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As the intensity of natural disasters increases, there is a need to develop policies and procedures to assist various agencies with moving aid to affected areas. One of the biggest limitations to this process is damage to transportation networks, in particular waterways. To keep waterways safe, aids to navigation (ATONs) are placed in various areas to guide mariners and ships to their final destination. If the ATONs are damaged, then the waterways are left unsafe, making it difficult to move supplies and recover from a disaster. The aim of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of pre‐positioning strategies for port recovery in response to a natural disaster.

A stochastic facility location model is presented to determine where teams and commodities should be pre‐positioned in order to maximize the number of ATONs repaired, given a constraint on response time. The first stage decisions focus on determining the location of resources. The second stage decisions consist of the distribution of supplies and teams to affected areas.

Results show the benefit of pre‐positioning and the value of coordination toward the responsiveness of restoring waterways. Furthermore, the relationship between resources, repair time, and response is characterized.

There has been extensive work addressing pre‐positioning as it relates to responding to the needs of populations affected by disasters. However, little has been done to explore pre‐positioning in the context of business recovery from severe weather events.

This chapter examines the systems used to collect data on the long-distance movement of freight by road for modelling, market research and other purposes. It begins by listing the features of an ideal long-distance freight data set that would fully meet the needs of policy makers, business analysts, academic researchers and freight operators. It then reviews the existing data-collection systems in Europe, highlighting their shortcomings and how they might be overcome. The third section analyses the strengths and limitations of several alternative approaches to collecting and analysing road freight data, some of which are at an early stage of development.

This paper provides an extensive review of surveys and data-collection programmes focused on urban goods movement (UGM). Surveys investigating passenger urban travel have a decades-long tradition. The same is not true for UGM. The first specific UGM surveys appeared about 10 years ago in response to the rapid growth of car traffic, congestion, pollution and lack of space. Most of the time, these surveys have been carried out to resolve specific, local problems concerning traffic. Only a few of them have taken a global approach to urban logistics by including all logistics operators (own-account and carriers), all delivery vehicles (heavy and light vehicles), all deliveries and pickups (from express to full payload) and an entire metropolitan area and surroundings. Due to various European programmes, an inventory has been created to analyse urban goods data collection according to spatial level and methodology of capture. With this inventory, European urban freight indicators can be described, along with the units in which they are measured and their purposes. The relevance of urban goods transport surveys lies in their capacity to give decision-makers an account of urban freight transport functioning, ratios and data, so as to help in formulating planning, regulation and forecasting. It appears that focusing on the movement (delivery/pick-up), as the unit of analysis in establishment-driver surveys is the most efficient approach to describe the generation of vehicular flow in the city. This fact is revealed in the French UGM surveys, which take into account the complexity of urban logistics.

The purpose of this study is to analyze trust perceptions between farmers and traders from a dyadic context in developing countries using mixed-method with a specific focus on fresh and dry commodities under contracted and non-contracted markets.

A mixed approach was employed. Cross-sectional data were collected from 202 farmers and 188 traders using questionnaires and an interview guide. The Mann–Whitney test was used to assess differences in trust perception. Differences in the excerpts were assessed through content analysis.

Results show differences in perception of trust between farmers and traders on integrity, benevolence and competence in marketing fresh and dry commodities. No detectable differences in trust perception between contract and non-contract markets were observed.

Data are limited to Northern Uganda and were collected on trust perception. Besides, there is a scarcity of formal contracts and difficulty in having a matched dyad which could affect generalization.

This is the first study to analyze differences in trust perceptions using a mixed approach in a dyadic context between fresh and dry chains in different markets typologies in developing countries.

This guide is compiled in order that banks may see the extent of the overall problem of fraud and money laundering in documentary credit transactions. It also contains advice on how banks and bankers may protect themselves and their staff from the consequences of fraudulent attacks against the system.

Material conscious and information network (MCIN) is a kind of cyber physics social system. This paper aims to study the MCIN modeling method and design the MCIN-based architecture of smart agriculture (MCIN-ASA) which is different from current vertical architecture and involves production, management and commerce. Architecture is composed of three MCIN-ASA participants which are MCIN-ASA enterprises, individuals and commodity.

Architecture uses enterprises and individuals personalized portals as the carriers which are linked precisely with each other through a peer-to-peer network called six-degrees-of-separation block-chain. The authors want to establish a self-organization, open and ecological operational system which includes active, personalized consumption, direct, centralized distribution, distributed and smart production.

The paper models three main MCIN-ASA participants, namely, design the smart supply, demand and management functions, which show the feasibility innovation and high efficiency of implementing MCIN on agriculture. At the same time, the paper presents a prototype system based on the architecture.

The authors think that MCIN-ASA improves current agriculture greatly and inspires a lot in production-marketing-combined electronic commerce.

There is usually a considerable shortage of resources and a lack of accurate data about the demand amount in a post-disaster situation. This paper aims to model the distribution and redistribution of relief items. When the new data on demand and resources become available the redistribution of previously delivered items may be necessary due to severe shortages in some locations and surplus inventory in other areas.

The presented model includes a vehicle routing problem in the first period and some network flow structures for succeeding periods of each run. Thereby, it can produce itineraries and loading plans for each vehicle in all periods when it is run in a rolling horizon manner. The fairness in distribution is sought by minimizing the maximum shortage of commodities among the affected areas while considering operational costs. Besides, equity of welfare in different periods is taken into account.

The proposed model is evaluated by a realistic case study. The results show that redistribution and multi-period planning can improve efficiency and fairness in supply after the occurrence of a disaster.

This paper proposes an operational model for distribution and redistribution of relief items considering the differences of items characteristics. The model integrates two well-known structures, vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery and network flow problem to take their advantages. To get more practical results, the model relaxes some simplifying assumptions commonly used in disaster relief studies. Furthermore, the model is used in a realistic case study.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the on‐going cultural turn in retail marketing by offering an overview of the interdisciplinary field of socio‐cultural retailing and discussing how this body of work can contribute conceptually, methodologically and substantively to the field of retail marketing.

This paper is based on a literature review of socio‐cultural retail studies in marketing, cultural geography, sociology, and anthropology. The literature is analysed in relation to the substantive, conceptual and methodological domains of retail marketing.

Drawing on the literature review, the authors argue that socio‐cultural retail studies can contribute to the field of retail marketing substantively, conceptually and methodologically, thus broadening its current scope and domains.

This paper provides an overview of an interdisciplinary field and identifies how it can contribute to the field of retail marketing. It is valuable for retailing researchers interested in socio‐cultural approaches to the study of contemporary retailing.