling that the green criterion is not the decisive factor in shaping shippers’ outsourcing strategies. The findings also stress a lack of follow-up efforts by shippers on green measures that were specified pre-contract, attributing this to contrasting intra-organisational objectives within shippers’ firms. This paper contributes to the green logistics purchasing literature by revealing how different contractual settings play an important role in shaping shippers’/LSPs’ perceptions of green concerns during the logistics purchasing process. Further, it is one of the first studies to provide phase-specific recommendations to increase the actors’ alignment on green targets.     

The built environment and travel behavior in urban China: A literature review

Interests in studying of the built environment impacts on travel behavior have proliferated from North America to other parts of the world including China. Until very recently, there has been very little research into travel behavior in China. However, during the last decade, there has been a fast growing interest in studying the built environment and travel behavior in Chinese cities, perhaps motivated by China’s unprecedented urbanization and rapid urban transport development. Case studies from China provide new insights into the impacts of built environment on travel behavior that can help to enrich existing scholarship. However, currently there is a generally poor understanding of the role played by Chinese research and how it has enriched the international literature. This paper aims to fill this gap by reviewing studies in and outside China by both Chinese and non-Chinese scholars. The focus is on the contribution of these studies to the international literature. We identify four areas of contribution: how the built environment has been developed and its implications for travel behavior; the importance of housing sources in defining residential built environment and explaining travel behavior; the unique Danwei (or work unit) perspective on jobs-housing relationships and commuting behavior; and the importance of neighborhood types in explaining travel behavior in Chinese cities. The findings from this review should be relevant for researchers interested in developing future studies that will further advance geographic knowledge of the built environment and travel behavior, specifically in China and with broader global contexts.     

Advances in consumer electric vehicle adoption research: A review and research agenda

In spite of the purported positive environmental consequences of electrifying the light duty vehicle fleet, the number of electric vehicles (EVs) in use is still insignificant. One reason for the modest adoption figures is that the mass acceptance of EVs to a large extent is reliant on consumers’ perception of EVs. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the drivers for and barriers against consumer adoption of plug-in EVs, as well as an overview of the theoretical perspectives that have been utilized for understanding consumer intentions and adoption behavior towards EVs. In addition, we identify gaps and limitations in existing research and suggest areas in which future research would be able to contribute.     

Planning,operation, and control of bus transport systems: A literature review

The efficiency of a transport system depends on several elements, such as available technology, governmental policies, the planning process, and control strategies. Indeed, the interaction between these elements is quite complex, leading to intractable decision making problems. The planning process and real-time control strategies have been widely studied in recent years, and there are several practical implementations with promising results. In this paper, we review the literature on Transit Network Planning problems and real-time control strategies suitable to bus transport systems. Our goal is to present a comprehensive review, emphasizing recent studies as well as works not addressed in previous reviews.     

Characteristics of European inland ports: A statistical analysis of inland waterway port development in Dutch municipalities

Most scientific attention in port studies centers on deep-sea ports, in particular container ports. In our paper, in contrast, we focus our attention on the characteristics of inland waterway ports in a European context. This is an overlooked part in the scientific literature on inland port development, which is up to now mainly concerned with US-based understandings of inland ports. We try to broaden the application of the inland port concept by explaining the development of inland ports in terms of inland waterway bounded cargo throughput. Based on a large-scale quantitative dataset of inland port development in Dutch municipalities we perform various statistical analyses to arrive at a more detailed understanding of the question: What are the characteristics of European inland waterway ports and what transport and economic factors influence cargo throughput on the municipal level? The results in particular highlight the importance of the presence of a container terminal, the diversity in types of goods which are being handled by the inland port and the accessibility of the inland port relative to the regional motorway network as important factors in explaining the size and growth of inland ports. Interestingly, the popular claim in policy of ‘investments in inland port development leading to employment growth’ cannot be confirmed.     

Seaport research: A structured literature review on methodological issues since the 1980s

This study aims to investigate how seaport research has been conducted from the methodological perspective. To this end, this study reviews published port literature for the last three decades (1980-2000s). The investigation primarily categorises the literature according to various methodological issues such as research paradigm, research strategy, base-disciplines, research methods and analysis techniques in order to provide meaningful implications on methodological evolution in seaport research for the period. This study suggests methodological bias in port research to a positivistic paradigm, following a quantitative trajectory moving from conceptual to empirical studies. In addition, the increased use of mathematical modelling and advanced statistical analysis methods is clearly observed. The introduction of advanced analytical tools used in other academic disciplines facilitates discussions in particular research area and amplifies the literature in those areas. This paper also suggests research gaps from the methodological perspective and implications for future port research.     

Global ship risk profiles: Safety and the marine environment

This article uses visualization techniques to investigate global ship risk profiles and their changes over time. With a unique data set of 49,151 observations, the authors link changes in risk profiles to legislative developments and industry actions, as well as identify areas prone to general safety, loss of life, and pollution risks. Improved risk profiles over time have resulted from legislative measures, including the International Safety Management Code, the Oil Pollution Act, amendments to the International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, and the introduction of port state controls and industry vetting inspections.     

Design and development of a hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm for the environmental vehicle routing problem

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a critical and vital problem in logistics for the design of an effective and efficient transportation network, within which the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) has been widely studied for several decades due to the practical relevance of logistics operation. However, CVRP with the objectives of minimizing the overall traveling distance or the traveling time cannot meet the latest requirements of green logistics, which concern more about the influence on the environment. This paper studies CVRP from an environmental perspective and introduces a new model called environmental vehicle routing problem (EVRP) with the aim of reducing the adverse effect on the environment caused by the routing of vehicles. In this research, the environmental influence is measured through the amount of the emission carbon dioxide, which is a widely acknowledged criteria and accounts for the major influence on environment. A hybrid artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) is designed to solve the EVRP model, and the performance of the hybrid algorithm is evaluated through comparing with well-known CVRP instances. The computational results from numerical experiments suggest that the hybrid ABC algorithm outperforms the original ABC algorithm by 5% on average. The transformation from CVRP to EVRP can be recognized through the differentiation of their corresponding optimal solutions, which provides practical insights for operation management in green logistics.     

Ports and regional development: A spatial analysis on a panel of European regions

This paper analyses the impact of port activities on local development for a sample of 621 TL-3 regions located in thirteen European countries and observed over the period 1998–2009. Using a spatial panel econometric framework which controls for spatial fixed effects, the paper provides an estimate of both the direct and indirect (i.e. spillover) effects associated to port activities. Results suggest that ports might have non-negligible effects on local GDP: interestingly, an important share of the effects takes place outside the region where the port is located.     

Resilience in transportation systems: a systematic review and future directions

ABSTRACT

The Belt and Road (B&R) initiative was introduced by the Chinese government to promote the worldwide economic development and multilateral cooperation between China and the associated countries. As a crucial part of global supply chains, transportation plays a key role to ensure the implementation of the B&R. Safety is one of the issues with great importance in transportation research. However, its foci have been expanded from traditional risk through security to resilience and sustainability. Resilience has attracted considerable interests from both researchers and practitioners across different research domains in recent years. Various studies have been conducted on transportation resilience from different perspectives. Consequently, different definitions have been developed to define and describe resilience. This paper presents a systematic review on transportation resilience with emphasis on its definitions, characteristics, and research methods applied in different transportation systems/contexts. It aims to figure out what transportation resilience is and what kind of essential characters it usually has. More importantly, research challenges are analysed and a future research agenda on the resilience of transportation systems is proposed. This paper will provide comprehensive insights into understanding the transportation resilience, as well as establish new horizons for relevant research topics within the context of the B&R.     

Sailing into a dilemma: An economic and legal analysis of an EU trading scheme for maritime emissions

On the basis of a joint economic and legal analysis, we evaluate the effects of a “regional” (European) emission trading scheme aiming at reducing emissions of international shipping. The focus lies on the question which share of emissions from maritime transport activities to and from the EU can and should be included in such a system. Our findings suggest that the attempt to implement an EU maritime ETS runs into a dilemma. It is not possible to design a system that achieves emission reductions in a cost efficient manner and is compatible with international law.     

Ship speed optimization: Concepts,models and combined speed-routing scenarios

The purpose of this paper is to clarify some important issues as regards ship speed optimization at the operational level and develop models that optimize ship speed for a spectrum of routing scenarios in a single ship setting. The paper’s main contribution is the incorporation of those fundamental parameters and other considerations that weigh heavily in a ship owner’s or charterer’s speed decision and in his routing decision, wherever relevant. Various examples are given so as to illustrate the properties of the optimal solution and the various trade-offs that are involved.     

The Tohoku disasters: Chief lessons concerning the post disaster humanitarian logistics response and policy implications

This paper describes the findings of the research conducted by the authors on the humanitarian logistic efforts after the cascading disasters that impacted the Tohoku region after the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11th, 2011. Using a combination of in depth interviews with participants in the relief efforts and meta analyses of news accounts, the authors identified lessons learned by the participants, and the corresponding policy implications and suggestions for improvement of future response efforts.     

A survey on planning semi-flexible transit systems: Methodological issues and a unifying framework

When demand for transportation is low or sparse, traditional transit cannot provide efficient and good-quality service, due to its fixed structure. New transportation alternatives are therefore increasingly proposed, combining on-demand service adjustment capabilities to the regular route and schedule characteristics of traditional transit. Such so-called semi-flexible systems require careful planning, but no formalization of the corresponding decisions problems, nor any comprehensive methodology has been proposed yet. This paper aims at contributing to fill this gap by presenting a comprehensive literature review, and a general and unifying modeling framework for representing and planning semi-flexible systems. The latter takes the form of the Demand Adaptive Systems, which generalizes the semi-flexible systems described in the literature, and also offers a number of advanced features, the scheduling mechanism, in particular. The paper then provides a classification of planning decisions, which is used to structure a comprehensive and comparative literature review of the field of semi-flexible systems, including methodological contributions as well as a number of particularly significant practical experiences.     

A bibliometric analysis on trends and characters of carbon emissions from transport sector

Transport sector’s substantial contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions has made it a growing area of study and concern. In order to identify trends and characteristics of carbon emissions research in the transportation sector we conducted a Bibexcel and complex network analysis for the period 1997–2016. In addition, we identify critical themes and contributions of research articles using h-index, PageRank and cluster analysis. We report contribution of countries, authors, institutions and journals, as well as performance of citations and keywords. Co-citing situations between different countries, authors, and institutions are also analyzed using network analysis. Between 1997 and 2016 we found a rise in publications on carbon emissions in the transportation sector and increased cooperation between countries, authors, and institutions. Authors from the USA, China and United Kingdom published the most articles and articles with the highest academic influence. Tsinghua University from China is the leading institution in carbon emissions research in the transportation sector. The most widely published author and cited author is Dr. He. We conclude our analysis by analyzing keywords and trends to suggest critical topic areas of future research. The systematic approach undertaken in this study can be extended and applied to other research topics and fields.     

A review of port devolution and governance models with compound eyes approach

Port devolution and port governance are focal issues in port studies. This paper argues that the previous typology of port devolution and port governance, including port function matrix models, might have to be modified, in particular for Asian port cases, because they have not considered socio, economic, and political systems and historical aspects behind the port devolution continuum. This paper uses the “compound eyes” approach comprising of many similar, closely-packed facets called ommatidia, with a multiple angle view, to revisit and review previous port devolution and governance models. The paper aims to identify the limitations and rectify fallacies in previous port studies by conducting a critical review and taking a couple of Asian container port cases as examples. This paper contributes to the literature of port devolution and governance, illuminating crucial gaps that the previous studies have not addressed.