Biofuel is considered to be an important alternative energy in the future transportation. Its development is supported by the rest of the world. However, biofuel industry development is still very slow. From the previous research it is known that the supply chain coordination and other problems need to be solved to promote the supply chain ability. This paper studies biodiesel supply chain coordination problem from the view of disturbance management. It gives a disturbed coordination strategy which contains the optimal order quantity and the contract parameters. This paper has then verified the disturbed coordination strategy through using the actual data of Jiangsu Yueda Kate New Energy Co. Ltd. The result shows that when the market demand and the recovery cost are simultaneously disturbed, the coordination can make the biodiesel supply chain robust and the new strategy under the revenue sharing contract is better than the original one.

This paper proposes a mathematical model to regulate the acceleration (deceleration) applied by self-driving vehicles in car-following situations. A virtual environment is designed to test the model in different circumstances: (1) the followers decelerate in time if the leader decelerates, considering a time delay of up to 5 s to refresh data (vehicles position coordinates) required by the model, (2) with the intention of optimizing space, the vehicles are grouped in platoons, where 3 s of time delay (to update data) is supported if the vehicles have a centre-to-centre spacing of 20 m and a time delay of 1 s is supported at a spacing of 6 m (considering a maximum speed of 20 m/s in both cases), and (3) an algorithm is presented to manage the vehicles’ priority at a traffic intersection, where the model regulates the vehicles’ acceleration (deceleration) and a balance in the number of vehicles passing from each side is achieved.

The intersecting of pedestrian streams is a common phenomenon which would lead to the pedestrian deceleration, stopping, and even threat to the safety of walking. The organization of pedestrian flow is a critical factor which influences the intersection traffic. The aim of this paper is to study the characteristics of oblique pedestrian streams by a set of pedestrian experiments. Two groups of experiment participants, three volume levels and five intersecting angles were tested. The qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis methods were applied to find out the relationship between the pedestrian streams angle and pedestrian characteristics. The results indicated that the mean and median speed, exit traffic efficiency decreased initially and increased afterwards with the increase of intersecting angles when the volume was 1,000 p/h/m and 3,000 p/h/m, while the speed standard deviation changing inversely. However, these four factors show the opposite variation tendency in volume 5,000 p/h/m. Meanwhile, the quadratic function was selected to fit them. It is found that the worst speeds of pedestrian streams were 131° and 122° in volume 1,000 p/h/m and 3,000 p/h/m, respectively, and the greatest influence on pedestrian streams was 125° in volume 5,000 p/h/m. The results of this research can help establish the foundation for the organization and optimization of intersecting pedestrian streams.

The number of registered commercial freight vehicles is constantly increasing, increasing therefore as well the traffic load on the roads in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A significant part of freight vehicles moving along the main and regional roads are overloaded and cause significant damage to road infrastructure, affect road safety and result in an increase of emissions of harmful gases for people and the environment. The overloading rate is extremely high, in particular with 5-axle trucks representing 58.7%. The research showed that the increased overload level ranges from 10-20% of the maximum permissible weight. The importance of load limits was recognized early in the history of road development. This interrelation led directly to limitations on vehicle loads, and laws were enacted in many countries to establish the maximum allowable motor vehicle sizes and weights. Strict enforcement of motor vehicle size and weight laws is a step toward reducing motor vehicle size and weight violations, heavy truck accidents, and, even more, improving road maintenance, rehabilitation expenditures and road safety. Thus, based on the applied model the objective of this paper is to evaluate and optimize the locations of truck weigh stations on the road network of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Short-term forecasting of the remaining parking space is important for urban parking guidance systems (PGS). The previous methods like polynomial equations and neural network methods are difficult to be applied in practice because of low accuracy or lengthy initial training time which is unfavourable if real-time training is carried out on adapting to changing traffic conditions. To forecast the remaining parking space in real-time with higher accuracy and improve the performances of PGS, this study develops an online forecasting model based on a time series method. By analysing the characteristics of data collected in Nanjing, China, an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model has been established and a real-time forecasting procedure developed. The performance of this proposed model has been further analysed and compared with the performances of a neural network method and the Markov chain method. The results indicate that the mean error of the proposed model is about 2 vehicles per 15 minutes, which can meet the requirements for general PGS. Furthermore, this method outperforms the neural network model and the Markov chain method both in individual and collective error analysis. In summary, the proposed online forecasting method appears to be promising for forecasting the remaining parking space in supporting the PGS.

The shipping market is an economic derivative of global production and trade, being precariously subject of their cyclic changes, depressions and expansions. This paper analyses the condition of global container shipping market, caused by long-lasting economic and financial crisis that begun in 2008, but is still much visible within the container industry, particularly through overcapacity and low freight rates. It also deals with major changes of maritime container carrier’s management strategies, development and application of advanced transportation, technological, technical, economical, organizational and commercial measures in order to adapt and cope with new business environment. Finally, an attempt is made to forecast the market, potential difficulties and to propose problem-solving measures.

Safety systems detect unsafe conditions and provide warnings for travellers to take action and avoid crashes. Estimation of the geographical location of a moving vehicle as to where it will be positioned next with high precision and short computation time is crucial for identifying dangers. To this end, navigational and dynamic data of a vehicle are processed in connection with the data received from neighbouring vehicles and infrastructure in the same vicinity. In this study, a vehicular location prediction model was developed using an artificial neural network for cooperative active safety systems. The model is intended to have a constant, shorter computation time as well as higher accuracy features. The performance of the proposed model was measured with a real-time testbed developed in this study. The results are compared with the performance of similar studies and the proposed model is shown to deliver a better performance than other models.

With the continuous expansion of urban scales and the constant growth of traffic demands, it has become important to accurately predict the distribution of traffic flow so as to relieve the traffic jams and lower the energy consumption. This research mainly focuses on the distribution problem of traffic flow in the urban traffic network. A minimization program has been provided as an alternative formulation for the turning delay stochastic user equilibrium problem. The paper derives the Weibull distribution-based node-link random loading mechanism of turning delay for direct calculation of link and turning flows that are consistent with the
path flow, thus avoiding the enumeration of turning paths. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the turning delay stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) model and the nodelink- based algorithm. The experiment demonstrates that the present method can reflect the relative performance of link and turning costs well, while presenting its advantages in the simulation of large-scale turning delay flow  ssignment.

This paper presents a procedure for analysing safety and operational improvements made possible by converting traffic circles to modern roundabouts. An Italian case study is presented for alternative layouts under various traffic demand scenarios. In the application of the procedure, the average waiting times and queue lengths at entries are computed with an analytical capacity model, using default values for gap parameters. Then, the roundabout is dynamically simulated. The simulation results in a revised set of gap parameters that are in turn used as inputs to a second trial of the capacity model, and in turn fed back into the simulation. The two steps are repeated until the parameters reach a pre-selected convergence criterion, so that gap parameter values for both the static capacity and dynamic microsimulation models are in equilibrium. Therefore, the applied procedure can conduct both static and dynamic roundabout design, usually applied separately. One can start with default values in guidelines and couple them with limited field data, improving both the expected results and cost-effectiveness of solutions. Next, safety is estimated using dynamic simulation software and a compatible conflict counting model to acquire surrogate measures of safety. Level-of-service
and surrogate safety indicators for the existing and redesigned roundabouts are then compared. The procedure is first demonstrated on an old “ultra-large” roundabout. The procedure is tested on this roundabout using the Highway Capacity Manual 2016 (HCM2016), AimsunTM, and Surrogate Safety Assessment Model (SSAM) software. A redesign is shown to be far superior in efficiency and safety. Finally, two cases are described where large first generation roundabouts
were upgraded to modern standards.

It is well known that road accidents tend to be more frequent in locations where a sudden change in road characteristics violates the driver's expectations. Most methods used to assess the design consistency are based on simplified speed profiles that give a coarse description of the vehicle dynamics along the road. This paper presents a new approach to quantify the road design consistency, based on continuous operating speed profiles. These profiles are based on the Gipps’ car-following equations, adapted to simulate the driver behaviour in the vicinity of horizontal curves under free-flow conditions. A methodology to calibrate and validate the Gipps’ behavioural parameters from field data is presented and applied to predict the speed profiles of three drivers for a set of rural road segments. The calibration is based on trajectory data collected with an instrumented vehicle and it follows an automated procedure that aims to minimize the differences between the predicted and observed speed profiles. The new consistency index is based on the deceleration distances and it allows to overcome some limitations of the existing methods.

The Panama Canal (PC) expansion will have an impact on trading patterns and the manner in which goods are transported around the world. Once the third set of locks at the Canal began their operation, it was clear that the way in which vessels transited the canal and their maximum dimensions were going to change. As such, the expanded Canal will undoubtedly mean that a new kind of vessel will come into existence. In terms of dimensions, these Neopanamax ships will be adapted to how the locks operate. However, this effect will not be the same across the full range of traffic. After the first transit on 26 June 2016, it was possible to obtain access to transit data for Neopanamax ships. A thorough statistical study of these new datasets would involve analysing how these new locks impact the vessel size and seaborne transport.