Offshore Petroleum Development and Potential

This article examines the uncertainties concerning the antiturst immunity for collective participation by liner conferences in intermodal transporation. Among them are the FMC's jurisdiction under the Shipping Act to authorize such collective actions, the legality of intermodal dual-rate contracts and the stringency by lsquo;public-interestrsquo; justification. Administrative and judicial decisions proved ineffective in resolving the issues which legislative actions had, over a decade, failed to deal with. These uncertainties could soon be ended with passage of the maritime antiturst polity emerging out of this Congress. It is, however, still uncertain as to whether, and to what extent, the viabilty of the conference system would be threatened by the continued growth of intermodalism and vice versa. Congressional intent to safeguard the continued growth of intermodalism and the development of other future innovations means that these two issues are of more than just academic interests. Yet, they have not been adequately addressed in the policy studies currently available.     

The coastal barrier resources act of 1982: An assessment of legislative intent,process, and exemption alternatives

Recent coastal barrier legislation demonstrates a growing national concern to protect fragile undeveloped coastal barriers and to prevent the expenditure of federal monies used in promoting their development. The Coastal Barrier Resources Act of 1982 bases designations of undeveloped coastal barriers on previous federal legislation and Department of the Interior rule‐making. This paper examines the legislative intent of Congress and how it was interpreted through the designation process. Alternative strategies to achieve exemption from the Coastal Barrier legislation are discussed as a process, and an analysis is made of an exemption as it occurred in Texas.     

Ship underwater noise assessment by the acoustic analogy. Part I: nonlinear analysis of a marine propeller in a uniform flow

The aim of this work is to analyze the hydroacoustic behavior of a marine propeller through the acoustic analogy and to test the versatility and effectiveness of this approach in dealing with the many (and relatively unexplored) issues concerning the underwater noise and its numerical prediction. In particular, a propeller in a noncavitating open water condition is examined here by coupling a Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes hydrodynamic solver to a hydroacoustic code implementing different resolution forms of the Ffowcs Williams–Hawkings (FWH) equation. The numerical results suggest that unlike the analogous aeronautical problem, where the role played by the nonlinear quadrupole sources is known to be relevant just at high transonic or supersonic regime, the pressure field underwater seems to be significantly affected by the flow nonlinearities, while the contribution from the linear terms (the thickness and loading noise components) is dominant only in a spatially very limited region. Then, contrary to popular belief and regardless of the low blade rotational speed, a reliable hydroacoustic analysis of a marine propeller cannot put aside the contribution of the nonlinear noise sources represented by the turbulence and vorticity three-dimensional fields and requires the computation of the FWH quadrupole source terms.     

Introducing advanced electronic driver support systems: An exploration of market and technological uncertainties

R&D in the field of driver support systems is increasingly paid attention to. These systems can contribute significantly to public traffic goals. However, there is much uncertainty about future technology developments, market introduction, and impacts on driver and traffic behaviour. An international Delphi study collecting expert opinions on these issues is partly described here. The Delphi study was organized in three rounds. Opinions of 50 experts from the USA, Japan and Europe were collected. The paper is limited to market introduction, and technological and driver-behavioural barriers. The main conclusion is that future developments are less obvious than often assumed.     

The econometric testing of investment incentives: A cointegrated approach

Thie paper re-examines the link between shipping investment and investment incentives, first explored in this journal by Marlow, and subsequently developed by mcWilliams et al. in the July–September issue. Examination of the ststistical properties of the data reveals that some of McWilliams' results may be flawed. A modified version of the Marlow model is estimated. checking for statistical and economic consistency, using cointegration, checking for statistical and economic consistency, using cointegration techniques. The estimated model resolves marlow's original challenge, but does not appear to be as robust as could be wished.     

Detection and Classification of Vehicles by Measurement of Road-Pavement Vibration and by Means of Supervised Machine Learning

Road vehicle detection and, to a lesser extent, classification have received considerable attention, in particular for the purpose of traffic monitoring by transportation authorities. A multitude of sensors and systems have been developed to assist people in traffic monitoring. Camera-based systems have enjoyed wide adoption over the last decade, partially substituting for more traditional techniques. Methods based on road-pavement vibration are not as common as camera-based systems. However, vibration sensors may be of interest when sensors must be out of sight and insensitive to environmental conditions, such as fog. We present and discuss our work on detection and classification of vehicles by measurement of road-pavement vibration and by means of supervised machine learning. We describe the entire processing chain from sensor data acquisition to vehicle classification and discuss our results for the task of vehicle detection and the task of vehicle classification separately. Using data for a single vibration sensor, our results show a performance ranging between 94% and near 100% for the detection task (1340 samples) and between 43% and 86% for the classification task (experiment specific, between 454 and 1243 samples).     

Full-slip kinematics based estimation of vehicle yaw rate from differential wheel speeds

Vehicle yaw rate is a key parameter required for various active stability control systems. Accurate yaw rate information may be obtained from the fusion of some on-vehicle sensors and GPS data. In this study, the closed-form expression of the yaw rate–written as a function of front wheel rolling speeds and steering angle–was derived via kinematic analysis of a planar four-wheel vehicle on the assumption of no longitudinal slip at the both front tires. The obtained analytical solution was primarily verified by computational simulation. In terms of implementation, the 1:10th scaled rear-wheel-drive vehicle was modified so that the front wheel rolling speeds and the steering angle could be measured. An inertial measurement unit was also installed to provide the directly measured yaw rate used for validation. Preliminary experiment was done on some extremely random sideslip maneuvers beneath the global positioning using four recording cameras. Comparing with the vision-based and the gyro-based references, the vehicle yaw rate could be well approximated at any slip condition without requiring integration or vehicle and tire models. The proposed cost-effective estimation strategy using only on-vehicle sensors could be used as an alternative way to enhance performance of the GPS-based yaw rate estimation system while the GPS signal is unavailable.     

The Development of a Visualization Methodology for Integrated Coastal Management

Coastal management information is frequently communicated to stakeholders and the public through complicated management documents and engineering plans. With the recognition that public involvement in coastal decision-making processes should be widened have come calls to develop new techniques to communicate complicated coastal information. Using Virtual Reality Geographical Information Systems and visualization packages, such information may be presented using formats more suitable for public consultation and information dissemination exercises than those currently employed. Using a site on the north Norfolk coast of England, an integrated Geographical Information Systems based methodology is presented that allows the visualization of proposed coastal management interventions. Visualizations have been produced that can be published in traditional paper-based management documents, or electronically. The different visualizations are compared and the technical issues surrounding their use discussed. It is argued that the methodology has clear advantages over traditional communication methods, although further research is necessary to determine how it may be practically employed by coastal managers.     

Increase of metro line capacity by optimisation of track circuit length and location: In a distance to go system

The signalling system affects the type of service that can be provided on any particular railway line. The aims set when it comes to designing these systems to operate a railway line are: to ensure safety of operation and to ensure flexible and efficient running. When building a line capacity optimisation algorithm, it must reach a compromise solution between two parameters: minimise the interval between trains and keep journey time as low as possible. This paper aims to describe the algorithm developed between METRO DE MADRID and CITEF (Railway Technology Research Centre of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid – UPM) that allows the capacity of an underground line equipped with ATP Distance To Go systems to be studied and optimised. This algorithm facilitates the tasks of signalling design and optimisation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numerical simulation of violent sloshing by a CIP-based method

In this article, a new computational fluid dynamics simulation approach based on the constraint interpolation profile (CIP) method is applied to tackle the violent sloshing problem. The present study considers two-dimensional sloshing phenomena in a rectangular tank. By the proposed method, the sloshing problem is viewed as a multiphase problem that includes water and air flows. A stationary Cartesian grid is used and the free surface is solved by an interface capturing method. The CIP combined unified procedure (CCUP) scheme was adopted for the flow solver, and both the CIP scheme and the CIP conservative semi-Lagrangian with cubic interpolation polynomial (CIP-CSL3) scheme were used for interface capturing. For validation of the numerical method, a physical experiment was conducted with a rectangular tank for several frequencies and filling heights. A convergence check was first performed for the method. The numerical simulation results on violent sloshing show that the use of the CIP-CSL3 scheme as an interface capturing procedure gives much better results for the pressures and free-surface profiles than the conventional CIP scheme.