Joint optimization of freight facility location and pavement infrastructure rehabilitation under network traffic equilibrium

Establishment of industry facilities often induces heavy vehicle traffic that exacerbates congestion and pavement deterioration in the neighboring highway network. While planning facility locations and land use developments, it is important to take into account the routing of freight vehicles, the impact on public traffic, as well as the planning of pavement rehabilitation. This paper presents an integrated facility location model that simultaneously considers traffic routing under congestion and pavement rehabilitation under deterioration. The objective is to minimize the total cost due to facility investment, transportation cost including traffic delay, and pavement life-cycle costs. Building upon analytical results on optimal pavement rehabilitation, the problem is formulated into a bi-level mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP), with facility location, freight shipment routing and pavement rehabilitation decisions in the upper level and traffic equilibrium in the lower level. This problem is then reformulated into an equivalent single-level MINLP based on Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) conditions and approximation by piece-wise linear functions. Numerical experiments on hypothetical and empirical network examples are conducted to show performance of the proposed algorithm and to draw managerial insights.     

Biofuel refinery location and supply chain planning under traffic congestion

This research focuses on planning biofuel refinery locations where the total system cost for refinery investment, feedstock and product transportation and public travel is minimized. Shipment routing of both feedstock and product in the biofuel supply chain and the resulting traffic congestion impact are incorporated into the model to decide optimal locations of biofuel refineries. A Lagrangian relaxation based heuristic algorithm is introduced to obtain near-optimum feasible solutions efficiently. To further improve optimality, a branch-and-bound framework (with linear programming relaxation and Lagrangian relaxation bounding procedures) is developed. Numerical experiments with several testing examples demonstrate that the proposed algorithms solve the problem effectively. An empirical Illinois case study and a series of sensitivity analyses are conducted to show the effects of highway congestion on refinery location design and total system costs.     

Location planning for transit-based evacuation under the risk of service disruptions

The effectiveness of transit-based emergency evacuation highly depends on the location of pick-up facilities, resource allocation, and management. These facilities themselves are often subject to service disruptions during or after the emergency. This paper proposes a reliable emergency facility location model that determines both pre-emergency facility location planning and the evacuation operations afterwards, while facilities are subject to the risk of disruptions. We analyze how evacuation resource availability leverages individual evacuees’ response to service disruptions, and show how equilibrium of the evacuee arrival process could be reached at a functioning pick-up facility. Based on this equilibrium, an optimal resource allocation strategy is found to balance the tradeoff between the evacuees’ risks and the evacuation agency’s operation costs. This leads to the development of a compact polynomial-size linear integer programming formulation that minimizes the total expected system cost from both pre-emergency planning (e.g., facility set-up) and the evacuation operations (e.g., fleet management, transportation, and exposure to hazardous surroundings) across an exponential number of possible disruption scenarios. We also show how the model can be flexibly used to plan not only pre-disaster evacuation but also post-disaster rescue actions. Numerical experiments and an empirical case study for three coastal cities in the State of Mississippi (Biloxi, Gulfport, and D’lberville) are conducted to study the performance of the proposed models and to draw managerial insights.     

Scheduling of Intelligent and Autonomous Vehicles under pairing/unpairing collaboration strategy in container terminals

A new class of Intelligent and Autonomous Vehicles (IAVs) has been designed in the framework of Intelligent Transportation for Dynamic Environment (InTraDE) project funded by European Union. This type of vehicles is technologically superior to the existing Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), in many respects. They offer more flexibility and intelligence in maneuvering within confined spaces where the logistic operations take place. This includes the ability of pairing/unpairing enabling a pair of 1-TEU (20-foot Equivalent Unit) IAVs dynamically to join, transport containers of any size between 1-TEU and 1-FFE (40-foot Equivalent) and disjoin again. Deploying IAVs helps port operators to remain efficient in coping with the ever increasing volume of container traffic at ports and eliminate the need for deploying more 40-ft transporters in the very confined area of ports. In order to accommodate this new feature of IAVs, we review and extend one of the existing mixed integer programming models of AGV scheduling in order to minimize the makespan of operations for transporting a set of containers of different sizes between quay cranes and yard cranes. In particular, we study the case of Dublin Ferryport Terminal. In order to deal with the complexity of the scheduling model, we develop a Lagrangian relaxation-based decomposition approach equipped with a variable fixing procedure and a primal heuristics to obtain high-quality solution of instances of the problem.     

高速公路建设单位与沿线农村党组织联建的探索

文章从河池至都安高速公路创新建设单位与沿线农村党组织联建模式的角度出发,分析了创新高速公路建设单位与沿线农村党组织联建模式的动因、作用、意义及影响因素等,对高速公路建设单位与沿线农村党组织结对共建新模式和构建和谐的村企关系进行了探索。     

隧道围岩优势节理面统计及其块体稳定性分析

对于节理发育的破碎围岩隧道工程,根据开挖面的节理发育情况对围岩稳定性作出快速判断是至关重要的.文章以宁波象山港大桥接线段的茶园里隧道右线为例,通过对该隧道右线YK21+670～YK21+718段围岩节理发育特征的精细化描述和统计分析,确定了该段围岩的优势节理面,并在此基础上利用赤平投影解析法进行了围岩块体稳定性分析,得出了围岩块体滑移形式及块体的受力状态,并与数值计算结果相互验证,确定了可能发生失稳的块体,明确了加固区域,对有效保证隧道开挖施工安全有重要意义.     

节理倾角对公路隧道围岩塌落拱影响分析

文章主要通过室内石膏块模型试验对节理间距为0.5 m的隧道围岩在节理倾角分别为0°,30°,45°,60°和90°时无支护开挖情况下围岩的塌落拱跨度、高度和塌落面积的探讨,得出了在不同节理倾角下得到的结果 ,并与普氏理论值进行了对比分析,发现塌落高度、塌落宽度以及塌落面积均与节理倾角呈非线性变化关系,其极小值介于45°~60°之间;同时利用离散元软件UEDC对上述工况进行二维数值分析,室内试验结果与数值分析结果一致;依据数值计算和室内试验综合分析,得到了在不同节理倾角下塌落拱高度的计算方法。     

Multiple objective optimization of the fleet sizing problem for road freight transportation

A fleet sizing problem (FSP) in a road freight transportation company with heterogeneous fleet and its own technical back‐up facilities is considered in the paper. The mathematical model of the decision problem is formulated in terms of multiple objective mathematical programming based on queuing theory. Technical and economical criteria as well as interests of different stakeholders are taken into account in the problem formulation. The solution procedure is composed of two steps. In the first one a sample of Pareto‐optimal solutions is generated by an original program called MEGROS. In the second step this set is reviewed and evaluated, according to the Decision Maker's (DM's) model of preferences. The evaluation of solutions is carried out with an application of an interactive multiple criteria analysis method, called Light Beam Search (LBS). Finally, the DM selects the most desirable, compromise solution.     

合资铁路重组背景下省级铁路平台可持续发展对策

在铁路行业高度垄断,铁路运营普遍效益欠佳和地方政府财力有限的现实环境下,特别是国铁集团近年来大力推行“一省一公司”合资铁路重组整合的改革,对省级铁路平台的发展带来了新的巨大的问题挑战,本文结合当前在全国大力推行的合资铁路重组改革的背景,分析了省级铁路平台在改革中将面临的重大问题,包括既有投融资能力难以支撑大规模规划项目建设、已建铁路运营大规模亏损、铁路行业建设运营高度垄断严重以及铁路土地综合开发进展迟缓等一系列问题,并针对以上问题提出相关的对策建议。     

A vehicle manufacturer's view of the potential for electric automobiles

In the search for low pollution, low noise, multi‐fuel vehicles capable of adapting to almost any source of energy available, the electric vehicle continues to be suggested in a variety of forms. In the long‐term view, working on the hypothesis that either solar or nuclear energy can provide the only inexhaustible energy supplies, electric propulsion will undoubtedly have a significant role to perform, and it could provide a useful means of transport in the transition period out of the current dependency on crude oil.

There are, however, some grave question marks hanging over the viability of electric vehicles on a large scale both in terms of their energy efficiency and practicality. This paper describes the state of development and discusses the future prospects.     

Urban spatial location advantage: The dual of the transportation problem and its implications for land-use and transport planning

Numerous recent studies have investigated the relationship between the location of jobs and housing in urban areas and how this relates to urban commuting patterns. Few have utilised the dual of the transportation problem of linear programming (TPLP) to provide insights into these relationships Accordingly, this analysis utilises the TPLP to determine dual variable values (shadow prices) for a study area in Dublin, Ireland. The approach determines the pattern of relative location advantage for the peak and off-peak travel periods and for public and private transport for 1991 and 2001. The results are set against the expected results for hypothetical urban structures. The results show that the pattern of relative location advantage has altered sharply over the study period for off-peak trip-making but has remained more or less the same for trip-making in the peak period. For the off-peak period, the pattern of relative location advantage has shifted from the central area to the periphery specifically for private transport trips; for public transport, the pattern has remained focused on the city centre. This indicates that private transport users can react more quickly to changes in the distribution of land-use activities than their public transport counterparts due to the relatively fixed nature of the latter mode. This implies that the public transport network needs to be reorganized to better reflect the revised pattern of trip-making specifically for the off-peak period. The results demonstrate the value of using the approach for providing information about the spatial organisation of land uses within cities and where future development may be targeted.