Safety Management Evaluation in Bus and Coach Companies

Abstract

In recent years, different initiatives have been carried out to develop Safety Management System guides or standards for coach and bus companies. They all consist of a set of safety and management requirements to be followed by organizations. However, none of them offers a complete set of tools to evaluate the safety level of the company and find the main weak points in order to improve them. The INSIA (Automotive Research Institute of Madrid, Spain) has developed a complete model that includes not only a set of elements that determine the safety level of the company but also a set of indicators and criteria to evaluate these elements by a team of auditors. The model allows companies to measure their safety level, find the weakest points and propose improvement actions.     

Autonomous vehicle control systems for safe crossroads

This article presents a cooperative manoeuvre among three dual mode cars – vehicles equipped with sensors and actuators, and that can be driven either manually or autonomously. One vehicle is driven autonomously and the other two are driven manually. The main objective is to test two decision algorithms for priority conflict resolution at intersections so that a vehicle autonomously driven can take their own decision about crossing an intersection mingling with manually driven cars without the need for infrastructure modifications. To do this, the system needs the position, speeds, and turning intentions of the rest of the cars involved in the manoeuvre. This information is acquired via communications, but other methods are also viable, such as artificial vision. The idea of the experiments was to adjust the speed of the manually driven vehicles to force a situation where all three vehicles arrive at an intersection at the same time.     

Exchange of carbon by an upwelling filament off Cape Ghir (NW Africa)

We have studied the physicochemical and biological structure of a permanent filament off Cape Ghir (31°N) and estimated the transport of organic matter associated with it. The seaward filament exported coastal upwelled water, with low temperature and salinity and high organic matter, to the open ocean even in the absence of upwelling-favorable conditions. The estimated flux of excess organic carbon (the nonrefractory pool) expressed in annual basis yielded a value of 3.1×10⁹ kg C, from which 90% was transported as dissolved organic carbon. This flux represents about 63% of the average annual primary production for the region of study. We conclude that the net-offshore transport may contribute to the enrichment of offshore oligotrophic waters throughout the year, partly explaining the metabolic imbalance found in open ocean waters of the subtropical Northeast Atlantic.     

Accompanied versus Unaccompanied Transport in Short Sea Shipping between Spain and Italy: An Analysis from Transport Road Firms Perspective

Short sea shipping (SSS) is called to play a key role in ensuring sustainable mobility in the European context. In the past years several studies tried to define the SSS requirements and also to identify the SSS lines that were economically viable. However, no studies approach the profile of their users—the road transport firms—and the organizational patterns adopted by them, in order to gain a better understanding of this transport modality. This research, on the basis of a sample of 81 international road transport firms that use SSS between Spain and Italy, analyses the profile of these firms and certain elements inherent to their relationship with the shipping firms, according to the two modalities of organizing their SSS transport operations: accompanied versus unaccompanied.     

An analysis of the Spanish high capacity road network criticality

The analysis of complex networks has been carried out in different fields using an ample variety of method and concepts. Recently, in the general literature of regional economics, the concepts of resilience, connectivity, vulnerability and criticality have been gaining their momentum. The aim of this paper is to provide an analytical framework, using well-known accessibility indicators, in order to calculate the critical links or road sections of the Spanish high-capacity road network. Our analysis will be based on approximately four hundred sections that will be classified in five different groups according to their criticality degree in the whole network. Our analysis will be complemented with the comparison of the results obtained in five different scenarios, namely the average criticality using the effects on the whole country, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Pontevedra. Furthermore, the paper will also analyze what kind of intrinsic characteristics of the sections favor or not the links’ criticality using a method based on a classification and regression tree. This analysis is crucial to understand other important concepts that are recently being studied in network and spatial economics, like, for example, resilience and vulnerability. It is concluded that the number of relations or routes, being a trunk or not, the road density and the time to Madrid capital play an important role in the criticality of the roads section in the high capacity road network.     

Air itinerary shares estimation using multinomial logit models

ABSTRACT

The main goal of this study is the development of an aggregate air itinerary market share model. In order to achieve this, multinomial logit models are applied to distribute the city-pair passenger demand across the available itineraries. The models are developed at an aggregate level using open-source booking data for a large group of city-pairs within the US air transport system. Although there is a growing trend in the use of discrete choice models in the aviation industry, existing air itinerary share models are mostly focused on supporting carrier decision-making. Consequently, those studies define itineraries at a more disaggregate level using variables describing airlines and time preferences. In this study, we define itineraries at a more aggregate level, i.e. as a combination of flight segments between an origin and destination, without further insight into service preferences. Although results show some potential for this approach, there are challenges associated with prediction performance and computational intensity.     

Blood Pressure Change in Intrafascicular Vagal Activities

Baroreflex plays a significant role in modulating blood pressure for the human body.It is known that activation of the vagal nerve related to baroreflex can lea...     

Marketing management at the world's major ports

Recent technological developments in maritime transport, particularly in container shipping and larger vessels, are having major repercussions at ports the world over. The latest wave of innovations has increased the level of competition in maritime transport, in particular in port activities. Shippers have many more alternatives available, something that tends to increase the hinterland of each port, precisely by reducing captive hinterlands. Ports are now generally moving towards formulas in which private initiative has a bigger role to play. Increases in competition combined with growth in private initiatives highlight the usefulness of marketing tools in two ways. Externally, because they help to achieve throughputs from remote points of origin and destination, and internally, by aiding the proper coordination of business and organizational activity at a commercial port. The present paper is a transversal study of the current situation of marketing and quality tools at major ports, including the opinions of a range of port commercial and marketing managers. We have also tried to describe the differentiated groups to be found at ports, as a useful methodology for identifying the nearest competition or ports with similar characteristics.     

Influence of repeated and delayed excitations in combined subspace identification

The application of combined subspace identification methods to land vehicles would allow the modal parameters of the vehicle to be obtained, while it is in operation, thus improving the vehicle modal characterisation. However, when a land vehicle is circulating through a straight line, the excitations applied to the different axles are identical among them but with a certain time delay. The presence of repeated excitations with different time delays implies that the past and future subspaces include common vectors that may lead to problems in the application of the method. To analyse its influence, an index called the reduction coefficient resulting from excitations (RCE) has been defined. RCE evaluates the amount of information eliminated in the oblique projection due to the effect of repeated excitations. The use of RCE enables the selection of analysis parameters, particularly the sampling frequency, the signals grouping and some specific parameters of the subspace identification methods.     

Indirect estimation of interregional freight flows with a real-valued genetic algorithm

Transportation - This paper introduces a method for estimating the interregional transportation of certain commodities in those cases where the commodity flows are not readily available and only...