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The purpose of this paper is to investigate causal agents of health and safety (H&S) incidents among “plant-trailers” (as used by construction and utility contractors to transport mechanical machinery); including the relationship(s) of such incidents to routine safety inspections and, plant maintenance functions.

H&S plant-trailer incident data, from a collaborating UK-based case study utility company are analysed using inductive, interpretative and descriptive statistical methods.

Principal incident occurrences relate to trailer wheels, wheel bearings, tyres and braking systems. All forms of incidents observed harbour significant risk and especially, if they occur during travel on public highways. Derived recommendations for incident mitigation and control, suggest a requirement for improved human behaviour, machinery inspection regimes and maintenance systems.

The findings will be valuable to academia as a basis for advancing this new research subject, both empirically and internationally. Direction is offered in this respect.

Recommendations will be of practical relevance to machinery management practitioners generally and to plant-trailer stakeholders more specifically. For the latter, the study encourages introspective consideration of plant-trailer H&S systems.

No previous research has targeted these issues relating to plant-trailers.

The purpose of this paper is to posit a methodology for exploring promotional trailers in the public domain and a critical discussion of the findings therein.

The approach utilises third part press as a mechanism to limit videosharing website results and allows for a varied corpus of data.

The paper posits that the term “trailer” has shifted significantly since its original use in the film industry and now applies to a certain type of experiential promotion.

This is the first time a methodology has been discussed that considers trailers as a shared vernacular term, rather than subject of historical archive.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the sharing of movie trailers on video-sharing social media has an impact on box-office revenue.

From December 2013 to November 2014, view statistics were collected for movie trailers from YouTube and matched with the box-office revenue of the relevant movies from Box Office Mojo. Based on the 72 sample movies, a panel simultaneous equation model was applied.

The results show that sharing of a movie trailer has a positive impact on the box-office revenue of the movie, and this effect is greater in the early stage of a movie release than in the later stage.

This study analyzes, from electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and social influence perspectives, the effects of video-sharing activities on social media and their impact on sales with an example that is representative of entertainment goods or movie trailers.

This study reveals that promotion through video-sharing social media websites can serve as an essential marketing tool for entertainment goods such as movies, while the sharing of a movie trailer has a positive influence on the box-office revenue of the movie.

Focusing on the sharing features of video-sharing social media websites, this study contributes to enhancing our understanding of the predictive power of consumers’ video-sharing and expanding current research on eWOM and social influence.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze some of the unseen negative effects of the post‐Katrina government policies dealing with housing in New Orleans.

Since Hurricane Katrina, the government, along with private for profit and not‐for‐profit organizations, has worked to rebuild the city of New Orleans. This effort is most evident in the response to the housing crisis that followed the storm. The government has spent billions of dollars and brought thousands of people in to rebuild homes and other infrastructure in the long run and to provide stopgap measures in the short run. The approximately 120,000 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) trailers in the region are one of the most visible examples of government efforts.

The paper finds that while the trailers did provide benefits to those who received them, it could be argued that the government's policies aimed toward solving the housing crisis suffer from Frédéric Bastiat's broken window fallacy. FEMA trailers and the multitude of workers brought in are examples of what is seen, and, as Bastiat showed, we must also look at what is unseen.

The paper is of value in showing that the trailer problem, among many others, has weakened the relief effort.

The Pallet Handling Device (PHD) is a five degree‐of‐freedom (dof) robot system under development by Stewart‐Glapat Corporation for autonomous loading of pallets into semi‐truck trailers at loading docks. The fully‐autonomous control is achieved using a programmable logic controller (PLC) and sensors. Ohio University has developed a one‐eighth‐scale prototype hardware system for PHD controls implementation and evaluation. This article describes the design and construction of this system, including the control architecture and PLC programming. The main objective of the scale hardware prototype is to demonstrate the autonomous control feasibility of the proposed full‐scale PHD system; this cannot be adequately performed in simulation.

A successful project in Malawi designed to provide a viable method of short‐haul transport, in rural areas with poor infrastructure, for agricultural produce is described. The tractor plus two trailers unit that was developed was not only efficient but cost effective compared to other systems. It was also assembled and therefore could be maintained by skilled workers locally. The problems of raising capital for projects of this kind are discussed.

Three men decided to set up on their own in the fiercely competitive road trailer market. Chris Phillips reports on the enthusiasm which keeps the company thriving — and the problems which threaten its future.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an effective solution method for the truck and trailer routing problem (TTRP) which is one of the important NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems owing to its multiple real-world applications. It is a generalization of the famous vehicle routing problem (VRP), involving a group of geographically scattered customers served by the vehicle fleet including trucks and trailers.

The meta-heuristic solution approach based on bat algorithm (BA) in which a local search procedure performed by five different neighborhood structures is developed. Moreover, a self-adaptive (SA) tuning strategy to preserve the swarm diversity is implemented. The effectiveness of the proposed SA-BA is investigated by an experiment conducted on 21 benchmark problems that are well known in the literature.

Computational results indicate that the proposed SA-BA algorithm is computationally efficient through comparison with other existing algorithms found from the literature according to solution quality. As for the actual computational time, the SA-BA algorithm outperforms others. However, the scaled computational time of the SA-BA algorithm underperforms the other algorithms.

In this work the authors show that the proposed SA-BA is effective as a method for the TTRP problem. To the authors’ knowledge, the BA has not been applied previously, as in this work, to solve the TTRP problem.