Solid barriers represent danger for the driver in case of traffic lane escape. This threat can be represented by a drainage ditch culvert face. The access bridge is not usually conspicuous enough near the traffic lane so that the driver could ditch and crash this barrier in case of an exceptional situation such as avoidance manoeuvres. This work deals with a technical solution of access bridges with an integrated deformation zone which was designed on the ground of a detailed analysis of current types of the construction. The new technical solution was proved by means of a numerical simulation of passenger car impact and compared with the current design of culvert faces.

The Baltic Sea shipping is at a crossroads as sulphur regulation will lead to excessive cost increases from the year 2015 onwards and CO2 emission trading is planned to be implemented for the entire shipping sector within the EU area. Therefore, shipping is going to be minimized and hinterland transportation (road and rail) will act as substitute. This research analyzes the situation on one of the highest volume general cargo transportation routes of Finland (operating between Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia), including loading and unloading at seaports and short sea shipping activity in between. Based on the efficiency evaluation results, it seems that containers should be favoured over semi-trailers – containers could be carried efficiently either in container ships or even at currently favoured RoRo or RoPax ships. Our research illustrates that pure container shipping with larger container ships within the analyzed route is not entirely out of question, but lead time and hinterland operations should receive more attention. Alternatively, RoRo and RoPax ships can also do something to increase their competitiveness in environmental harm caused and diesel consumption – higher cargo loads and utilization levels are short-term key for continued dominance.

With the rapidly increasing global energy needs, offshore oil production has become an attractive source of energy. Supplying offshore oil production installations is a complex logistics problem that hinges on many factors with significant uncertainties. So, it is critical to provide the necessary supplies and services without interruption. In a typical offshore oil production effort, oil companies charter most or all drilling units as well as offshore supply vessels (OSV). The type and duration of charter contract has direct impact on the project budget as vessels market is closely correlated with the world market crude oil price which can have daily significant fluctuations. As the region of West Africa is one of the world’s busiest offshore exploration and oil production markets employing 12% of the world’s fleet, exploring its issues, was taken to study the relations between daily OSV rates and crude oil price. The research results presented in this paper show correlation between OSV daily rates and crude oil price with broader fluctuations in crude oil price.

Using new optimization methods and information-communications technology has become the key issue in the competition among the distributers of fast-moving consumer goods. Introducing a delivery optimization system instead of manual routing enables significant cost savings. The prerequisites for optimization are stable information system and efficient company management. The rich vehicle routing problem model is discussed and the effects of implementing the delivery optimization system are presented. For four years of continuous utilisation, the system has helped the distributer to reduce the overall distribution costs. It also made possible to close down several depots and handle more customer requests without investing in the vehicle fleet. The developed optimization system enabled the distributer to adapt to the new distribution schedule and react to first indicators of recession very fast.

This paper considers the effects of combination of two different approaches in developing seaports positioning strategy. The first one is based on comparing the most important quantitative and qualitative seaports choice criteria by benchmarking method. Benchmarking has been used in creating the appropriate model for efficient marketing positioning of Aegean, Adriatic and Black Sea seaports. The criteria that describe the degree of these seaports competitiveness are chosen upon the investigation of ports customers’ preferences. The second employed approach based on matrix game concept has been used for the purpose of optimal repositioning of the ports. Though, nine selected ports’ functions are treated in a way that they are divided into two sets: one composed of the functions which are to be developed, and the other consisted of the functions for which it is expected to be suppressed in the future. According to the numerically obtained results the ports are repositioned, and corresponding explanations are given in the marketing manner. The mixture of these two concepts should contribute to the review of the state of these business systems and their images at the market, as well as to open prospective toward finding out the ways of creating and maintaining their competitive advantages.

A major problem addressed in railway network planning relates to distinguishing the role of the railway line in the network, and making a reasonable classification of the lines based on their role. Accessibility has been widely used to measure the role of transportation infrastructure in various studies, but few quantitative models for the classification of the role have been presented yet. In this paper, the line accessibility classification model is proposed, which aims to distinguish the role of railway lines in the network and to classify the lines into different grades. The practicability of the model is demonstrated through the case study of Northeast China railway network where the railway lines in Northeast China can be classified into three grades. The line accessibility classification model is supposed to be a strategic decision support tool for planners and policy makers to determine the classification of railway lines.

With the evolution of advanced wireless communication technologies, tremendous efforts have been invested in vehicular networking, particularly the construction of a vehicle-to-vehicle communication system that supports high speed and mobility. In vehicle-to-vehicle communication environment, vehicles constantly exchange information using wireless technology.

In this study, a bi-level formulation is presented for solving the Equilibrium Network Design Problem (ENDP). The optimisation of the signal timing has been carried out at the upper-level using the Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA), whilst the traffic assignment has been carried out through the Path Flow Estimator (PFE) at the lower level. The results of HSA have been first compared with those obtained using the Genetic Algorithm, and the Hill Climbing on a two-junction network for a fixed set of link flows. Secondly, the HSA with PFE has been applied to the medium-sized network to show the applicability of the proposed algorithm in solving the ENDP. Additionally, in order to test the sensitivity of perceived travel time error, we have used the HSA with PFE with various level of perceived travel time. The results showed that the proposed method is quite simple and efficient in solving the ENDP.

Road freight transportation between provinces of a country has an important effect on the traffic flow of intercity transportation networks. Therefore, an accurate estimation of the road freight transportation for provinces of a country is so crucial to improve the rural traffic operation in a large scale management. Accordingly, the focused case study database in this research is the information related to Iran’s provinces in the year 2008. Correlation between road freight transportation with variables such as transport cost and distance, population, average household income and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of each province is calculated. Results clarify that the population is the most effective factor in the prediction of provinces’ transported freight. Linear Regression Model (LRM) is calibrated based on the population variable, and afterwards Fuzzy Regression Algorithm (FRA) is generated on the basis of the LRM. The proposed FRA is an intelligent modified algorithm with an accurate prediction and fitting ability. This methodology can be significantly useful in macro-level planning problems where decreasing prediction error values is one of the most important concerns for decision makers. In addition, Back-Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) is developed to evaluate the prediction capability of the models and to be compared with FRA. According to the final results, the modified FRA estimates road freight transportation values more accurately than the BPNN and LRM. Finally, in order to predict the road freight transportation values, the reliability of the calibrated models is analyzed using the information of the year 2009. Results show higher reliability for the proposed modified FRA.

The analysis of the experiences in European cities, following the implementation of different transport policy measures, has led to a conclusion that parking policy measures have the dominant effect on the choice of private car as a mode of transport. This effect is the greatest for the commutes to work, characterized by the longest duration of parking space occupancy. Given the aforementioned experiences in developed European cities, the main aim of the study presented here was the determination of a relationship between limiting the duration of parking space occupancy in the Novi Sad city centre and the transport participants’ decision whether or not to use passenger car to commute to work. Based on the established interdependence between these parameters, we developed a mathematical model for calculating a number of expected car (commuting) journeys that terminate in the city centre as a function of limited duration of parking space occupancy.

Since 1996 to 2006, Iran‟s population structure experienced considerable changes. During the mentioned period, the share of the population under 15 decreased from 39.6% to 28%. Considering this decrease, Iran‟s population was quickly guided to oldness which will have irreversible social and economical repercussions on the country‟s future progress. The main objective of this study is to estimate the effects of the elderly on the moving stream of the other pedestrians in Iran‟s sidewalks, which is done for the first time in Iran using the Micro-Simulation method. The Micro-Simulation model of pedestrians is a computerized simulation procedure in which the moving behavior of each pedestrian such as speed, path, and the direction is considered separately. According to the obtained results from this study, an increase in the percentage of the elderly population can lower the sidewalk's level of service. Also, the decrease of the average motion speed and the free walking space for wider paths is not necessarily less than that of narrow paths; in a way that by increasing the width of a sidewalk, pedestrians‟ total average speed and the average walking space decrease up to a specific width and then, start to increase. This decrease in wider sidewalks is more than that in more narrow ones.

Safety in highways is one of the most important subjects in Transportation Engineering. Increasing rate of vehicles and the needs to design or geometrically modifying the highways, emphasized on the safe-designing of the roadways more than before. Between the constructive components of the highway, horizontal curves due to the more occurrences of accidents are of great importance. The American ministry of highway and transportation introduced the software IHSDM, with variant capabilities, to predict accidents. In this research, five types of curves (simple circle curve and clothoid-circle-clothoid) at different intersection angles were designed, and accident rates based on the standard specifications on each curve was predicted by using the IHSDM, and the results are compared with each other. Finally, by processing the curves of accident rates versus the curves types and intersection angle, and comparing them with each other, the necessity of using spiral curves in the highway design is emphasized.

Environmental and occupational noise is common nuisance that affects the health of employees. Performed health checks of employees engaged by Company “Pomorski Saobraćaj” showed that 5% of examined sailors had hearing loss. The results were a trigger for starting experiment on noise risk assessment with objective to discover possibilities of noise pollution presence, precise significant noise sources and describe solutions for eliminating negative effects.

Several measurements on five positions were performed on ferry boat “KAMENARI”, according to EC Physical Agents Directive and Merchant Shipping and Fishing Vessels Regulations 2007.

Noise on selected positions exceeded the limit for about 1-5dB. Noise exposure level was 84.5dB. Diesel engine, exhaust system and structural noise were main sources of excessive noise.

Experiment shows noise presence as nuisance that affects sailors. Noise presents a serious threat for sailor’s health. It interferes with crew communication and jeopardizes navigation safety. Technical measures, crew health checks and noise monitoring could prevent all negative effects.

The study determines the correlation between the application of advanced models and methods of inventory optimisation in the supply chain in relation to the satisfaction of employees who are responsible for managing the inventory optimisation processes. The previous studies confirm that the optimisation of inventory management in the supply chain insures competitive advantages on the market. There is space for further research of impact of the achieved inventory optimisation in the supply chain on the change of the employees’ satisfaction. The paper establishes the interrelation of the interdependence of the achieved inventory optimisations on the satisfaction of the employees and the related synergy effects of acquiring added value of the companies on the market oriented to the satisfaction of the buyers and service users. The research has defined new knowledge in interdependence of inventory management optimisation on the change of indicators of employees’ satisfaction. Based on the performed research an assumption has been created for the design of an application package (so-called XaaS-based services) for the management of interaction processes of inventory optimization in the supply chain, satisfaction of service users and employees.

The Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the most studied combinatorial optimization problem which is significant in many practical applications in transportation problems. The TSP problem is NP-hard problem and requires large computation power to be solved by the exact algorithms. In the past few years, fast development of general-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) has brought huge improvement in decreasing the applications’ execution time. In this paper, we implement 2-opt and 3-opt local search operators for solving the TSP on the GPU using CUDA. The novelty presented in this paper is a new parallel iterated local search approach with 2-opt and 3-opt operators for symmetric TSP, optimized for the execution on GPUs. With our implementation large TSP problems (up to 85,900 cities) can be solved using the GPU. We will show that our GPU implementation can be up to 20x faster without losing quality for all TSPlib problems as well as for our CRO TSP problem.

The objective of this study is to identify the influencing factors of crash rates from the perspective of access management techniques in urban areas. The target areas are located in the Las Vegas Metropolitan area, and 19 arterials are selected. In order to address the interdependency between crash rates and travel speeds, and left-censored issue, a tobit model with endogenous variable is presented. The structure of the tobit model addresses the left-censored issue for the segments meanwhile the endogeneity issue between crash rates and travel speeds is explained. The results indicate that there is a strong interdependency between crash rates and travel speeds. The segment length, driveway density, median opening density, posted speed limit and AADT per lane are statistically significant factors that influence crash rates on segments, moreover, crash rates are significantly influenced by two-directional median opening density. 

The contribution deals with the customers’ claims on provided services during train delay in personal railway transport. There is comparison between the situation in the Czech Republic (Brno main station) and Austria (Wien Westbahnhof) in the contribution. Development of the compensation policy cannot be based only on customer requirements. If the railway company focuses on providing compensation for delays, it must follow its economic balance. However, as the passengers' opinion survey showed, the negative impact of delays can be reduced by providing adequate information to passengers. Based on the passengers' opinion survey, it is necessary to consider the Regulation 1371/2007/ES as the minimum of the possible and on the basis of this reasoning to compile a compensation policy. The costs associated with compensation for the delay should be divided according to the causes of the delay among the individual culprits, so that railway undertakings bear the responsibility even for delays arising from reasons that are beyond the control of the railway undertaking itself.

The wrong behavior of the road traffic participants is a permanently discussed issue in many countries with advanced road transport. Such behavior doesn’t always result in traffic accident, but only in restriction or danger of the culprit or other participants. For monitoring the behavior problems we can for example use the video-analysis of the conflict situations.

The methodology of the conflict situations monitoring with the video-apparatus application is described in the paper presented. There are also results of the conflict situations analysis on the selected roundabouts in the Czech Republic.

The paper refers to suitability of the conflict situations video-analysis application not only for monitoring the wrong behavior of drivers and other participants of road traffic, but also for monitoring the inappropriately designed building elements (this hypothesis is confirmed by results of research, which are shown this article).

There is need for better understanding of how mobility management interventions work and how they affect the individuals’ modal choice decisions, as well as need for robust evaluation techniques allowing any behavioural changes to be observed. Changing individual’s behaviour is not a one-step process and any evaluation methodology should account for this. A new standardized expert evaluation resource MaxSUMO takes this step-wise process into account. MaxSUMO is based on a new theoretical behavioural change model MaxSEM which measures individuals’ stage positions (their susceptibility to change behaviour) and stage movement (progression towards actual behavioural change). This paper illustrates the use of MaxSUMO by the evaluation of the mobility campaign “I keep moving, even without my car” undertaken by the City of Ghent.