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This paper is an empirical attempt to verify the interplay between political change, fleet nationality, and the evolution of shipping networks. North Korea offers a good example of a socialist maritime country that has experienced much contrasting geopolitical contexts since 1990. A database of vessel movements between North Korean ports and other ports is analyzed. Main results show differences between North Korean and foreign fleets in terms of traffic (vessel size, age, berthing time) and geographical coverage. South Korean ports tend to play a new role in the reorganization of North Korean-related flows in Northeast Asia.

It should be noted that the (inland waterway transport) IWT in Ukraine currently is in its infancy in comparison with other land based transport means (rail and road) and with other countries that possess navigable rivers. This paper is an extension of the research initiated by Grushevska and Notteboom (2015) where the concepts of intermediacy and centrality were introduced in order to assess the role of Ukraine in the global and regional transport networks. The list of key obstacles for Ukraine’s intermediacy function included IWT related barriers such as: (i) deficient inland waterway infrastructure, (ii) high IWT costs (fees for bridges, locks etc.) and (iii) pilotage charges. To date the transportation to/from ports is mainly fulfilled by road or by rail based multimodal transport solutions. We present the unutilized potential of Ukrainian IWT that needs to be efficiently exploited for the benefit of the national economy and national transport system. This study intends to enrich the limited academic research on IWT systems in a transition stage, as exemplified by the case of Ukraine.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how technology-forcing regulations affect the product development process in the supply chain of heavyweight vehicles.

Through a case study, this paper seeks to understand how one of the leading companies in heavyweight vehicles manufacturing industry and its engine supplier in Brazil introduce eco-design practices into its engine development process.

Through case studies conducted in a heavyweight vehicle producer and its engine supplier, this study shows that, in addition to meeting the standards and legislation, the automaker uses ecodesign practices during the product development cycle such as a design that eliminates harmful and hazardous materials and a project that allows recycling, the reuse of parts and energy efficiency, thereby reducing the environmental impact. However, without the mandatory requirements imposed by federal legislation, products with lower environmental impacts would rarely be developed, as environmental performance is not demanded by customers, who are mainly cost driven. Technology-forcing regulations play an important role in enhancing the adoption of ecodesign practices, but market and competitive conditions also play an important role.

Several studies on the impacts of public policies and development for the automobile sector have been conducted, but there is a lack of studies in the area of commercial vehicles, especially in Brazil. Therefore, this research is justified by new demands of society, in addition to the necessity of complying with legal requirements and the adoption of good practices related to eco-design.

For many decades, it has been recognized that maintenance activities should be adapted to the specific usage of a system. For that reason, many advanced policies have been developed, such as condition-based and load-based maintenance policies. However, these policies require advanced monitoring techniques and rather detailed understanding of the failure behavior, which requires the support of an OEM or expert, prohibiting application by an operator in many cases. The present work proposes a maintenance policy that relieves the high (technical) demands set by these existing policies and provides a more accurate specification of the required (dynamic) maintenance interval than traditional usage-based maintenance.

The methodology followed starts with a review and critical assessment of existing maintenance policies, which are classified according to six different aspects. Based on the need for a technically less demanding policy that appears from this comparison, a new policy is developed. The consecutive steps required for this functional usage profiles based maintenance policy are then critically discussed: usage profile definition, monitoring, profile severity quantification and the possible extension to the fleet level. After the description of the proposed policy, it is demonstrated in three case studies on real systems.

A maintenance policy based on a simple usage registration procedure appears to be feasible, which enables a significantly more efficient maintenance process than the traditional usage-based policies. This is demonstrated by the policy proposed here.

The proposed maintenance policy based on functional usage profiles offers the operators of fleets of systems the opportunity to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of their maintenance process, without the need for a high investment in advanced monitoring systems and in experts interpreting the results.

The original contribution of this work is the explicit definition of a new maintenance policy, which combines the benefits of considering the effects of usage or environment severity with a limited investment in monitoring technology.

Following the recent surge in research on carsharing, the paper synthesizes this growing literature to provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of research and to identify directions for future work. Specifically, this study details implications for service theory and practice.

Systematic selection and analysis of 279 papers from the existing literature, published between 1996 and 2020.

The literature review identified four key themes: business models, drivers and barriers, customer behavior, and vehicle balancing.

For managers, the study illuminates the importance of collaboration among stakeholders within the automotive sector for purposes of widening their customer base and maximizing utilization and profits. For policy makers, their important role in supporting carsharing take-off is highlighted with emphasis on balancing support rendered to different mobility services to promote mutual success.

This is the first systematic multi-disciplinary literature review of carsharing. It integrates insights from transportation, environmental, and business studies, identifying gaps in the existing research and specifically suggesting implications for service research.

This study advocates the importance of taking an evolutionary perspective in the strategic configuration of closed-loop supply chains (CLSC) in the transition to a circular economy. Building on the supply chain management and industrial dynamics research domains, an evolutionary analytical framework was developed and applied in the empirical context of the ongoing industrial transition to e-mobility.

This study is designed as an in-depth exploratory case study to capture the multi-layer dynamic complexities and their interplay in CSLC development. The empirical investigation was based on two-year interactions between the authors and various departments in a leading European heavy vehicle manufacturer. The proposed evolutionary analytical framework was used for investigating the dynamics of four CLSC configurations through ten possible trajectories.

The findings demonstrate that the evolution of each CLSC configuration comes with multiple challenges and requirements and point out the necessity for the co-development of technologies, product design and production, and infrastructure through long-term relationships among key supply chain actors. However, this evolutionary journey is associated with multiple dilemmas caused by uncertainties in the market and technology developments. All these factors were properly captured and critically analyzed, along with their interactions, thanks to the constructs included in the proposed evolutionary analytical framework.

The proposed evolutionary framework is applicable for examination of SC transformation in the context of market and technology development, and is particularly relevant for transitioning from linear SC to CLSC. The framework offers a single actor perspective, as it does not directly tackle dynamics and effects of actions taken by SC actors.

The developed framework can support SC managers in identifying, framing, and comparing alternative strategies for CLSC configuration in the transition process.

This study proposes the framework for understanding and guiding the evolutionary process of CLSC development. Its uniqueness lies in the integration of concepts from innovation and evolutionary theories coming from industrial dynamics and SCM literature streams.

Drawing from legitimacy and institutional entrepreneurship theory, this study assesses the naming patterns of entrepreneurial firms in the US biotechnology industry.

The authors use a mixed-methods design of content analysis and regression to analyze a sample of 441 entrepreneurial biotechnology firms, for which data were obtained from Net Advantage. The authors track changes to the proportion of firms with naming attributes, such as name length and type of name. The authors also examine variability in those characteristics during the industry's evolution, comparing freestanding to acquired start-ups.

Start-ups select names that are longer, more descriptive, begin with rare sounds or hard plosives and have stronger discipline- or technology-specific links during nascent years of the industry. As the industry evolves, entrepreneurs are more likely to select names that are shorter, more abstract, begin with hard plosives and have stronger industry-specific links. The naming patterns of freestanding and acquired companies differ, and companies that conform to industry pressures tend to remain independent.

Unlike extant studies that assess established industries, the current study identifies shifting trends in the naming patterns of entrepreneurial firms in an emerging industry. By focusing on start-ups, the authors expand research on organizational naming practices, which focuses traditionally on name choices and name change patterns of incumbents. By using marketing and linguistics methods when analyzing organizational name attributes, naming patterns in these attributes are identified, including name length, name type, starting letter of the name and link to the industry.

Digital twin (DT) is an emerging technology that enables sophisticated interaction between physical objects and their virtual replicas. Although DT has recently gained significant attraction in both industry and academia, there is no systematic understanding of DT from its development history to its different concepts and applications in disparate disciplines. The majority of DT literature focuses on the conceptual development of DT frameworks for a specific implementation area. Hence, this paper provides a state-of-the-art review of DT history, different definitions and models, and six types of key enabling technologies. The review also provides a comprehensive survey of DT applications from two perspectives: (1) applications in four product-lifecycle phases, i.e. product design, manufacturing, operation and maintenance, and recycling and (2) applications in four categorized engineering fields, including aerospace engineering, tunneling and underground engineering, wind engineering and Internet of things (IoT) applications. DT frameworks, characteristic components, key technologies and specific applications are extracted for each DT category in this paper. A comprehensive survey of the DT references reveals the following findings: (1) The majority of existing DT models only involve one-way data transfer from physical entities to virtual models and (2) There is a lack of consideration of the environmental coupling, which results in the inaccurate representation of the virtual components in existing DT models. Thus, this paper highlights the role of environmental factor in DT enabling technologies and in categorized engineering applications. In addition, the review discusses the key challenges and provides future work for constructing DTs of complex engineering systems.

Evaluating existing literature can lead to a better understanding of a scientific journal's state of the art. In this sense, this study aims to analyze the global research evolution of the Revista Europea de Dirección y Economia de la Empresa (REDEE) and the European Journal of Management and Business Economics (EJMBE).

A bibliometric analysis was conducted to acknowledge the most contributing authors, impactful articles, publication trends, keyword analysis, co-occurrence networks and collaboration networks. A total of 454 articles published between 2006 and 2022 were analyzed.

The results suggest that the international strategy set in 2014 has resulted in a steadily growing number of publications and a significant increment in citations. Relationship marketing and the connections between innovation, performance and entrepreneurship are topics of interest for the EJMBE.

Mapping existing EJMBE research through identifying the contributing authors, most impactful articles, publication trends, keyword analysis, co-occurrence networks and collaboration networks is missing to encourage new research projects.

Connecting autonomous drones to ground operations and services is a prerequisite for the adoption of scalable and sustainable drone services in the built environment. Despite the rapid advance in the field of autonomous drones, the development of ground infrastructure has received less attention. Contemporary airport design offers potential solutions for the infrastructure serving autonomous drone services. To that end, this paper aims to construct a framework for connecting air and ground operations for autonomous drone services. Furthermore, the paper defines the minimum facilities needed to support unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous logistics and the collection of aerial data.

The paper reviews the state-of-the-art in airport design literature as the basis for analysing the guidelines of manned aviation applicable to the development of ground infrastructure for autonomous drone services. Socio-technical system analysis was used for identifying the service needs of drones.

The key findings are functional modularity based on the principles of airport design applies to micro-airports and modular service functions can be connected efficiently with an autonomous ground handling system in a sustainable manner addressing the concerns on maintenance, reliability and lifecycle.

As the study was limited to the airport design literature findings, the evolution of solutions may provide features supporting deviating approaches. The role of autonomy and cloud-based service processes are quintessentially different from the conventional airport design and are likely to impact real-life solutions as the area of future research.

The findings of this study provided a framework for establishing the connection between the airside and the landside for the operations of autonomous aerial services. The lack of such framework and ground infrastructure has hindered the large-scale adoption and easy-to-use solutions for sustainable logistics and aerial data collection for decision-making in the built environment.

The evolution of future autonomous aerial services should be accessible to all users, “democratising” the use of drones. The data collected by drones should comply with the privacy-preserving use of the data. The proposed ground infrastructure can contribute to offloading, storing and handling aerial data to support drone services’ acceptability.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the paper describes the first design framework for creating a design concept for a modular and autonomous micro-airport system for unmanned aviation based on the applied functions of full-size conventional airports.