Directness as a key performance indicator for freight transport chains

From the perspective of a transport service buyer and at the abstraction level of material flows, all transports travel directly from product supplier to product customer. In reality, however, the directness of transport services depends on factors such as geography, available infrastructure, temporary conditions, shippers' qualitative preferences, the economy of and practical possibilities for consolidation and access to return flows. This work examines directness by structuring and elaborating upon the causes of freight transport detours and briefly analysing their effect. The article also includes a discussion about the prospects of capturing directness in a KPI, and how such a measure can be designed, measured, monitored and used, as well as a brief analysis of the consequences of using it for monitoring and controlling supply chain performance.     

牡绥铁路双丰隧道辅助坑道设计研究

双丰隧道是牡绥铁路最长的隧道和重点控制工程,其辅助坑道设置对隧道建设本身及牡绥铁路整体建设都具有重要的意义。隧道开工后因施工组织受客观条件影响,先后将设计的2座斜井由单车道变更为双车道;在2号斜井工区率先进入第三系泥岩后,开挖变形大,易发生涌水涌泥,施工受阻,通过对比研究斜井、迂回平导方案,推荐增加迂回平导辅助1、2号斜井工区施工;详细介绍斜井断面的拟定及新增迂回平导平、纵断面设计及优化和内轮廓拟定等,最终有效保证了隧道的施工安全和顺利贯通。     

Fast-charging station choice behavior among battery electric vehicle users

This study explores how battery electric vehicle users choose where to fast-charge their vehicles from a set of charging stations, as well as the distance by which they are generally willing to detour for fast-charging. The focus is on fast-charging events during trips that include just one fast-charge between origin and destination in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. Mixed logit models with and without a threshold effect for detour distance are applied to panel data extracted from a two-year field trial on battery electric vehicle usage in Japan. Findings from the mixed logit model with threshold show that private users are generally willing to detour up to about 1750 m on working days and 750 m on non-working days, while the distance is 500 m for commercial users on both working and non-working days. Users in general prefer to charge at stations requiring a shorter detour and use chargers located at gas stations, and are significantly affected by the remaining charge. Commercial users prefer to charge at stations encountered earlier along their paths, while only private users traveling on working days show such preference and they turn to prefer the stations encountered later when choosing a station in peak hours. Only private users traveling on working days show a strong preference for free charging. Commercial users tend to pay for charging at a station within 500 m detour distance. The fast charging station choice behavior is heterogeneous among users. These findings provide a basis for early planning of a public fast charging infrastructure.     

Optimization of mid-block pedestrian crossing network with discrete demands

In many cases, pedestrian crossing demands are distributed discretely along an arterial segment. Demand origins, destinations and crosswalks comprise a pedestrian crossing network. An integrated model for optimizing the quantity, locations and signal settings of mid-block crosswalks simultaneously is proposed to best trade-off the operational performances between pedestrians and vehicles. Pedestrian behavior of choosing crosswalks is captured under a discrete demand distribution. Detour distance and delay at signalized crosswalks are formulated as a measure of pedestrian crossing cost. Maximum bandwidths are modeled in analytical expressions as a measure of vehicular cost. To solve the proposed model, the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA II) based algorithm is designed and employed to obtain the Pareto frontier efficiently. From the numerical study, it is found that there exists an optimal number of mid-block crosswalks. Excess available crosswalks may make no contributions to improvement in pedestrian cost when the constraint of the minimum interval between crosswalks and vehicular cost are taken into account. Two-stage crosswalks are more favorable than one-stage ones for the benefits of both pedestrian and vehicles. The study results show promising properties of the proposed method to assist transportation engineers in properly designing mid-block crosswalks along a road segment.