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Short-sea shipping (SSS) plays an important role in regional transportation networks by supporting regional trade and improving inter-modality. In particular, countries in north-east Asia, such as China, South Korea and Japan have been served well by local SSS services. While SSS markets in Northeast Asia (NEA) have been developed by bilateral routes with sub-markets, the market structure of each sub-markets varies depending on concentration and competition levels as well as government intervention. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the market structure of SSS markets in the Northeast Asia.

Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) and concentration ratio are adopted to measure the market concentration from 2013 to 2017 for SSS markets in NEA. Additionally, the balance between supply and demand is investigated by measuring the capacity utilisation factor (CUF) based on slot capacity.

The market structure in the NEA SSS markets is influenced by firms’ behaviour under different levels of governmental intervention. Shipping firms in a market with more governmental intervention in market entry tend to focus on balancing supply and demand rather than increasing market share, whereas firms in a market with less intervention (and more competition) tend to increase their market share by pursuing efficient capacity management.

The period of data set is limited to 2013–2017. Furthermore, prices or revenue for specific routes are not available.

This paper sheds light on the market structure and behaviour of players in SSS market. In addition, the work has value to measure capacity utilisation based on slot capacity.

Truck appointment systems have been applied in critical container ports in the United States due to their potential to improve handling operations. This paper aims to develop a truck appointment system to optimise the total cost experiencing at the entrance of container terminals by managing truck arrivals and the number of service gates satisfying a given level of service.

The approximation of M_t/G/n_t queuing model is applied and integrated into a cost optimisation model to identify (1) the number of arrival trucks allowed at each time slot and (2) the number of service gates operating at each time slot that ensure the average waiting time is less than a designated time threshold. The optimisation model is solved by the Genetic Algorithm and tested with a case study. Its effectiveness is identified by comparing the model's outcomes with observed data and other recent studies.

The results indicate that the developed truck appointment system can provide more than threefold and twofold reductions of the total cost experiencing at the terminal entrance compared to the actual data and results from previous research, respectively.

The proposed approach provides applicably coordinated truck plans and operating service gates efficiently to decrease congestion, emission and expenses.

The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study on the time needed to load and disburse cash using bill validators on slot machines and stand-alone cash dispensers in casinos in British Columbia under a Ticket In Ticket Out (TITO) system.

Testing took place over two days, using 18 machines. The results were extrapolated to estimate the approximate time required to process $1,000,000 with different average bill amounts in the cash mix and three different bill validator machines in common use. The average value per bill using the cash mix used by the public in the casino was $33.11 [standard error (SE) $2.11].

The mean time/accepted note ranged from 4.12 to 9.65 s, depending on bill validator type. This implies that the time needed to load $1,000,000 onto credit slips using bill validators on slot machines ranges from 35 to 81 h, excluding rest breaks and other breaks. The time needed to redeem $1,000,000 is estimated to be 3 h.

The implications of these finding for illicit actors to successfully launder large amounts of cash are discussed. Given the time needed to physically handle the cash, and other control systems currently in use in casinos in British Columbia, processing large amounts of cash using bill validators on slot machines would require a highly organized team that would find it difficult to elude detection.

The trial results provide a baseline estimate to be used going forward when investigating or proposing money laundering methodologies that include slot machines.

Although proactive fault handling plans are widely spread, many unexpected data center outages still occurred. To rescue the jobs from faulty data centers, the authors propose a novel independent job rescheduling strategy for cloud resilience to reschedule the task from the faulty data center to other working-proper cloud data centers, by jointly considering job nature, timeline scenario and overall cloud performance.

A job parsing system and a priority assignment system are developed to identify the eligible time slots for the jobs and prioritize the jobs, respectively. A dynamic job rescheduling algorithm is proposed.

The simulation results show that our proposed approach has better cloud resiliency and load balancing performance than the HEFT series approaches.

This paper contributes to the cloud resilience by developing a novel job prioritizing, task rescheduling and timeline allocation method when facing faults.

The increase of containership sizes driven by the need to create greater economies of scale seems to be an endless process. Vessels of more than 21,000 TEU are presently on order. The purpose of this paper is to question whether a positive effect still remains at present mega ship sizes and, even if this was the case, whether such presumably small effect would be outweighed by costly operational impacts for the lines and the ports out of the huge ship sizes.

The effect of increasing ship sizes on the three major cost items in container shipping have been investigated by extrapolating founded regression curves, applying respective physical laws and referring lumpsum crewing cost (as the major part of the vessel’s running costs) to various ship sizes.

In this paper, it is shown that further effects of lower slot costs lessen while ships get larger. Hence, a further increase in ship sizes would not significantly reduce transport costs anymore. In contrast, the necessary efforts to prepare the ports for ships of ever-increasing size are growing over proportionally with every additional metre of draught and/or beam. It is shown that an ongoing increase of containership sizes, e.g. in the Europe-Far East trade, does not bring any further benefit, neither for the ports and their terminals nor even for the lines itself and not even for the shippers! It is an amazing mechanism that all stakeholders act rationally on their own, but the overall effect for all of them (including the public) has turned into negative.

The results may pave the way for a closer cooperation among ports, e.g. within the Hamburg-Le Havre range. Ports and terminals may see the opportunity to escape the spiral of ongoing efforts for deepening and widening the fairways and installing ever-bigger gantry cranes by agreeing on a joint policy with regard to maximum ship size.

Endwall film cooling protects vane endwall by coolant coverage, especially at the leading edge (LE) region and vane-pressure side (PS) junction region. Strong flow impingement and complex vortexaa structures on the vane endwall cause difficulties for coolant flows to cover properly. This work aims at a full-scale arrangement of film cooling holes on the endwall which improves coolant efficiency in the LE region and vane-PS junction region.

The endwall film holes are grouped in four-holes constructal patterns. Three ways of arranging the groups are studied: based on the pressure field, the streamlines or the heat transfer field. The computational analysis is done with the k-ω SST model after validating the turbulence model properly.

By clustering the film cooling holes in four-holes patterns, the ejection of the coolant flow is stronger. The four-holes constructal patterns also improve the local coolant coverage in the “tough” regions, such as the junction region of the PS and the endwall. The arrangement based on streamlines distribution can effectively improve the coolant coverage and the arrangement based on the heat transfer distribution (HTD) has benefits by reducing high-temperature regions on the endwall.

A full-scale endwall film cooling design is presented considering interactions of different film cooling holes. A comprehensive model validation and mesh independence study are provided. The cooling holes pattern on the endwall is designed as four-holes constructal patterns combined with several arrangement choices, i.e. by pressure, by heat transfer and by streamline distributions.

The purpose of the article is (1) to find out whether students instructed with Computer-Assisted Simulation Learning Games (CASLGs) will improve in their scholarly learning outcomes and (2) to ascertain if the biological construct of sex will affect students scholarly learning outcomes.

The study was experimental. The study sample comprised 120 students from four schools. The study instrument was the Scholarly Learning Outcomes Test (SLOT), drawn from the school syllabus. The study lasted six weeks. Before the experimentation, the students were pre-tested using the Scholarly Learning Outcomes Test (SLOT. After which, students were posttested to ascertain students' scholarly learning outcomes. The statistical mean was employed to analyse data generated from the pretest and posttest to provide answers for the research questions, while analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) statistics was utilised to test the hypotheses.

The results show that CASLGs improved students' scholarly learning outcomes more than the face-to-face instructional approach and the biological construct of sex is of no effect on students' scholarly learning outcomes.

First, in performing the study, the regular instructors/teachers were utilized. The personalities of these instructors were not considered or scrutinized; this might have impacted the research outcomes.

Implications for future studies: One advantage is that it is part of a bigger initiative in which there are extra sources of data to study. This information or data from this study would help to throw further light on the predictors of student scholarly learning outcomes in the near future. One implication of this study rests on the confirmation that activity-based strategies such as CASLGs enhance students' scholarly learning outcomes.

This study is a product of the author’s doctoral thesis. It is the outcome of the investigation carried out by the author for the award of PhD; therefore, it is original. The study’s results are of immense value because they contributed to knowledge in the area of computer-based learning games.