Who is safe and who is at risk: a study of 20-year-record on accident total loss in different flags

The study examines 20-years of data on 36 world principal fleets and on worldfleets in general, analyses their developments, and particularly their safety records in terms of accidental total loss rates. This study confirms that the open-registry ships tend toward substandard ships. However, some open-registry countries' safety records are quite acceptable. It finds that the safety record of developing maritime countries as a group is better than that of developed maritime countries, of which some are worse than the world average.     

Characterization of incidents on an urban arterial road

The early warning of incidents on urban arterial roads in a congested city can reduce delay, accidents and pollutant emission. Freeway incident detection systems implemented in recent years may not be suitable for arterial incidents. Arterial incident detection is more difficult. The traffic flow on an arterial road is not conserved from the upstream end of a road link to the downstream end because urban traffic does turn in and out of side‐streets, car‐parks and local residences. Roadside friction such as kerbside parking and shopping traffic also tends to create apparent incidents which are in fact frequent and normal events. This paper develops a definition for an arterial incident and describes a case study on an arterial road in Melbourne, Australia. The study shows that detectors upstream of an incident are more useful for incident detection than downstream detectors. It also identifies occupancy and speed as the appropriate parameters to characterise and detect arterial incidents.     

机车的直接传动

长期以来,设计人员希望能简化电力机车动车的传动装置,尤其是希望去掉传动齿轮.为此对直接传动作了许多研究试验.牵引电动机去掉传动齿轮,必须按传动比发挥相应大的转矩.转矩大小对电机的体积有着决定性的影响.所以不是所有类型的电机都适用于直接传动.文章在永磁同步电机的基础上研究了全弹性悬挂和非弹性悬挂的机车直接传动.     

Adaptive traffic control system: Control strategy,prediction, resolution,and accuracy

Recent advances in traffic control methods have led to flexible control strategies for use in an adaptive traffic control system (ATCS). ATCS aims at controlling the imminent traffic, which is yet to arrive and hence not known perfectly. Therefore, volume prediction is an essential part. Associated with the prediction are two aspects: resolution and accuracy. Recent studies indicate a tradeoff between prediction resolution and accuracy: finer resolutions, larger errors. It is imperative to study the relationship and tradeoff between the control strategy, prediction resolution, and its associated error, which are crucial to the development of ATCS. This study investigates this relationship through an extensive simulation of scenarios in Hong Kong with a recently developed dynamic traffic control model, DISCO. Based on the Hong Kong scenarios conducted with DISCO, the major findings include: (i) the importance of resolution outweighs that of error; (ii) dynamic timing plans generally outperform time‐invariant timing plans; (iii) up to a certain extent, overestimated predictions lead to better results than underestimated predictions.     

Evaluation of automotive forward collision warning and collision avoidance algorithms

Collision warning/collision avoidance (CW/CA) systems target a major crash type and their development is a major thrust of the Intelligent Vehicle Initiative. They are a natural extension of adaptive cruise control systems already available on many car models. Many CW/CA algorithms have recently been proposed but the existing literature mainly focuses on algorithm development. Evaluations of these algorithms have been usually based on subjective ratings. The main contribution of this paper is the utilization of a naturalistic driving data set for the evaluation of CW/CA algorithms. We first collect manual driving data from the ICCFOT project, then process the data by Kalman smoothing, and finally identify 'threatening' and 'safe' data sets according to vehicle brake inputs and vehicle range behavior. Five CW/CA algorithms published in the literature are evaluated against the identified data sets. The performance of these algorithms is determined through a performance metric commonly used in signal detection and information retrieval under unbalanced data population.     

Liner alliances in the globalization era: a strategic tool for Asian container carriers

There has been an increased interest recently in alliances as successors of the large consortia that used to operate in the context of the conference system. Today, having become a common means and term of co-operation in a variety of other industries, alliances are posited as the response of the supply side of liner shipping to important changes on the demand side; alliances have, thus, become predominant in the most important routes for container cargoes. In recent years, however, the list of major container traffic generators and the list of major carriers of containerized cargoes have begun to contain more common entries, generally originating from the Asian region. Asia is, however, a large continent and the entrance of Asian carriers into liner shipping has not been simultaneous; the position, strategies and co-operation strategies of Asian companies have more differences than they share common features. Nevertheless, this paper suggests that alliances are a distinct form of co-operation in liner shipping and the empirical evidence based on a survey in the region supports this hypothesis. The similarity of attitudes of the major Asian container carriers vis a vis alliances is in this way revealing in terms of the range of motivations for participating in the alliance system in a globalized transport environment.     

Influence of injection parameters on the transition from PCCI combustion to diffusion combustion in a small-bore HSDI diesel engine

In this paper, the influence of injection parameters on the transition from Premixed Charge Combustion Ignition (PCCI) combustion to conventional diesel combustion was investigated in an optically accessible High-Speed Direct-Injection (HSDI) diesel engine using multiple injection strategies. The heat release characteristics were analyzed using incylinder pressure for different operating conditions. The whole cycle combustion process was visualized with a high-speed video camera by simultaneously capturing the natural flame luminosity from both the bottom of the optical piston and the side window, showing the three dimensional combustion structure within the combustion chamber. Eight operating conditions were selected to address the influences of injection pressure, injection timing, and fuel quantity of the first injection on the development of second injection combustion. For some cases with early first injection timing and a small fuel quantity, no liquid fuel is found when luminous flame points appear, which shows that premixed combustion occurs for these cases. However, with the increase of first injection fuel quantity and retardation of the first injection timing, the combustion mode transitions from PCCI combustion to diffusion flame combustion, with liquid fuel being injected into the hot flame. The observed combustion phenomena are mainly determined by the ambient temperature and pressure at the start of the second injection event. The start-of-injection ambient conditions are greatly influenced by the first injection timing, fuel quantity, and injection pressure. Small fuel quantity and early injection timing of the first injection event and high injection pressure are preferable for low sooting combustion.     

Association of reduced visibility with crash outcomes

Most of the information necessary for driving a vehicle is regarded as visual information. In spite of its importance, visibility conditions at the time of a crash are often not documented at a high level of detail. Past studies have not examined the quantified values of visibility and its association with crashes. The current study merged data collected from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with 2010–2012 Florida crash data. From the thousands of logged weather events compiled by the NOAA, the researchers isolated periods of normal visibility and comparable periods of reduced visibility in a matched-pairs study. The NOAA data provided real visibility score based on the spatiotemporal data of the crashes. Additionally, the crash data, obtained from Roadway Information Database (RID), contains several geometric and traffic variables that allow for effects of factors and visibility. The study aims to associate crash occurrence under different levels of visibility with factors included in the crash database by developing ordinal logistic regression. The intent is to observe how different visibility conditions contribute to a crash occurrence. The findings indicate that the likelihood of a crash increase during periods of low visibility, despite the tendency for less traffic and for lower speeds to prevail during these times. The findings of this study will add valuable knowledge to the realm of the impact of visibility in the way of using and designing appropriate countermeasures.     

Analysis of a Passive Sequential Hydraulic Damper for Vehicle Suspension

Vibration isolation characteristics of a sequential hydraulic damper, employing external pressure relief valves, are investigated via analytical means. The sequential hydraulic damper is modelled as a nonlinear dynamical system incorporating nonlinearities due to orifice flows, gas spring and pressure relief mechanisms. The damping characteristics of the sequential hydraulic damper, are compared to those of a constant orifice and a semi-active sequential damper, and discussed in view of their vibration isolation performance. It is established that the performance characteristics of the sequential hydraulic damper are similar to that of a semi-active sequential damper. A tuning methodology to achieve appropriate control of the resonant peak and effective vibration isolation is proposed. The shock and vibration isolation performance of the vehicle model employing a sequential damper are evaluated and compared to those of the vehicle model employing a constant orifice hydraulic damper. It is concluded that the vehicle ride performance can be improved considerably using an adequately tuned sequential damper.     

A Nonlinear Analysis of the Generic Types of Loss of Stability of the Steady State Motion of a Tractor-Semitrailer*

All different types of loss of stability which occur generically for a tractor semitrailer vehicle are studied when varying two parameters namely the speed V of the vehicle and the position d of the center of mass of the trailer. For a fixed value of d and varying V it turns out that only two cases either a divergence or a Hopf bifurcation can occur typically. By means of a nonlinear analysis the post-bifurcation behavior for both cases is treated showing that it is critical in both cases. This latter result means that the system is an imperfection sensitive one for which the calculation only of the linear stability limit, does not have very much practical meaning, because small perturbations of the system (changes of parameters) can lead to a drastic reduction of the critical speed. Our paper furthermore indicates how a nonlinear investigation of stability problems in vehicle dynamics with no restriction to the number of degrees of freedom of the system can be done in a straight forward manner.