Innovation,capabilities and competitive advantage in Norwegian shipping

As a high-cost country, it is believed that Norway has to build its competitiveness in most industries on innovation and knowledge-intensive products. The shipping industry is no exception. It has to be innovative in order to prosper. This unison conclusion, which has been drawn in several research projects during the last 10–20 years, is probably also applicable for companies in other high cost countries. A major issue in this research is how the industry can develop and maintain innovativeness and international competitiveness. The aim of this paper is to discuss the conclusion drawn in previous research concerning how the shipping industry can be innovative. It concludes that shipping companies have to improve their skills and competencies in a stronger interplay between organizations within and without the maritime cluster. This may increase their total capability and innovativeness and create distinctive competitive advantages that are difficult to imitate.     

Price and frequency competition in freight transportation

This paper develops a simple analytical model of price and frequency competition among freight carriers. In the model, the full price faced by a shipper (a goods producer) includes the actual shipping price plus an inventory holding cost, which is inversely proportional to the frequency of shipments offered by the freight carrier. Taking brand loyalty on the part of shippers into account, competing freight carriers maximize profit by setting prices, frequencies and vehicle carrying capacities. Assuming tractable functional forms, long- and short-run comparative-static results are derived to show how the choice variables are affected by the model’s parameters. The paper also provides an efficiency analysis, comparing the equilibrium to the social optimum, and it attempts to explain the phenomenon of excess capacity in the freight industry.     

The limits of analyzing service quality data in public transport

In recent years, management and academics have increasingly focused on quality management in public transport. In particular, many public transport operators regularly monitor their service quality over time and use these data to assess quality performance (e.g., for performance-based quality contracts) and to determine managerial decisions (e.g., budget allocations for service improvements). However, despite the widespread applications of service quality data in practice, it is unclear whether cross-sectional analyses and cross-temporal comparisons of service quality data provide valid insights for quality management purposes. In this study, we investigate the usability of cross-sectional analyses and cross-temporal comparisons of service quality data by conducting an empirical study that tracked a panel’s perceptions of the service quality of public transport and its choice over the course of three consecutive years. The results demonstrate that cross-sectional analyses provide valid insights for quality management. However, cross-temporal comparisons should be interpreted carefully because the results of these comparisons are surprisingly unreliable. In fact, we find that service quality data do not provide reliable results over time and therefore conclude that cross-temporal comparisons of service quality data must be interpreted with caution for quality management in public transport.     

Evaluating critical lines and stations considering the impact of the consequence using transit assignment model ‐case study of London's underground network

As the problem of full transit vehicles is encountered daily by passengers in most of the big cities, previous research evaluated the consequence of overcrowding in terms of on‐board crowding and passengers not being able to board with full vehicles. The impact of overcrowding in the real world is, however, not necessarily proportional to these numbers. This paper attempts to specify the critical lines and stations of a network by considering the number of passengers failing to board and attempting to evaluate its impact on service quality and safety risks. The hypothesis is that larger stations with wider platforms can often cope better with overcrowding than smaller stations. Therefore a station size dependent satisfaction function is proposed, which takes values from 0 to 1. The method is applied to London's underground network with a number of scenarios which show critical stations in the network if delays occur.     

Parameterisation of clastic sediments including benthic structures

The sediment transport processes in the south-western Baltic Sea are predicted by means of a numerical model in the project DYNAS. There are two sediment parameters that influence the results of modelling remarkably: critical shear stress velocity and bottom roughness. This paper presents the way how to parameterise these factors and extrapolate them into the investigation area. The critical shear stress velocity is parameterised basing on grain size data, combining approximations after Hjulström [Hjulström, F., 1935: Studies in the morphological activity of rivers as illustrated by the river Fyris. Geological Institution of University of Uppsala: Bulletin (25): 221–528.], Shields [Shields, A., 1936: Anwendung der Ähnlichkeits-Mechanik und der Turbulenzforschung auf die Geschiebebewegung. Mitteilungen der Preussischen Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffahrt (26): 26 pp.] and Bohling [Bohling, B., 2003: Untersuchungen zur Mobilität natürlicher und anthropogener Sedimente in der Mecklenburger Bucht. unpublished doctoral thesis, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald/Germany, 156 pp.]. The roughness length, in the case of absence of macro zoo-benthos and their structures, is parameterised basing on grain size too employing Soulsby [Soulsby, R.L., 1997: Dynamics of Marine Sands: a Manual for Practical Applications. London, Thomas Telford Publications. 249 pp.], Nielsen [Nielsen, P., 1983: Analytical determination of nearshore wave height variation due to refraction shoaling and friction. Coastal Engineering 7, 233–251.] and Yalin [Yalin, M.S., 1977: Mechanics of Sediment Transport. Pergamon Press, New York. 298 pp.]. No equivalent simple parameterisations for biologically caused bed roughness exist. Here, findings of Friedrichs [Friedrichs, M., 2004: Flow-induced effects of macro zoo-benthic structures on the near-bed sediment transport. Dissertation, Universität Rostock, 80 S.] and estimations by the DYNAS biologists group were combined in order to derive roughness lengths from abundance measurements of four previously selected key species which represent the originators of the dominating benthic structures at the sea floor in the south-western Baltic Sea. Critical shear stress velocity and bed roughness are known at few sample sites only. They were extrapolated into the larger investigation area using a proxy-target concept. The mean near bottom milieu (bathymetry, median grain size, salinity, oxygen) which was derived using results from numerical modelling serves as the proxy. Since the milieu parameters are measured at the sampling sites for which the target parameters have been determined, a combined hierarchical and supervised classification was employed to transfer the local knowledge into the unknown investigation area.     

混凝土浇注过程的非线性有限元分析

混凝土的浇注过程非常复杂,影响浇注质量的因素也很多,文中利用有限元软件ANSYS对混凝土的浇注过程和各种影响因素进行了模拟,对浇注过程中的水化热效应、节点位移与应力等问题进行了分析,为混凝土的施工提供参考。     

Road pricing and parking policy

The starting point of this paper is that the collection costs of urban road pricing have turned out to be unexpectedly high. A comparative cost analysis of the congestion charging system of London, Stockholm, Oslo and Singapore also shows that there are large collection cost differences. The most striking difference is between Oslo and London. Oslo, like Stockholm has the necessary, natural, qualities for a central city toll ring with a limited number of entrances; just 18 and 19 tollgates are required. For large historic cities like London with hundreds of inlets to the central city, tollgates at every entrance would involve high investment costs and be very obtrusive in the street scene. The problem is, however, that the present London charging system, with no tollgates, shows high running costs, ten times higher than in Oslo, in spite of the fact that the charged number of vehicles is the same in the two cities. This is a formidable obstacle to alleviating urban traffic congestion in many big cities.The charging technology could hopefully be developed, however, another approach is to develop and combine other measures including traffic regulation, parking policy and public transport subsidisation, which would be only second-best in a hypothetical situation where road pricing is without costs. This paper focuses on parking policy. Two strands of parking policy reform are discussed; fringe benefit taxation of free workplace parking which has recently been introduced in Sweden and a two-part tariff at parking meters, which is suggested as an extension of congestion charging to all day traffic within the central city.     

MPLS技术与MPLS QoS机制

MPLS(Multi-Protocol Label Switching)是一种新兴的标签交换技术。本文介绍了MPLS技术的发展以及MPLS网络构成与MPLS工作机制,详细说明了MPLS网络的特点。同时给出了基于MPLS下的QoS考虑方案,并对MPLS发展的前景和MPLS还需要解决的一些关键技术提出了自己的看法。     

Food supply mechanisms for cold-water corals along a continental shelf edge

In recent years it has been documented that deep-water coral reefs of the species Lophelia pertusa are a major benthic habitat in Norwegian waters. However, basic information about the biology and ecology of this species is still unknown. Lophelia live and thrive under special environmental conditions of which factors such as temperature, water depth, water movement and food supply are important. The present work explores the hypothesis that Lophelia forms reefs in places where the encounter rate of food particles is sufficiently high and stable over long periods of time for continuous growth. This is done by relating the distribution of reefs with the results of numerical ocean modelling.Numerical simulations have been performed with an idealized bottom topography similar to what is found outside parts of the Norwegian coast. In the simulations the model is first forced with an along slope jet and then with an idealized atmospheric low pressure. The model results show that the encounter rates between the particles and the water layer near the seabed are particularly high close to the shelf break. This may indicate that many Lophelia reefs are located along the shelf edges because the supply of food is particularly good in these areas.A sensitivity study of the particle supply in the area close to the seabed for increasing latitude has also been done. This shows that the Ekman transport in the benthic layer tends to create a steady supply of food for benthic organisms near the shelf edge away from the equator.     

LNG，船舶环保燃料新宠

如果我们对比蒙大拿州冰河国家公园历史和当前的照片，我们就可以轻易地发现冰川正在消融，海平面正在上升。目前人们普遍认为全球变暖是碳排放造成的恶果。2007年2月2日，联合国环境规划署发布了迄今为止关于气候变化最权威的科学报导。有九成的把握认为，矿物燃料的使用及其他人类活动导致了气候变化。