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The expansion of the Panama Canal that is completed in 2016 provides container carriers with new opportunities to redeploy global oceangoing trunk routes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the cargo sources and geographical locations of three trunk routes, the departure points of which are all in East Asia.

The operating conditions of various shipping practices were used to simulate trunk route deployment after canal expansion. Subsequently, a clean-line strategy featuring liquefied natural gas (LNG) as a replacement for heavy oil is proposed to explore the effects that container carriers have on energy savings and emission reductions.

The results showed that the unit emissions of ships traveling trunk routes in East Coast North America and East Coast South America did not differ significantly regardless of whether the container carrier employed a conventional method or the new deployment plan following the expansion of the Panama Canal. By contrast, the adoption of a new method for sailing through the canal yields significant emission reductions for Far East/Europe routes. In addition, the slow-steam strategy adopted by carriers and the more costly clean-line strategy of LNG-fueled ships are both effective when applied to trunk routes.

The results of this study provide a reference to container carriers deploying route structures and the International Maritime Organization when promoting emission-reduction policies.

Over the past eight years, the MELVYL catalog has become one of the largest public access catalogs in the world, and now plays a central role in providing access to the library resources of the University of California. Currently, under heavy load, the MELVYL catalog supports many hundreds of simultaneous terminal connections, servicing over a quarter of a million queries a week and displaying more than two million records a week to its user community. This article discusses the history of the network that has supported the MELVYL catalog from the early days of its prototype to the present. It also describes both the current technical and policy issues that must be addressed as the network moves into the 1990s, and the roles that the network is coming to play in integrating local automation, the union catalog, access to resource databases, and other initiatives. Sidebars discuss the TCP/IP protocol suite, internet protocol gateways, and Telenet and related inter‐operability problems.

In the maritime industry, it is vital to have a reliable forecast of container shipping demand. Although indicators of economic conditions have been used in modeling container shipping demand on major routes such as those from East Asia to the USA, the duration of such indicators’ effects on container movement demand have not been systematically examined. To bridge this gap in research, this study aims to identify the important US economic indicators that significantly affect the volume of container movements and empirically reveal the duration of such impacts.

The durability of economic indicators on container movements is identified by a vector autoregression (VAR) model using monthly-based time-series data. In the VAR model, this paper can analyze the effect of economic indicators at t-k on container movement at time t. In the model, this paper considers nine US economic indicators as explanatory variables that are likely to affect container movements. Time-series data are used for 228 months from January 2001 to December 2019.

In the mainland China route, “building permission” receives high impact and has a duration of 14 months, reflecting the fact that China exports a high volume of housing-related goods to the USA. Regarding the South Korea and Japan routes, where high volumes of machinery goods are exported to the USA, the “index of industrial production” receives a high impact with 11 and 13 months’ duration, respectively. On the Taiwan route, as several types of goods are transported with significant shares, “building permits” and “index of industrial production” have important effects.

Freight demand forecasting for bulk cargo is a popular research field because of the public availability of several time-series data. However, no study to date has measured the impact and durability of economic indicators on container movement. To bridge the gap in the literature in terms of the impact of economic indicators and their durability, this paper developed a time-series model of the container movement from East Asia to the USA.

This study proposes targeted modernization of the Department of Defense (DoD's) Joint Forces Ammunition Logistics information system by implementing the optimized innovative information technology open architecture design and integrating Radio Frequency Identification Device data technologies and real-time optimization and control mechanisms as the critical technology components of the solution. The innovative information technology, which pursues the focused logistics, will be deployed in 36 months at the estimated cost of $568 million in constant dollars. We estimate that the Systems, Applications, Products (SAP)-based enterprise integration solution that the Army currently pursues will cost another $1.5 billion through the year 2014; however, it is unlikely to deliver the intended technical capabilities.

The shipper selects a suitable shipping route and plans for a voyage in order to import and export cargo on the basis of published sailing schedules. The reliability of the sailing schedule will influence the shipper’s logistics expense, which means that the logistics costs will depend on the reliability of schedules published by container shipping companies. Therefore, it is important to consider factors which can cause delays would for container ships sailing on sea routes. The reliability of published sailing schedules can be affected by a number of different factors. This study adopts the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to estimate the importance of the delaying factors in a sailing schedule. In addition, the consistent fuzzy preference relations (CFPR) method is applied to identify the subjective importance (weights) of the delaying factors. The entropy weight method combined with the actual performance of the container shipping company are both used when estimating the objective importance (weights) of the delaying factors. According to the analysis results, the criteria can be divided into four quadrants with different management implications, which indicate that instructions for chase strategy, sailing schedule control, fleet allocation, transship operation arrangement and planning for ports in routes are often ignored by container shipping companies. Container shipping companies should consider adjusting their operational strategies, which would greatly improve their operational performance.

The purpose of this paper is to report on a geometrical integration methodology that can be used to organise some types of these systems. Most multipath delivery systems, such as Building Services (BSs), are arbitrarily distributed with no known solution to reduce the complexity in the way channels are arranged.

Integration for optimal functionality through reduction of geometrical complexity is achieved by understanding the elements of complexity within current practices; identifying commonalities between the various components which can be used for integration; performing an axiomatic design to resolve design complications; adopting theory of inventive problem-solving for methodology and process development towards optimal functionality; and generating a mathematical solution to inform digital modelling of optimal design. The study takes into account thermophysical and electromagnetic interactions between utilities and uses novel mathematical manipulations based on designing a manifold of spherical and cylindrical geometries joined using Bezier surfaces.

Once a solution was reached, computer-aided design (CAD) iterations were undertaken for channelling six BSs into a single unit. The outcome was concentric cylindrical–spherical shells superimposed with spacings of typically few millimetres to deliver/distribute the utilities. It is applied to bring together BSs into a single trunking system at minimal, yet appropriate, proximal distances, and it allows distribution of any number of services in any direction. Physical prototypes were produced and initial testing of their performance (reported elsewhere) has been encouraging.

A design methodology for integrating arbitrary distributed paths/conduits. The approach could be incorporated into CAD tools as a design feature to facilitate integration of multipath delivery systems.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, low-cost carriers grew rapidly in many low- and middle-income economies. In this chapter, we examine the geography and network structure of low-cost carriers in such economies across Asia in 2018. We use these analyses to explore the relationship between budget airlines and economic development. Levels of disposable income and infrastructure adequacy help to account for the significance of low-cost airlines in some middle-income economies. And in turn, these airlines by fostering higher levels of accessibility and personal mobility may help catalyze faster development. However, the environmental externalities associated with aviation, especially atmospheric emissions, raise concerns about the sustainability of this mode. We assess these concerns and focus in particular on the development of low-cost carriers fleets in Asia. We ask whether the acquisition of more fuel-efficient aircraft will ameliorate aviation's environmental impact.