IAME 2001: Contemporary research in global shipping and logistics

The establishment and implementation of a training programme requires a training needs assessment (TNA). Without this approach, more often than not, training programmes have failed to succeed and to make such an assessment the instructional designer, i.e. the person in charge for this work, needs to follow a methodology. Unlike the other industries, the port industry has neglected the use of these methodologies, which is shown by the lack of research work published in academic journals. With a view to fill the existing gap, the paper proposes a five-step TNA methodology to be used in the port industry and applies its first three steps to investigate the port training situation in the new European Union member states. To achieve this objective, the paper is structured in the following way: Section 1 puts the research work into context; section 2 addresses the role of ports; section 3. presents a port TNA methodology; section 4. explains research methodology; section 5 addresses port training issues in the new European-member states; and section 6 presents conclusions and further comments.     

Distributions of travel time variability on urban roads

Reliability is an important factor in route, mode and also departure time choice analysis and is a key performance indicator for transport systems. However, the current metrics used to measure travel time variability may be not sufficient to fully represent reliability. Better understanding of the distributions of travel times is needed for the development of improved metrics for reliability. A comprehensive data analysis involving the assessment of longitudinal travel time data for two urban arterial road corridors in Adelaide, Australia, demonstrates that the observed distributions are more complex than previously assumed. The data sets demonstrate strong positive skew, very long upper tails, and sometimes bimodality. This paper proposes the use of alternative statistical distributions for travel time variability, with the Burr Type XII distribution emerging as an appropriate model for both links and routes. This statistical distribution has some attractive properties that make it suitable for explicit definition of many travel time reliability metrics. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effectiveness of roadside crash countermeasures

In this article, an "intelligent" airline seat inventory control system is developed. Applications of the system are considered for both nonstop flights and flights with stopovers. The system developed is able to recognize a situation characterized by the number of reservations made by individual passenger classes and the number of canceled reservations at a certain moment in time before departure. The system can also make the appropriate decision without knowing the functional relationships in effect between individual variables. As in other intelligent systems, the "intelligent" airline seat inventory control system proposed here is able to generalize, adapt and learn based on new knowledge and new information. The "intelligent" airline seat inventory control system is based on fuzzy logic. The system makes on-line decisions as to whether to accept or reject any passenger request using established fuzzy rules. The "intelligent" system's results are compared with those of the EMSR model for nonstop flights. The results for flights with stopovers are compared with those obtained using integer programming. The final conclusions are very promising.     

Classifying Ports for Efficiency Benchmarking: A Review and a Frontier-based Clustering Approach

Abstract

Port efficiency and port clustering are two aspects that have received different degrees of attention in the existing literature. While the actual estimation of port efficiency has been extensively studied, the existing literature has paid little attention to developing robust methodologies for port classification. In this paper, we review the literature on classification methods for port efficiency, and present an approach that combines stochastic frontier analysis, clustering and self-organized maps (SOM). Cluster methodologies that build on the estimated cost function parameters could group ports into performance metrics’ categories. This helps when setting improvement targets for ports as a function of their specific cluster. The methodology is applied to a database of Spanish port authorities. The dendrogram features three clusters and five outlier Spanish Port Authorities. SOM are employed to track the temporal evolution of Spanish Port Authorities that are of special interest for some reasons (i.e. outliers). Results show that use of a combination of cost frontier and cluster methods to define robust port typology and SOMs, jointly or in isolation, offers useful information to the decision-makers.     

Improving paratransit scheduling using ruin and recreate methods

Abstract

In this paper we study the effects of using ruin and recreate methods in a replanning phase of a dynamic dial-a-ride problem. Several such methods are proposed, and a modeling system is used to evaluate how they improve the quality of the solutions. We show that simple changes to existing planning methods can increase the efficiency of the service. Two cases, with different forms of costs inflicted on the vehicles, are evaluated and significant improvements are found in both cases. The best results of our study are found with ruin methods based on removal of sequences of requests.     

Decoupling of Road Freight Transport and Economic Growth Trends in the UK: An Exploratory Analysis

Abstract

Between 1997 and 2004, gross domestic product increased in real terms in the UK by one‐fifth, while the volume of road freight movement remained stable. This suggests that the long‐awaited decoupling of economic and freight transport growth has begun, possibly leading to a new era of sustainable logistics. This paper reviews previous research on the decoupling issue and recent trends in gross domestic product/freight tonne‐km elasticities in Europe and the USA. It then examines 12 possible causes of the observed decoupling in the UK using published statistics from a wide range of British and European sources. This analysis indicates that around two‐thirds of the decoupling is due to three factors whose impact can be quantified: the increased penetration of the British road haulage market by foreign operators, a decline in road transport’s share of the freight market, and real increases in road freight rates. Several other factors, most notably the relative growth of the service sector, the diminishing rate of centralization, and the off‐shoring of manufacturing, appear to be having a significant effect, though this finding cannot be measured on the basis of available statistics. The paper concludes that, while the decoupling is in the right direction from a public policy standpoint, the net environmental benefits are likely to be quite modest.     

Development of a biology inspired manufacturing system for machining transmission cases

Disruptions in automated manufacturing systems for machining automotive parts caused by system changes and disturbances reduce the productivity, and increase the downtime as well as the cost of products. To cope with these challenges, the paper presents a biology inspired manufacturing system (Bio-MS). The model of Bio-MS is inherited from the organization of the living systems in biology and nature such as ant colony, school of fish, bee’s foraging behaviors, and so on. In which, the resources of the manufacturing system are considered as biological organisms, which are autonomous entities so that the manufacturing system has the advanced characteristics inspired from biology such as self-adaptation, self-diagnosis, and self-healing. To realize the Bio-MS, the cognitive agent and swarm intelligence were proposed. The disturbances happening when machining the transmission cases at an automotive company in Korea were analyzed to classify them and to find out the corresponding management methods. Currently, the system utilization was too low due to the manual recovery, only 70–76 percent of total production time is used for manufacturing and the rest of the time is wasted in different disturbances. The Bio-MS with autonomous behaviors adapts efficiently to the changes of the manufacturing environment. It enables to increase the system utilization more than 80 percent.     

Robust design optimization of suspension system considering steering pull reduction

This paper presents robust design optimization method to reduce steering pull phenomenon. One of the biggest causes of steering pull phenomenon is tolerance of suspension system such as hard point, spring, damper and bush. Therefore, the relationship between suspension systems and steering pull phenomenon has as nonlinear characteristics. But, it can be very difficult to evaluate the analytical design sensitivity. Thus, it is impossible to directly apply a well-developed optimization algorithm based on gradient information. To avoid these difficulty, this study uses sequential approximation optimization process based on a meta-model. The robust design process has 28 random design variables with tolerance. For efficient design process, the sample variances for the design goals are approximated from meta-models. The proposed approach required only 62 evaluations until it converged. Optimal design reduced the drift by 80% and its deviation by 38.7%, respectively. This result proves that the suggested design method of suspension system is effective and useful.     

Objective evaluation of door-closing sound quality based on physiological acoustics

This paper presents a new method to objectively quantify the sound quality of doors closing in premium passenger cars. In previous works, psychoacoustic parameters have been used for objective quantification. However, these parameters do not agree well with subsequent subjective assessments. Therefore, the correlation between the psychoacoustic parameters and the subjective rating of door closing sounds in sampled cars is low, and it is not sufficient to use psychoacoustic parameters as an objective metric to quantify the quality of door-closing sounds. In this paper, a new method is proposed to objectively quantify the sound quality based on physiological acoustics and statistical signal processing. A gammatone filter is used as a pre-processing method in models of the auditory system and kurtosis, which is the fourth-order moment of the temporal signal and is used to extract quantitative information about the quality of door-closing sounds. The new metric obtained from the proposed method is highly correlated to subjective ratings and has been successfully applied to the quantification of door-closing sound quality.     

Experiments and thermal-electrical analysis of buss bar and relay assemblies in junction blocks

A junction block (or electrical distribution box) is electrical equipment that has been densely assembled from components such as buss bars, relays, and fuses to control the electric current flow in vehicles. Joule heat is generated in these parts as a result of electrical bulk resistance and electrical contact resistance. The generation of heat increases due to the complex behavior of modern vehicle electronic systems. Overheated parts can be damaged during operation due to thermal energy. The thermal assessment of a junction block is an important issue in automobile development. We suggest a methodology to simulate the transient temperature distribution of buss bars and electrical relays in a junction block. A finite element formulation of a coupled electro-thermal problem, which includes the effect of Joule heating, is introduced to the simulation. Finite element analysis (FEA) and experiments at the component level of buss bars and relays are conducted to investigate the thermal performance of a junction block. To verify the accuracy of the FEA procedure, the temperature history obtained by FEA is compared with the results obtained from experiments. The thermal-electric analysis of a typical junction block assembly is also discussed.