Law enforcement in the ocean

The combating of the present great variety of criminal activities occurring at sea mainly involves measures to be taken on land, in particular in ports.However, also actual enforcement at sea will continue to play an essential (complementary) role. This article surveys the rules of international law governing law enforcement measures at sea. These rules are complex, because distinctions have to be made between the various jurisdictional zones at sea and between the positions of the flag state, the coastal state and the port state. Traditionally, ships in the high seas (all sea areas beyond a narrow band of territorial sea) were under the exclusive jurisdiction of the flag state. In an increasing number of situations, the coastal state now has law enforcement authority over foreign ships in expanded areas up to 200 nautical miles offshore. But apart from these situations, flag state jurisdiction still prevails beyond the territorial sea. This makes effective law enforcement difficult. In practice, many obstacles can be overcome by making more effective use of the authority of the port state, and by concluding new international agreements providing for specific enforcement systems.     

An analysis of the pricing system in the Greek-Italian coastal routes

Price discrimination is practiced by oligopolistic coastal shipping companies in the 'unregulated' Greece-Italy routes in the year 2002. Investigation has been carried out 'per route'—in a doctoral thesis—instead of 'per market' which was the so-far erroneous approach of shipping economists. This is so for a host of differentiating factors play a considerable and non-negligible role (like geography, distance, demand, seasonality and others). Service—and price-discrimination—in coastal shipping is affected also by the predetermined ship design which thus is a special feature—but not exclusively—in coastal shipping. Companies in the Adriatic Sea try to extract the greater possible value of the user's willingness to pay, peak and off-peak, group and ungrouped, for social groups (clubs, families and students). Marketing and economics interfere in a complicated—far from the nice world of theory—situation, where maximization of revenue and profit, capacity utilization, intense seasonality and high fixed cost (common and joint costs as well) are a few of the factors that interplay. This paper can be considered as a case study for applied pricing. Excess capacity is also a strategic factor affecting pricing. It is our opinion that the analysis here gives for the first time a complete theoretical and practical account—based on the price lists of the companies—of the pricing policy of the ferry boats running in the Adriatic Sea belonging to coastal shipping companies connecting Italy with Greece and Greece with the European Union (EU). We believe this work to be useful for maritime Europe.     

大功率多流制机车牵引变流器的比较

欧洲铁路的显著特点是供电电流制式范围较广.为使电力机车运行灵活且在不同制式交界处暂停时间较短,有必要使用多流制机车.比较了多流制变流器的各种方案,并介绍了基于最新的大功率IGBT技术的一种很有价值的方案.     

An introduction to airport APM systems

The purpose of this paper is to provide an introduction to the nature and purpose of airport automated people mover (APM) systems. Our objective is to provide a convenient research tool for persons seeking an introduction to the airport APM industry. Included are illustrations of typical system designs; a listing of existing airport APM systems, including a tabular presentation of selected data; an organization and discussion of the history and evolution of the existing systems; and a status report on current developments in the APM industry.     

Grounding experiments on soft bottoms

To verify a theoretical analysis procedure for calculation of the hull girder response of ships running aground, a series of large-scale ship grounding experiments was performed on an artificial island made of engineered fill. The tests were conducted by running a condemned fishing vessel up on selected beaches of the island with velocities ranging between 2m/s and 5.5m/s. During the tests, surge, heave, and pitch accelerations were measured and also the deformations of the beach and the ship bow. Based on these accelerations, rigid body velocities and motions were determined. The forces arising from the interaction between the bow of the vessel and the seabed were determined by solving the equations of motions. This article describes the analysis of the measured results and a comparison of the results from the full-scale measurements with results from a recently developed analysis procedure for grounding on soft bottoms. Presented at the International Conference on Technology for Marine Environment Preservation (MARIENV '95), Tokyo, Japan, September 24–29, 1995.     

The effects of marine cargo delays in law and commerce

With the development of door-to-door intermodal services and the advent of just-in-time supply systems, punctual delivery of cargoes is more than ever a priority both for shippers and for shipowners. This paper is about the incidence of delay in transportation, particularly in the marine mode, and its legal and commercial consequences.

The fundamental legal obligations of marine carriers have always included delivery with dispatch. Thus the law would seem to support the commercial expectations of shippers for reliable performance. The authors discuss the nature of these obligations, investigate their adequacy under modern conditions of trade and report on a survey of Canadian shippers and consignees.

The authors conclude that there appears to be a divergence in the toleration of delay, but that few of the Canadian companies suffering unacceptable delays received, or even sought, financial compensation and none of them planned to do more. The authors speculate about their reasons for absorbing the losses incurred through unacceptable delays. The evidence from the survey is that shippers, in spite of their dissatisfaction with the resolution or outcome of incidents of unacceptable delay, are loath to seek compensation through legal means, but instead prefer to resort to a range of commercial actions.     

Causes of casualties and the regulation of occupational health and safety in the shipping industry

The aim of this paper is to investigate maritime safety from an occupational hazards perspective as opposed to a maritime casualty perspective. It is recognised that safety in shipping should encompass casualties arising from accidents occurring in the course of performing normal seafaring duties, not just those arising from technical defects or maritime disasters. The paper discusses an investigation involving a survey of 19 flag states and two detailed studies of records kept at the Hong Kong and Singapore maritime administrations. The results indicate that occupational accidents account for a significant proportion of fatalities at sea. The statistics presented specify the ship types that are most at risk, as well as the types of occupational hazards that can most frequently lead to accidents and fatalities. The results of this study indicate voids in the process of investigating fatalities that relate to occupational accidents. These results also indicate inadequate investigation of events and causes. The creation of a database of such information could potentially be used for the development of appropriate regulations that could prevent fatal and non-fatal occupational accidents through regulatory processes.     

Sliding mode robust fault-tolerant control for uncertain systems with time delay

Considering the modeling uncertainties and external disturbance, a kind of sliding mode robust H∞fault-tolerant control method for time delay system with actuator fault is proposed. The upper-bound of the uncertainties is considered as a known constant, while the upper-bound of the actuator fault is unknown. A sufficient condition for the existence of an integral sliding mode dynamics is given in terms of linear matrix inequality(LMI). A novel adaptive law is given to estimate the unknown upper-bound of faults. On this basis, a type of sliding mode robust H∞fault-tolerant control law is designed to guarantee the asymptotic stability and the H_∞ performance index of the system. Finally, the simulation on quad-rotor semi-physical platform demonstrates the reliability and validity of the method.     

Handling Capabilities of Vehicles in Emergencies Using Coordinated AFS and ARMC Systems

In this paper, an advanced control technique that can be implemented in hard emergency situations of vehicles is introduced. This technique suggests integration between Active Front Steering (AFS) and Active Roll Moment Control (ARMC) systems in order to enhance the vehicle controllability. For this purpose, the AFS system applies a robust sliding mode controller (SMC) that is designed to influence the steering input of the driver by adding a correction steering angle for maintaining the vehicle yaw rate under control all the time. The AFS system is then called active-correction steering control. The ARMC system is designed to differentiate the front and rear axles' vertical suspension forces in order to alter the vehicle yaw rate and to eliminate the vehicle roll motion as well. Moreover, the operation of the SMC is based on tracking the behavior of a nonlinear 2-wheel model of 2-DOF used as a reference model. The 2-wheel model incorporates real tire characteristics, which can be inferred by the use of trained neural networks. The results clearly demonstrate the enhanced characteristics of the proposed control technique. The SMC with the assistance of the ARMC provides less correction of the steering angle and accordingly reduces the possibility of occurrence of the saturation phenomenon that is likely to take place in the operation of the SMC systems.