城市轨道交通资产管理初探

分析我国城市轨道交通资产管理的现状,认为城市轨道交通的发展日益迅速,资产管理的效果直接影响了城市轨道交通企业的效益.通过介绍国际上应用广泛的资产管理标准,并借鉴香港地铁的成功经验,阐明先进、适用的资产管理方式应该符合PAS55-1规范要求,立足于资产的整个寿命周期,采用基于风险的管理政策,既强调计划又因资产的表现而适当调整.     

Effects of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative on the wine import logistics of China

China’s Belt and Road (BR) initiative is expected to facilitate international trade between the countries involved. In this study, we review the special requirements of wine logistics and the market growth potential of wine consumption in China. A model minimizing generalized logistical costs is developed and applied to wine imports in China, so that the best candidate cities in which to locate transport gateways and distribution centers can be identified. Our analysis suggests that the most preferred gateways are Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong, which all have similar delivery costs. In comparison, Beijing and Chongqing have much higher delivery costs, mainly because they do not have good access to marine transport and/or efficient domestic distribution networks. For long-distance intercontinental transport of large volumes of wine, marine shipping remains the only viable delivery mode. However, wine distribution within China extensively uses air, road, and water transport. Therefore, cities with excellent multi-modal transport services are better positioned to become wine logistics gateways. Our study also highlights the importance of value-added services and good government support, which are important factors that influence distribution costs and quality.     

Tradeoffs among free-flow speed, capacity, cost, and environmental footprint in highway design

This paper investigates differentiated design standards as a source of capacity additions that are more affordable and have smaller aesthetic and environmental impacts than modern expressways. We consider several tradeoffs, including narrow versus wide lanes and shoulders on an expressway of a given total width, and high-speed expressway versus lower-speed arterial. We quantify the situations in which off-peak traffic is sufficiently great to make it worthwhile to spend more on construction, or to give up some capacity, in order to provide very high off-peak speeds even if peak speeds are limited by congestion. We also consider the implications of differing accident rates. The results support expanding the range of highway designs that are considered when adding capacity to ameliorate urban road congestion.     

The price of uncertainty in pavement infrastructure management planning: An integer programming approach

Currently there is a true dichotomy in the pavement maintenance and rehabilitation (M&R) literature. On the one hand, there are integer programming-based models that assume that parameters are deterministically known. On the other extreme, there are stochastic models, with the most popular class being based on the theory of Markov decision processes that are able to account for various sources of uncertainties observed in the real-world. In this paper, we present an integer programming-based alternative to account for these uncertainties. A critical feature of the proposed models is that they provide – a priori – probabilistic guarantees that the prescribed M&R decisions would result in pavement condition scores that are above their critical service levels, using minimal assumptions regarding the sources of uncertainty. By construction of the models, we can easily determine the additional budget requirements when additional sources of uncertainty are considered, starting from a fully deterministic model. We have coined this additional budget requirement the price of uncertainty to distinguish from previous related work where additional budget requirements were studied due to parameter uncertainties in stochastic models. A numerical case study presents valuable insights into the price of uncertainty and shows that it can be large.     

Probabilistic Modeling of Erroneous Human Response to In-Vehicle Route Guidance Systems: A First Look

An integral component of (in-vehicle) navigation systems is the determination of optimal routes to the desired destination. An implicit assumption in the underlying algorithms is that people do not make mistakes when following the prescribed routes. This is, however, not always consistent with reality, especially when driving in unfamiliar environments. This article presents a first look at the possibility of mistakes when driving. This possibility is formalized in a Markov decision process. It is demonstrated that quite paradoxical situations can occur when accounting for mistakes. As the most interesting—but perhaps extreme—example, we have shown that under certain conditions, it is no longer optimal to recommend drivers to take the shortest route. Instead, a longer route (in certain cases even the longest!) becomes optimal. Numerical results are provided throughout the article to reveal the fundamental properties of this problem.     

The implications of the re-establishment of direct links across the Taiwan Strait on the aviation industries in Greater China

This paper investigates the economic implications of the liberalization of air transportation across the Taiwan Strait to the region's aviation industries. Our analysis suggests that (1) liberalization has brought substantial benefits to airports and airlines in Mainland China and Taiwan. Negative impacts to Hong Kong are largely compensated by traffic increase in routes linking Mainland China. (2) In general, Taiwanese airports and airlines have benefited more from liberalization compared to airports and airlines on the mainland and Hong Kong. Such asymmetric effect is due to the larger size of the Mainland Chinese aviation market, which allows Taiwanese airlines to exploit network-related benefits. (3) Our investigation suggests that foreign hub carriers and medium sized Chinese airports will benefit most from China's future liberalizations.     

The environmental costs and economic implications of container shipping on the Northern Sea Route

The Northern Sea Route (NSR) has tremendous potential for ocean shipping between Europe and Asia due to the savings from shorter transit time and distance. However, the Arctic area is environmentally vulnerable and thus there is a trade-off between NSR’s impacts on environment vs. its economic benefits, especially when compared with the traditional route, such as through the Suez Canal Route (SCR). This study estimates the market shares of different transport modes and alternative shipping routes for the container transport market between Europe and Asia, and the resulting environmental costs. Our result suggests that NSR can be a viable option under the status quo. However, its environmental costs tend to be higher than SCR due to small ship size and low load factor in the present, thus the development of NSR would lead to worse environment outcomes. If these issues can be resolved, NSR can benefit from lower operational and environmental costs, which will lead to higher market share and social welfare. Otherwise, increased use of NSR may lead to higher total environment costs than the status quo.     

Port system evolution – the emergence of second-tier hubs

Some evidence has emerged of second-tier hubs inserting themselves between hubs and feeder ports, producing a new hierarchy of port networks. This article aims to establish the dynamics of this process based on illustrative cases in Asia, South America, and Europe. Findings reveal spatial factors to include a cluster of small ports with minimal sailing distance within a given range, suitable channel and berth depth, and ideally high capacity inland links. From the economic perspective, demand-side factors include a local captive market and aggregated demand to be captured from other ports, while supply-side factors include diseconomies of scale at traditional hubs, an increase in direct services, an increase in large feeder vessels calling from first-tier hubs which are then transhipped to smaller feeders for serving local ports, and an increase in overland servicing of local smaller ports. From a strategic perspective, vertical and horizontal integration in the shipping sector has produced extensive network economies, whereby shipping lines look to create group-specific port hierarchies, enhanced in the presence of aggressive management strategies and supportive policies. This finding suggests that proactive port stakeholders can in certain circumstances seize the opportunity to capture this role within their port range.     

Design analysis and comparison between standard and rotary porting systems for IC engine

Many porting systems for internal combustion engines have been tried and tested over the years, however the basic spring actuated poppet valve system has prevailed over the last century. In the goal to lower engine output parasitic losses, a simple rotary valve porting system design is proposed and analyzed. The proposed design concept takes into consideration and combines all the prominent advantages of many ealier mutlitiple design variations over the past century. The inherent primary advantage of such a rotary porting system is the elimination of reciprocating components, thus lowering vibration, and removal of highly stiff springs which contribute to considerable system power loss. Comparable sized 3-D representations of both systems are constructed in CAD (Computer Aided Design) software in order to run mechanical and fluid simulations to validate the efficiency advantage of a rotary valve porting system. Using Pro/Engineer Mechanism Dynamics module, the minimum torque required to actuate both systems at 2000 rpm and 3000 rpm is determined. Fluid simulations are performed using a commercial software CFDesign V10. Volumetric flow rates are compared during the intake stroke as well as turbulence intensity factors which characterizes a systems ability to properly mix the Air/Fuel mixture and the combustion efficiency. Some possible improvement on the rotary geometry is suggested.     

Modelling port choice in an uncertain environment

Port choice is an important issue to be investigated to ensure the effective integration of container supply chains and the sustainable development of regional economy. The selection of appropriate ports to facilitate shipping activities and international trade is crucial for many stakeholders, including shipping lines, port administrators, cargo shippers and national governments. The task is essentially a process of multiple criterion decision-making (MCDM) under uncertainty, requiring analysts to derive rational decisions from uncertain and incomplete data related to different quantitative and qualitative determinants. This paper aims at proposing a new conceptual port choice method by explaining the role fuzzy logic in evidential reasoning in a complementary way, in which various forms of raw data (either objective or subjective) collected to evaluate port performance can first be converted into and presented as fuzzy grades defined using linguistics terms with degrees of belief (DoBs) and second be combined using evidential reasoning to produce a port choice preference score. The method is applied to analyse the selection of major Northeast Asian (NEA) container ports from a shipping line’s perspective. The outcome, a port choice preference score, is calculated using evidential reasoning to directly synthesize the true estimation of the port with respect to each criterion and therefore, unlike a relative ranking index, keeps the ‘goodness’ of port evaluation, capable of benchmarking a specific port’s performance and monitoring the increase of its competitiveness in a longitude study with respect to an individual criterion or all the criteria as a whole.