An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Beach Management in the Catalan Coast (North-Western Mediterranean)

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of beach management in the Catalan coast (NW Mediterranean) by introducing and integrating results from different partial projects. They analyzed the legal, political, and administrative framework of beach management, the quality tools available, the practices of management, the processes of beach use, and beach waste/litter dynamics. The information obtained served to create a new beach management tool referred to as the Beach Quality Index, which was developed by an interdisciplinary team of academics from the natural/physical sciences and social sciences that worked together during the course of four years. Information obtained from users and key stakeholders served to create the index. The study demonstrated that as a consequence of the shortcomings in the legal and administrative system as well as inadequate practices of beach managers, beach management in the area experiences coordination problems, insufficient information and lack of proactive management, pollution, and in general problems associated with the satisfaction of short-term user demands.     

船用液控蝶阀节流调速系统的数字仿真(英文)

Hydraulic butterfly valves have been widely applied in marine engineering because of their large switching torque, low pressure loss and suitability for large and medium diameter pipelines. Due to control problems resulting from switching angular speeds of the hydraulic butterfly valve, a throttle-governing control mode has been widely adopted, and detailed analysis has been carried out worldwide on the structural principle concerning speed-regulation and the load torque on the shaft while opening or closing a hydraulic butterfly valve. However relevant reports have yet been published on the change law, the error and the influencing factors of the rotational angular velocity of the hydraulic butterfly valve while opening and closing. In this article, research was based on some common specifications of a hydraulic butterfly valve with a symmetrical valve flap existing in a marine environment. The throttle governing system supplied by the accumulator to achieve the switching of the hydraulic control valve was adopted, and the mathematical models of the system were established in the actual conditions while the numerical simulations took place. The simulation results and analysis show that the rotational angular velocity and the error of the hydraulic butterfly valve while switching is influenced greatly by the drainage amount of the accumulator, resulting in pressure loss in the pipeline, the temperature of hydraulic medium and the load of the hydraulic butterfly valve. The simulation results and analysis provide a theoretical basis for the choice of the total capacity of the accumulator and pipeline diameters in a throttle governing system with a hydraulic butterfly valve. It also determines the type and specification of the hydraulic butterfly valve and the design of motion parameters of the transported fluid.     

The two-dimensional study of the interaction between liquid loshing and elastic structures

Sloshing phenomenon in the liquid cargo carriers has caught the attention of researchers as the interaction between the sloshing waves and structure is one of the key point and difficulty in the study of sloshing. In this paper, we captured the free surface with a volume of fluid (VOF) method and then calculated the motions and responses of the structure by adopting the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations for the whole fluid domain. With the use of user defined functions (UDF) in Fluent, the interaction between fluid and structure was then simulated. As a reasonable simplification, the authors studied the response of a single cantilever in a tank under sloshing loads; Further study should pay more attention to the mechanisms of interaction between sloshing waves and elastic structures.     

Research of scalability of the belt-type sensor networks

For the large-scale application requirements of the belt-type networks, the mathematical modeling as well as quantitative analysis for the scalability of the network based on average path length is completed in this paper, and the theorem for the scale scalability of the belt-type networks is derived. The theorem provides a calculation formula for the upper limit of node scale theory of the belt-type networks and a calculation formula for the upper limit of single node load theory.     

Computing the cost of traffic congestion: a microsimulation exercise of the City of Antofagasta,Chile

Abstract

This paper computes the cost of traffic congestion in the city of Antofagasta in Chile. A microsimulation is implemented where all the agents of the system travel across the transport network. The congestion cost is computed through the aggregation of the opportunity cost of people waiting within the transport system, as a consequence of traffic congestion. Monte Carlo experiments produced an approximated congestion cost of US$1.02 million during a typical working day. Moreover, the simulation provides useful information about the average traveling time for the 14 districts of the city.     

Estimation of a route choice model for urban public transport using smart card data

This paper describes a logit model of route choice for urban public transport and explains how the archived data from a smart card-based fare payment system can be used for the choice set generation and model estimation. It demonstrates the feasibility and simplicity of applying a trip-chaining method to infer passenger journeys from smart card transactions data. Not only origins and destinations of passenger journeys can be inferred but also the interchanges between the segments of a linked journey can be recognised. The attributes of the corresponding routes, such as in-vehicle travel time, transfer walking time and to get from alighting stop to trip destination, the need to change, and the time headway of the first transportation line, can be determined by the combination of smart card data with other data sources, such as a street map and timetable. The smart card data represent a large volume of revealed preference data that allows travellers' behaviour to be modelled with higher accuracy than by using traditional survey data. A multinomial route choice model is proposed and estimated by the maximum likelihood method, using urban public transport in ?ilina, the Slovak Republic, as a case study     

Book Review: Airline Marketing and Management

Abstract

Public transport policy in the Madrid Metropolitan Area is often deemed as a success. In 1985, an important reform was carried out in order to create a new administrative authority to coordinate all public transport modes and establish a single fare for all of them. This reform prompted a huge growth in public transport usage, even though it reduced the funding coverage ratio of the transport system. Since then, Madrid’s public transport system has been undergoing an increasing level of subsidization, which might jeopardize the financial viability of the city public transport system in the future. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the evolution of the public transport funding policy in Madrid in recent years. We found that the increasing level of subsidy can hardly be explained on the basis of equity issues. Moreover, we claim that there is still room for a funding policy that makes the efficiency of the system compatible with its financial sustainability.     

Research of order allocation model based on cloud and hybrid genetic algorithm under ecommerce environment

For massive order allocation problem of the third party logistics (TPL) in ecommerce, this paper proposes a general order allocation model based on cloud architecture and hybrid genetic algorithm (GA), implementing cloud deployable MapReduce (MR) code to parallelize allocation process, using heuristic rule to fix illegal chromosome during encoding process and adopting mixed integer programming (MIP) as fitness function to guarantee rationality of chromosome fitness. The simulation experiment shows that in mass processing of orders, the model performance in a multi-server cluster environment is remarkable superior to that in stand-alone environment. This model can be directly applied to cloud based logistics information platform (LIP) in near future, implementing fast auto-allocation for massive concurrent orders, with great application value.     

Longer-term changes in mode choice decisions in Chennai: a comparison between cross-sectional and dynamic models

The rapid and continuing changes in travel and mobility needs in India over the last decade necessitates the development and use of dynamic models for travel demand forecasting rather than cross-sectional models. In this context, this paper investigates mode choice dynamics among workers in Chennai city, India over a period of five years (1999–2004). Dynamics in mode choice is captured at four levels: exogenous variable change, state-dependence, changes in users’ sensitivity to attributes, and unobserved error terms. The results show that the dynamic models provide a substantial improvement (of over 500 log-likelihood points and ρ² increases from 44% to 68%) over the cross-sectional model. The performance was compared using two illustrative policy scenarios with important methodological and practical implications. The results indicate that cross-sectional models tend to provide inflated estimates of potential improvement measures. Improving the Level of Service (LOS) alone will not produce the anticipated benefits to transit agencies, as it fails to overcome the persistent inertia captured in the state-dependence factors. The results and models have important applications in the context of growing motorization and congestion management in developing countries.

The transition to electric bikes in China: history and key reasons for rapid growth

Annual electric bike (e-bike) sales in China grew from 40,000 in 1998 to 10 million in 2005. This rapid transition from human-powered bicycles, buses and gasoline-powered scooters to an all-electric vehicle/fuel technology system is special in the evolution of transportation technology and, thus far, unique to China. We examine how and why e-bikes developed so quickly in China with particular focus on the key technical, economic, and political factors involved. This case study provides important insights to policy makers in China and abroad on how timely regulatory policy can change the purchase choice of millions and create a new mode of transportation. These lessons are especially important to China as it embarks on a large-scale transition to personal vehicles, but also to other countries seeking more sustainable forms of transportation.