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The purpose of this paper is to explore the effective taxonomies of airline green operations strategy.

To this end, a sample of 23 airlines from five regions (North America, South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East) was surveyed. The annual sustainability reports of the surveyed airlines for the period 2013‒2016 were retrieved from the Global Reporting Initiatives website. K-means clustering analysis was used to generate taxonomic clusters of airline green operations strategy. A special data analysis technique, called rank analysis, was also adopted to identify the significant green actions and develop indicative models.

This study revealed that three effective taxonomies were adopted by airlines: a low-effect strategic pattern, a low-to-moderate effect strategic pattern and a high-effect strategic pattern. A different combination of green operation actions characterized each strategic pattern.

The research contribution of taxonomies of green operations strategy has so far been limited, country focused and concentrated on the manufacturing sector. This study reported the taxonomies and performed an in-depth analysis of the categories of effective actions taken to promote green performance. Moreover, this study developed indicative models for the relationship between categories of action and green performance for each strategic pattern, an action that has seldom been reported by previous studies of green operations strategies for airlines.

Sustainable tourism is becoming more popular all over the world. Eco-friendly (green) hotels are properties that are friendly to the environment and are becoming increasingly popular among green travellers. Electronic word-of-mouth is a technique of communicating with consumers in order to share their experiences, and it is a significant marketing tool for hotels. This paper aims to identify the main themes shared in online reviews by tourists visiting eco-friendly hotels, and which of these themes were associated with satisfaction and dissatisfaction ratings.

The research used qualitative content analyses to analyse 1,202 user-generated content of the top 10 hotels in UK shared by guests on an online platform.

The analyses revealed nine themes in descriptions of airline travel experiences. These are “hotel amenities”, “services”, “location”, “staff”, “eco” (eco-friendly activities), “value” and “recommend/revisit” (intentions). Negative comments are associated with the “bathroom”, “mattress”, “water”, “bed”, “price”, “shower”, “Wi-Fi” and “restaurant” concepts.

This study differs from previous research in which it aims to address a void in the literature on the shortcomings of research focused on finding the dominant themes expressed in online reviews by tourists visiting eco-friendly hotels, and it does so using data mining approach.

The current outbreak of COVID-19 is an unprecedented event in air transportation. In this study, we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on global air transportation through the lens of complex networks different at different scales, ranging from worldwide airport networks where airports are nodes and links between airports exist when direct flights exist, to international country networks where countries are contracted as nodes, and to domestic airport networks for representative countries/regions. We focus on the spatial-temporal evolutionary dynamics of COVID-19 in air transportation networks, discovering hidden patterns on flight frequency reduction. Our study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation from a complex system perspective.

The purpose of this review is to comprehensively consider the material properties and processing of additive titanium alloy and provide a new perspective for the robotic grinding and polishing of additive titanium alloy blades to ensure the surface integrity and machining accuracy of the blades.

At present, robot grinding and polishing are mainstream processing methods in blade automatic processing. This review systematically summarizes the processing characteristics and processing methods of additive manufacturing (AM) titanium alloy blades. On the one hand, the unique manufacturing process and thermal effect of AM have created the unique processing characteristics of additive titanium alloy blades. On the other hand, the robot grinding and polishing process needs to incorporate the material removal model into the traditional processing flow according to the processing characteristics of the additive titanium alloy.

Robot belt grinding can solve the processing problem of additive titanium alloy blades. The complex surface of the blade generates a robot grinding trajectory through trajectory planning. The trajectory planning of the robot profoundly affects the machining accuracy and surface quality of the blade. Subsequent research is needed to solve the problems of high machining accuracy of blade profiles, complex surface material removal models and uneven distribution of blade machining allowance. In the process parameters of the robot, the grinding parameters, trajectory planning and error compensation affect the surface quality of the blade through the material removal method, grinding force and grinding temperature. The machining accuracy of the blade surface is affected by robot vibration and stiffness.

This review systematically summarizes the processing characteristics and processing methods of aviation titanium alloy blades manufactured by AM. Combined with the material properties of additive titanium alloy, it provides a new idea for robot grinding and polishing of aviation titanium alloy blades manufactured by AM.

The aviation industry has seen consistent growth over the past few decades. To maintain its sustainability and competitiveness, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the environmental impacts across the entire life cycle of the industry, including materials, processes and resources; manufacturing and production; lifetime services; reuse; end-of-life; and recycling. One important component of aircraft engines, integral rotors known as Blisks, are made of high-value metallic alloys that require complex and resource-intensive manufacturing processes. The purpose of this paper is to assess the ecological and economical impacts generated through Blisk production and thereby identify significant ‘hot-spots’.

This paper focuses on the methodology and approach for conducting a full-scale Blisk life cycle assessment (LCA) based on ISO 14040/44. Unlike previous papers in the European Aerospace Science Network series, which focused on the first two stages of LCA, this publication delves into the “life cycle impact assessment” and “interpretation” stages, providing an overview of the life cycle inventory modeling, impact category selection and presenting preliminary LCA results for the Blisk manufacturing process chain.

The result shows that the milled titanium Blisk has a lower CO₂ footprint than the milled nickel Blisk, which is less than half of the global warming potential (GWP) of the milled nickel Blisk. A main contributor to GWP arises from raw material production. However, no recycling scenarios were included in the analysis, which will be the topic of further investigations.

The originality of this work lies in the detailed ecological assessment of the manufacturing for complex engine components and the derivation of hot spots as well as potential improvements in terms of eco-footprint reduction throughout the products cradle-to-gate cycle. The LCA results serve as a basis for future approaches of process chain optimisation, use of “greener” materials and individual process improvements.

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.

This paper aims to classify journal papers in the context of hybrid quality function deployment QFD and multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods published during 2004–2021.

A conceptual classification scheme is presented to analyze the hybrid QFD-MCDM methods. Then some recommendations are given to introduce directions for future research.

The results show that among all related areas, the manufacturing application has the most frequency of published papers regarding hybrid QFD-MCDM methods. Moreover, using uncertainty to establish a hybrid QFD-MCDM the relevant papers have been considered during the time interval 2004–2021.

There are various shortcomings in conventional QFD which limit its efficiency and potential applications. Since 2004, when MCDM methods were frequently adopted in the quality management context, increasing attention has been drawn from both practical and academic perspectives. Recently, the integration of MCDM techniques into the QFD model has played an important role in designing new products and services, supplier selection, green manufacturing systems and sustainability topics. Hence, this survey reviewed hybrid QFD-MCDM methods during 2004–2021.

With the yearly increase of mileage and passenger volume in China's high-speed railway, the problems of traditional paper railway tickets have become increasingly prominent, including complexity of business handling process, low efficiency of ticket inspection and high cost of usage and management. This paper aims to make extensive references to successful experiences of electronic ticket applications both domestically and internationally. The research on key technologies and system implementation of railway electronic ticket with Chinese characteristics has been carried out.

Research in key technologies is conducted including synchronization technique in distributed heterogeneous database system, the grid-oriented passenger service record (PSR) data storage model, efficient access to massive PSR data under high concurrency condition, the linkage between face recognition service platforms and various terminals in large scenarios, and two-factor authentication of the e-ticket identification code based on the key and the user identity information. Focusing on the key technologies and architecture the of existing ticketing system, multiple service resources are expanded and developed such as electronic ticket clusters, PSR clusters, face recognition clusters and electronic ticket identification code clusters.

The proportion of paper ticket printed has dropped to 20%, saving more than 2 billion tickets annually since the launch of the application of E-ticketing nationwide. The average time for passengers to pass through the automatic ticket gates has decreased from 3 seconds to 1.3 seconds, significantly improving the efficiency of passenger transport organization. Meanwhile, problems of paper ticket counterfeiting, reselling and loss have been generally eliminated.

E-ticketing has laid a technical foundation for the further development of railway passenger transport services in the direction of digitalization and intelligence.

The natural environment is facing unprecedented times owing to rising temperatures from carbon emissions, which travel-related industries contribute significantly towards. The recent global COVID-19 outbreak should be a wake-up call for the industry, as vulnerabilities have been laid bare. The current challenges should be used as a motivation to change the meaning of travel to support the global warming crisis. This paper aims emphasis that, by means of new stories, new values, beliefs and ultimately travel behaviours can be rewritten.

This study embraces a pragmatic approach to research. To ensure plausibility, credibility and relevance, the research carried out multi-disciplinary analysis of secondary data, information, knowledge and draws on current developing trends.

The travel community needs to take responsibility and start reducing its carbon footprint and as carbon neutrality is increasingly a global priority. Accordingly, this research considers potential future travel-related behaviours that could support more carbon-neutral travel. Significantly, it notes how the COVID-19 outbreak has offered insights into potential positive changes. To benefit from these changes, new stories for industry providers are necessary to encourage more carbon-neutral travel practices.

This paper offers timely and original discussions on the future of travel as a result of COVID-19 impacts. It draws on the power of storytelling as a means of achieving behavioural change in the travel community to support the challenge of climate change.

In the aerial transportation area, fuel costs are critical to the economic viability of companies, and so urgent measures should be adopted to avoid any unnecessary increase in operational costs. In particular, this paper addresses the case of missed approach manouevres, showing that it is still possible to optimize the usual procedure.

The costs involved in a standard procedure following a missed approach are analysed through a simulation model, and they are compared with the improvements achieved with a fast reinjection scheme proposed in a prior work.

Experimental results show that, for a standard A320 aircraft, fuel savings ranging from 55% to 90% can be achieved through the reinjection method.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first study in the literature addressing the fuel savings benefits obtained by applying a reinjection technique for missed approach manoeuvres.