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In this paper, the authors study the effect of consumers' fairness preferences on dynamic pricing strategies adopted by platforms in a non-cooperative game.

This study applies fair game and repeated game theory.

This study reveals that, in a one-shot game, if consumers have fairness preferences, dynamic prices will slightly decline. In a repeated game, dynamic prices will be reduced even when consumers do not have fairness preferences. When fairness preferences and repeated game are considered simultaneously, dynamic prices are most likely to be set at fair prices. The authors also discuss the effect of platforms' discounting factors, the consumers' income and alternative choices of consumption on the dynamic prices.

The study findings illustrate the importance of incorporating behavioral elements in understanding and designing the dynamic pricing strategies for platforms and the implications on social welfare in general.

The authors developed a theoretical model to incorporate consumers' fairness preference into the decision-making process of platforms when they design the dynamic pricing strategies.

This paper aims to conduct a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry. The current trends are analyzed for the industry, showing that this industry is still young and has great potential to boom. Meanwhile, the Asia market is the fastest growth region among the global, to which increasing cruise ships are repositioned by major cruise lines. However, for such a promising industry, the literature review on some state-of-the-art research works suggests that the research works that have been conducted for the cruise shipping are quite limited, and the majority of the works belongs to empirical and descriptive studies, which does not provide optimization-based quantitative analysis on some operation planning problems.

This paper conducts a review on cruise shipping and the cruise shipping industry.

In reality, there are some important operation planning problems faced by cruise lines or cruise ships, and four of them are addressed in this paper in response to the fast growing trend. The addressed operation planning problems are cruise fleet management, cruise ship deployment, cruise itinerary design and cruise service planning.

The importance and the attention for the research on the problems are also elaborated in the paper.

The rapid growth in cruise shipping coupled with increasing public awareness of climate change has led to increasing concerns about the impact cruise shipping poses on the environment, especially regarding air emissions. This study analyses the cruise shipping network of ports in and around the emission control areas (ECAs) to understand the structural properties of the network and ports.

A complex network approach was used to analyse the network data of 239 voyages serviced by 14 international cruise lines, visiting 127 ports across 44 countries in the Caribbean Sea.

It is found that the network has a small-world property with a short average path length and a high clustering coefficient. The regulations affect connections among ports, in which most ports in ECAs have lower connections than ports outside ECAs. A few ports in ECAs play important key roles, but many ports outside ECAs play a more important role in the network because the regulations are barriers for cruise ships entering the ports.

The findings of this study have drawn useful guidelines for cruise lines and port authorities to improve their operations. Constrictive recommendations are suggested to policymakers for designing reasonable regulations to attract more cruise shipping to travel in ECAs.

This paper aims to study the impacts of groundwater seepage on artificial freezing process of gravel strata, the temperature field characteristics of the strata, and the strata process, closure time and thickness evolution mechanism of the frozen wall.

In this paper several laboratory model tests were conducted, considering different groundwater seepage rate.

The results show that there is a significant coupling effect between the cold diffusion of artificial freezing pipes and groundwater seepage; when there is no seepage, temperature fields upstream and downstream of the gravel strata are symmetrically distributed, and the thickness of the frozen soil column/frozen wall is consistent during artificial freezing; groundwater seepage causes significant asymmetry in the temperature fields upstream and downstream of the gravel strata, and the greater the seepage rate, the more obvious the asymmetry; the frozen wall closure time increases linearly with the increase in the groundwater seepage rate, and specifically, the time length under seepage rate of 5.00 m d⁻¹ is 3.2 times longer than that under no seepage; due to the erosion from groundwater seepage, the thickness of the upstream frozen wall decreases linearly with the seepage velocity, while that of the downstream frozen wall increases linearly, resulting in a saddle-shaped frozen wall.

The research results are beneficial to the optimum design and risk control of artificial freezing process in gravel strata.

Simulation is a well-known technique for using computers to imitate or simulate the operations of various kinds of real-world facilities or processes. The facility or process of interest is usually called a system, and to study it scientifically, we often have to make a set of assumptions about how it works. These assumptions, which usually take the form of mathematical or logical relationships, constitute a model that is used to gain some understanding of how the corresponding system behaves, and the quality of these understandings essentially depends on the credibility of given assumptions or models, known as VV&A (verification, validation and accreditation). The main purpose of this paper is to present an in-depth theoretical review and analysis for the application of VV&A in large-scale simulations.

After summarizing the VV&A of related research studies, the standards, frameworks, techniques, methods and tools have been discussed according to the characteristics of large-scale simulations (such as crowd network simulations).

The contributions of this paper will be useful for both academics and practitioners for formulating VV&A in large-scale simulations (such as crowd network simulations).

This paper will help researchers to provide support of a recommendation for formulating VV&A in large-scale simulations (such as crowd network simulations).

In order to solve the problem of inaccurate calculation of index weights, subjectivity and uncertainty of index assessment in the risk assessment process, this study aims to propose a scientific and reasonable centralized traffic control (CTC) system risk assessment method.

First, system-theoretic process analysis (STPA) is used to conduct risk analysis on the CTC system and constructs risk assessment indexes based on this analysis. Then, to enhance the accuracy of weight calculation, the fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP), fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (FDEMATEL) and entropy weight method are employed to calculate the subjective weight, relative weight and objective weight of each index. These three types of weights are combined using game theory to obtain the combined weight for each index. To reduce subjectivity and uncertainty in the assessment process, the backward cloud generator method is utilized to obtain the numerical character (NC) of the cloud model for each index. The NCs of the indexes are then weighted to derive the comprehensive cloud for risk assessment of the CTC system. This cloud model is used to obtain the CTC system's comprehensive risk assessment. The model's similarity measurement method gauges the likeness between the comprehensive risk assessment cloud and the risk standard cloud. Finally, this process yields the risk assessment results for the CTC system.

The cloud model can handle the subjectivity and fuzziness in the risk assessment process well. The cloud model-based risk assessment method was applied to the CTC system risk assessment of a railway group and achieved good results.

This study provides a cloud model-based method for risk assessment of CTC systems, which accurately calculates the weight of risk indexes and uses cloud models to reduce uncertainty and subjectivity in the assessment, achieving effective risk assessment of CTC systems. It can provide a reference and theoretical basis for risk management of the CTC system.

Cruise tourism is the fastest-growing segment of the shipping and port industry. This study aims to develop an analytic model to assess the key criteria and sub-criteria influencing four cruise port's development in Taiwan.

Based on the literature review, four criteria and 13 sub-criteria are developed and analysed by fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Four cruise ports include Kaohsiung, Keelung, Taichung and Hualien ports. The 26 relevant field experts (including cruise operators, governmental officials and academics) were invited to provide information for assessing the sub-criteria in the model.

The results indicate that port infrastructure and facilities are the most important criterion, followed by port-city development plans, port geography and climate and port regulations and services. In addition, the three most important sub-criteria overall are the onshore tourism programme, the city’s historical and cultural features and the green port hinterland transport system. Also, Keelung port is ranked as the best port, followed by Kaohsiung, Taichung and Hualien.

As Asia is an important cruise market in the world (ranked as third) and passenger number in Taiwan has achieved the top two in Asia, denoting Taiwan is a good market to develop an evaluation model of cruise ports. The findings present a holistic picture of the relative importance of the various criteria associated with cruise port development and raise issues related to cruise port marketing and the economic and environmental sustainability of ports and their hinterlands.

The electromechanical brake system is leading the latest development trend in railway braking technology. The tolerance stack-up generated during the assembly and production process catalyzes the slight geometric dimensioning and tolerancing between the motor stator and rotor inside the electromechanical cylinder. The tolerance leads to imprecise brake control, so it is necessary to diagnose the fault of the motor in the fully assembled electromechanical brake system. This paper aims to present improved variational mode decomposition (VMD) algorithm, which endeavors to elucidate and push the boundaries of mechanical synchronicity problems within the realm of the electromechanical brake system.

The VMD algorithm plays a pivotal role in the preliminary phase, employing mode decomposition techniques to decompose the motor speed signals. Afterward, the error energy algorithm precision is utilized to extract abnormal features, leveraging the practical intrinsic mode functions, eliminating extraneous noise and enhancing the signal’s fidelity. This refined signal then becomes the basis for fault analysis. In the analytical step, the cepstrum is employed to calculate the formant and envelope of the reconstructed signal. By scrutinizing the formant and envelope, the fault point within the electromechanical brake system is precisely identified, contributing to a sophisticated and accurate fault diagnosis.

This paper innovatively uses the VMD algorithm for the modal decomposition of electromechanical brake (EMB) motor speed signals and combines it with the error energy algorithm to achieve abnormal feature extraction. The signal is reconstructed according to the effective intrinsic mode functions (IMFS) component of removing noise, and the formant and envelope are calculated by cepstrum to locate the fault point. Experiments show that the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm can effectively decompose the original speed signal. After feature extraction, signal enhancement and fault identification, the motor mechanical fault point can be accurately located. This fault diagnosis method is an effective fault diagnosis algorithm suitable for EMB systems.

By using this improved VMD algorithm, the electromechanical brake system can precisely identify the rotational anomaly of the motor. This method can offer an online diagnosis analysis function during operation and contribute to an automated factory inspection strategy while parts are assembled. Compared with the conventional motor diagnosis method, this improved VMD algorithm can eliminate the need for additional acceleration sensors and save hardware costs. Moreover, the accumulation of online detection functions helps improve the reliability of train electromechanical braking systems.