THE DECISION TO UNDERTAKE VOCATIONAL HIGHER EDUCATION IN SHIPPING AND LOGISTICS IN THE UK

This work investigates the decision to study shipping and logistics at advanced levels in the UK. Documented evidence reports and analyses the perceptions of students on vocational courses in shipping, transport and logistics and investigates why they chose their particular fields of study. A range of instruments are presented to analyse how students perceived that they had arrived at their study decisions, including national surveys of undergraduates in maritime business, postgraduates in shipping and logistics and professionals contemplating updating short courses. Qualitative, quantitative and mapping methods are presented along with perceptions of relevant professional outcome roles and other factors. Exploratory approaches to proposing and evaluating alternative approaches to teaching aimed at raising the student's perception of the nature of professional skills requirements were predicated by identifying and defining local student schemae and tailoring aids to their specific learning and teaching requirements. A cognitive mapping approach enabled comparisons of perceptions between postgraduates, whose individual beliefs, after being mapped and modelled as a directed network, were analysed, and differences between maps were quantified. Quantitative pairwise map comparisons included 54 individuals generating 1430 synchronal comparisons in one cohort and four diachronal cohort comparisons. These revealed that distance measures constrained by the numbers of transmitters or receivers, and the strength of relationships where appropriate, formed the best discriminators. Empirical and theoretical explanations of maps and attempts to compare particular subgroups and explain differences were often inconclusive. A unified social cognitive theory of career and academic interest, choice and performance generated useful propositions relating to how individuals manage issues of self-efFicacy, expected outcomes from decisions and their personal goals. Substantive work revealed problems of conflicting domains between students' verbatim statements, only weakly coincident with theoretical concepts. Conclusions that mapping is most powerful/when based on qualitative analysis of the richness and diversity of individual perceptions; infer that no simple standard decision process is operating and hence no single recruitment marketing device is apparent. In applying and disseminating findings, where possible, proposals were made to assist organisations promoting careers awareness and recruitment into relevant professions and university based vocational courses, published by relevant professional bodies

Dynamic vehicle routing problems: Three decades and counting

Since the late 70s, much research activity has taken place on the class of dynamic vehicle routing problems (DVRP), with the time period after year 2000 witnessing a real explosion in related papers. Our paper sheds more light into work in this area over more than 3 decades by developing a taxonomy of DVRP papers according to 11 criteria. These are (1) type of problem, (2) logistical context, (3) transportation mode, (4) objective function, (5) fleet size, (6) time constraints, (7) vehicle capacity constraints, (8) the ability to reject customers, (9) the nature of the dynamic element, (10) the nature of the stochasticity (if any), and (11) the solution method. We comment on technological vis-à-vis methodological advances for this class of problems and suggest directions for further research. The latter include alternative objective functions, vehicle speed as decision variable, more explicit linkages of methodology to technological advances and analysis of worst case or average case performance of heuristics.© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Applications of Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process in Urban Mobility System

Importance of urban mobility system is increasing from year to year. This is the reason why decision making process is increasingly complex requiring taking into account more and more different criteria. One of the important and commonly used techniques that support decision making processes is Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) while for the purpose of supporting a more realistic way of decision making, fuzzy logic is used. The paper examines the use of fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) in the urban mobility system. With the use of systematic literature review (SLR) it categorises peer reviewed journals’ articles related to the applications of FAHP in urban mobility system and extracted from Scopus and Web of science database, and analyses them methodologically. Papers were classified based on basic attributes of research papers, features of urban mobility system (UMS) where the FAHP was used, and use characteristics of the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). The results of this study indicated that the use of FAHP in urban mobility system is increasing with the first published paper in 2009. Our review has found that FAHP is used for very different purposes such as evaluation of customer expectations or citing a selection problem. Most often it is used in combination with other methods. Interestingly, there is only one paper that uses FAHP for decision making in the whole urban mobility system

Evaluation of Gender Equality Criteria Related to Social Sustainability in Ports

Ports are developing sustainability frameworks in order to cope with latest requirements from the stakeholders. Economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainability are the three pillars of the topic. Although economic and environmental aspects of sustainability in ports are widely researched in the literature, the social dimension of gender equality research is scarce. To fill the gap, it is important to identify the most important efforts for improving gender equality in ports. The aim of this study is to evaluate the gender equality criterias by port executives in terms of social sustainability. For this purpose, one of the Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods, Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) was used to evaluate the priority weights of five criterias in Turkey.  The results show that recruitment policy is the most important criteria in the field. Therefore, some suggestions are made to port industry to become more socially sustainable by minimizing the gender gap

Maritime Computing Transportation, Environment, and Development: Trends of Data Visualization and Computational Methodologies

This research aims to characterize the field of maritime computing (MC) transportation, environment, and development. It is the first report to discover how MC domain configurations support management technologies. An aspect of this research is the creation of drivers of ocean-based businesses. Systematic search and meta-analysis are employed to classify and define the MC domain. MC developments were first identified in the 1990s, representing maritime development for designing sailboats, submarines, and ship hydrodynamics. The maritime environment is simulated to predict emission reductions, coastal waste particles, renewable energy, and engineer robots to observe the ocean ecosystem. Maritime transportation focuses on optimizing ship speed, maneuvering ships, and using liquefied natural gas and submarine pipelines. Data trends with machine learning can be obtained by collecting a big data of similar computational results for implementing artificial intelligence strategies. Research findings show that modeling is an essential skill set in the 21st century

A review of fuzzy AHP methods for decision-making with subjective judgements

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a broadly applied multi-criteria decision-making method to determine the weights of criteria and priorities of alternatives in a structured manner based on pairwise comparison. As subjective judgments during comparison might be imprecise, fuzzy sets have been combined with AHP. This is referred to as fuzzy AHP or FAHP. An increasing amount of papers are published which describe different ways to derive the weights/priorities from a fuzzy comparison matrix, but seldomly set out the relative benefits of each approach so that the choice of the approach seems arbitrary. A review of various fuzzy AHP techniques is required to guide both academic and industrial experts to choose suitable techniques for a specific practical context. This paper reviews the literature published since 2008 where fuzzy AHP is applied to decision-making problems in industry, particularly the various selection problems. The techniques are categorised by the four aspects of developing a fuzzy AHP model: (i) representation of the relative importance for pairwise comparison, (ii) aggregation of fuzzy sets for group decisions and weights/priorities, (iii) defuzzification of a fuzzy set to a crisp value for final comparison, and (iv) consistency measurement of the judgements. These techniques are discussed in terms of their underlying principles, origins, strengths and weakness. Summary tables and specification charts are provided to guide the selection of suitable techniques. Tips for building a fuzzy AHP model are also included and six open questions are posed for future work

Literature review on shipyard productivity in Indonesia

The shipyard industry plays an important role in supporting fishing activities and efforts to fulfill animal protein for humans. It is an industry that has an orientation to produce a product in the form of a ship. There are two types of shipyards, which are offshore buildings and floating buildings - both are used to build new ships and repair old ships. Based on the level of technology used by the shipyard industry, it is divided into modern, traditional, and semi-modern shipyards. Its productivity can see the advantages and disadvantages of a shipyard to ensure this industry remains to exist. Several factors need to be taken into account to increase the shipyard productivity, including land or location, human resources, technology, and materials.Keywords:ProductivityShipyardTechnolog

R&I smart specialisation strategies: classification of EU regions’ priorities. Results from automatic text analysis

Building on automatic text analysis, this paper proposes an original categorization of Research and Innovation Smart Specialisation Strategy (RIS3) priorities and provides a common language (with detailed dictionaries) to classify priorities and then to associate EU regions to multiclass categories of priorities. This result is a powerful tool to interpret the current state of diversification across regions, with its potential of complementarities and synergies that might support territorial integrated development paths. It would also support regions in their future strategic programmes on RIS3. A case study on the Alpine macro-region shows innovation development paths to outline macroregion strategic planning

A review of Smart Contract Blockchain Based on Multi-Criteria Analysis: Challenges and Motivations

A smart contract is a digital program of transaction protocol (rules of contract) based on the consensus architecture of blockchain. Smart contracts with Blockchain are modern technologies that have gained enormous attention in scientific and practical applications. A smart contract is the central aspect of a blockchain that facilitates blockchain as a platform outside the cryptocurrency spectrum. The development of blockchain technology, with a focus on smart contracts, has advanced significantly in recent years. However research on the smart contract idea has weaknesses in the implementation sectors based on a decentralized network that shares an identical state. This paper extensively reviews smart contracts based on multi criteria analysis challenges and motivations. Therefore, implementing blockchain in multi-criteria research is required to increase the efficiency of interaction between users via supporting information exchange with high trust. Implementing blockchain in the multi-criteria analysis is necessary to increase the efficiency of interaction between users via supporting information exchange and with high confidence, detecting malfunctioning, helping users with performance issues, reaching a consensus, deploying distributed solutions and allocating plans, tasks and joint missions. The smart contract with decision-making performance, planning and execution improves the implementation based on efficiency, sustainability and management. Furthermore the uncertainty and supply chain performance lead to improved users confidence in offering new solutions in exchange for problems in smart contacts. Evaluation includes code analysis and performance while development performance can be under development.Comment: Revie