Analysing training and education in ports

The quality and availability of labour is important for the performance of ports. Insights from cluster theories are relevant for analysing training and education in ports, as ports can be regarded as clusters. In general, labour in clusters is relatively mobile, education services in clusters are relatively good and employees have a high willingness to invest in specific skills. However, skilled and talented labour still may be scarce, especially in regions with tight labour markets. Thus, in many clusters, including port clusters, firms and governments actively aim to improve the quality of labour. This paper presents an analysis of these efforts of firms and governments to improve the quality of the labour force in three seaport clusters. In this paper the concept of a ‘training and education regime’ is presented as an approach to analyse efforts of firms and governments to improve the quality and availability of labour. Important results of three case studies include first, the observation that the quality of training and education regime differs substantially between clusters. Second, the presence of aregime manager in Rotterdam adds to the quality of Rotterdam’s training and education regime. Such an organisation may be effective across countries and clusters. Finally, the presence ofleader firms, willing to invest in training and education also improves an education regime.     

More gray hair—but for whom? Scenario-based simulations of elderly activity travel patterns in 2020

This paper reports the results of a scenario-based simulation study to explore mobility effects of an aging society in the Netherlands. Four accumulative behavioral scenario variants, embedded in an economic and demographic scenario are used to simulate possible future activity-travel patterns, using the Albatross system as the simulator. The variants account for likely differences in activity-travel behavior between elderly today and elderly in the future. Trends ongoing over the last decade in the Netherlands suggest that future elderly need to work longer, change their activity pattern with most growth occurring in the social/leisure activity category, will try to avoid morning peak hours by rescheduling their activities and may introduce more spatial diversity in terms of their residence location. Results show that these behavioral and spatial changes lead to a significant increase in travel demands as well as temporal, spatial and modal shifts in mobility patterns. We discuss possible policy implications of these predictions and evaluate the specific strength of activity-based models for studies of this kind.

Performance Evaluation of Handoff-Based Cellular Traffic Monitoring Systems Using Combined Wireless and Traffic Simulation Platform

Handoff-based cellular probe technologies have been proven to be a cost-effective solution for traffic surveillance due to their low cost, large sample size, and intensive spatial coverage. At the same time, the development of reliable simulation tools that can be used to conduct a feasibility study, performance evaluation, and estimation model testing for cellular probe technologies, especially in the arterial environment, is still limited. In this study, by simulating the real-world signal delaying and wireless signal communication protocols, we establish a simulation platform for evaluating cellular probe system. The simulation platform eliminates unrealistic assumption on static and regular cell boundaries in the existing simulation tools and can provide simulation results similar to field observations. Based on the platform, we compared the performance of cellular probe system under both freeway and arterial environment. We analyzed the impact of traffic conditions, the duration of cellphone calls, and penetration rate on the handoff efficiency, handoff link speed error, and information-disseminating link speed estimation error. In addition, we also provide a detailed evaluation of the accuracy of the intersection delay estimation and the potential error sources and mechanism. The results show that the handoff-based cellular probe technologies attain good performance in traffic monitoring and the proposed simulation platform can reflect the real-world condition on an acceptable level.     

Estimating Missing Traffic Volume Using Low Multilinear Rank Tensor Completion

Traffic volume data have been collected and used for various purposes in some aspects of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) applications. However, the unavoidable detector malfunction can cause data to be missing. It is often necessary to develop an effective approach to recover the missing data. In most previous methods, temporal correlation is explored to reconstruct missing traffic volume. In this article, a new missing traffic volume estimation approach based on tensor completion is proposed by exploring traffic spatial–temporal information. The tensor model is utilized to represent traffic volume, which allows for exploring the multicorrelation of traffic volume in spatial and temporal information simultaneously. In order to estimate the missing traffic volume represented by the tensor model, a novel tensor completion algorithm, called low multilinear rank tensor completion, is proposed to reconstruct the missing entries. The proposed approach is evaluated on the PeMS database. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is more effective than the state-of-art methods, especially when the ratio of missing data is high.     

The conflict between competition policy and the wider role of the local bus industry in Britain

Since the Transport Act of 1985, the local bus industry in Britain (outside London and Northern Ireland) has been subject to deregulation, removing previous restrictions on routes, service levels and fares. This also marked a reversal of the previous emphasis on co-ordination of services provided by different operators, and introduced competition law as applying to other industries to the local bus sector. This has been in conflict with other policy objectives aimed at stimulating greater use of public transport, such as harmonisation of ticketing systems. The underlying issues are examined, and recent changes in policy. The Local Transport Act of 2008 offers an opportunity to resolve some of these problems, and its application in Oxford is discussed as the first substantial example to date. However, a strong conflict remains between the role of competition agencies and other aspects of policy.     

Exchange rate changes and the cost competitiveness of international airlines: The Aviation Trade Weighted Index

Discussions of how changes in exchange rates impact on international airlines tend to be ambivalent. In this paper, it is shown that the relative cost competitiveness of an international airline will decline when there is an exchange rate appreciation in its home country - as will be the case for other tradable goods and services. The extent to which this happens depends on which countries the prices of the inputs are set in and also on which countries' airlines it is closely competing with. The impact is greater if there is an appreciation relative to those countries whose airlines the home airlines are closely competing with. In the trade literature, this is recognised in the Trade Weighted Index of exchange rates, which weights exchanges rates according to their importance in a country's trade flows. In this paper, an Airline Trade Weighted Index is developed - the weights for this index depend on airline traffic and revenues on routes to and from a country. The ATWI is calculated for Australian international airlines, and it indicates that there has been a significant loss of competitiveness in recent years, due to the appreciation of the Australian dollar relative to currencies of key airline competitor countries.     

Activity sequencing,location, and formation of individual non-mandatory tours: application to the activity-based models for Columbus,Cincinnati, and Cleveland,OH

Most of the earlier activity based models (ABMs) largely relied on a tour-based modeling paradigm which explicitly predicts tour frequency and then adds details including stop frequency, order, and location of stops within each tour. The current study is part of new tour formation design framework for an ABM in which the underlying tour structure and the stop frequency within tours emerge from temporal, sequencing, and locational preferences of activities that the traveler intends to participate during the day. In order to do this, the study developed a modified rank-ordered logit (ROL) framework that is capable of modeling sequence, locations, as well as the underlying tour structure of all activity episodes simultaneously in an integrated manner. Model estimation with the household survey data, provided several important behavioral insights into underlying choices that drive tour formation. Specifically, the study uncovered pairwise ordering preferences among episodes of different activity purposes, clustering tendencies among episodes of same activity purpose, the impact of supply side activity opportunities on the location and sequence choice dimensions, and impedance effects (including distance and mode and time-of-day logsums) on location and tour break dimensions. The developed models are incorporated in the operational ABM structure adopted for three major cities (Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati) in Ohio.     

井喷的悲剧

导航电子地图的竞争点,从导航里程到POI（兴趣点）数量、然后再到电子眼提示功能……近期,3D导航界面的宣传风头初露．但也只不过是实现了路口放大和极少复杂路口假3D仿真。中国地域广阔．建筑多而杂,真正3D导航时代在中国为时尚早。那么。中国地图商们将赋予产品什么样的卖点来吸引更多的用户呢？我认为融入动态交通信息和道路救援系统．即将成为导航电子地图的重要卖点,也是“真正拉开产品差异、一比产品高下”时代的来临。