Leadership and Commitment in the Royal Navy ☆

What is proposed here is a relatively simple procedure by which a fleet manager may select the best mix of ships to provide a given transport service. The method is confined to non-liner trades and assumes the availability of more than enough suitable ships. It further assumes that unneeded ships can be placed in idle status (or returned to owner if chartered in) without penalty.

The objective of the procedure is to select the mix of available ships and sea speeds that can perform the required service at maximum profitability to the owner.     

Four decades of changing transport policy in Santiago,Chile

During the last forty years, Santiago has experienced a series of drastic changes in public transport policies. These changes have ranged widely, from total deregulation to processes that concentrated the management of public transport within the hands of the public sector.     

Multi-agent simulation of adoption of alternative fuels

We have formalized and parameterized a model for the production of six transport fuels and six fuels blends from six feedstocks through 13 different production chains, and their adoption of by 11 distinct subpopulations of motorists. The motorists are represented by agents that use heuristics to choose a fuel on the basis of three attributes and a social feedback loop. Adoption of specific fuels is mostly driven by price differences, but other factors play a role if prices are similar. The results are not always intuitive and do not always show up immediately. We find that sustained combinations of interventions are required to bring about a transition away from petrol or diesel. Adoption of alternative fuels was most often confined to niche markets with a share of 5% or lower. Only in a single case was a complete fuel transition observed.     

无车日活动问答

过去的几十年里,人们一直围绕小汽车出行建造城市。为了方便车辆通行,占用了人行道路;为了建设道路基础设施,破坏了城市;在车祸中丧生的人数每年递增;不断制造出来的噪声和废气污染着我们的城市。而这些只是小汽车对社会所造成的一部分影响。     

The funding of hierarchical railway development in China

Transport networks are hierarchal in essence. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the financing structure and the hierarchal evolution of railway network development, using the case of China. Although privatization and corporatization in transport provision have been trends in some parts of the world, the national government is still the main body responsible for railway development in many countries. Among these countries, China and India are the only two that include the Ministry of Railways (MOR). In India, the entire country's railways are clearly defined as public services provided and managed by the MOR. In China, railways have been corporatized; yet, the MOR and the National Railway Corporation are still widely regarded as a single body that has monopolistic power over almost all railway systems at the national and regional levels in both infrastructure development and operation.     

Robust flight-to-gate assignment using flight presence probabilities

In this paper we present a novel method to improve the robustness of solutions to the Flight-to-Gate Assignment Problem (FGAP), with the aim to reduce the need for gate re-planning due to unpredicted flight schedule disturbances in the daily operations at an airport. We propose an approach in which the deterministic gate constraints are replaced by stochastic gate constraints that incorporate the inherent stochastic flight delays in such a way so as to ensure that the expected gate conflict probability of two flights assigned to the same gate at the same time does not exceed a user-specified value. The novel approach is integrated into an existing multiple time slot FGAP model that relies on a binary integer programming formulation and is tested using real-life data pertaining to Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. The results confirm that the proposed approach holds out great promise to improve the robustness of the FGAP solutions.     

Port competition in Latin America and the Caribbean: the role of concessions and competition policy

Appropriate port regulation and competitive forces tend to be related to higher levels of operational and economic performance of ports. From a policy-making perspective, pursuing efficiency and securing competition in ports to reach a level playing field is a two-step process requiring (1) ex-ante regulations to set the rules that maximize the competition for the market, especially when the policy objective is to attract private operations to ports on competitive concession processes and (2) ex-post competition policy to monitor and preserve competition in the market. This paper studies port regulation in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) from a competition perspective, analyzing both ex-ante and ex-post policies implemented in the region. The analysis reveals that the competitive environment in LAC is low, giving room for possible anticompetitive practices in the LAC port sector. Since the end of the 1990s, approximately 80% of container terminals in the region were granted to only five companies. Chile and Mexico have been found to be the best practices in the region, with better conditions assuring robust competition in the market. The main policy implication from this analysis is the need for a stronger involvement of antitrust agencies throughout the port concession processes.