E-business impacts for urban freight: results from an Australian study

E-Business is expected to dramatically change the way business is conducted internationally, nationally, within states and at the local area level. Moreover, these changes are very likely to happen well within the planning time frames required for provision of transport infrastructure and services. E-business is defined as including e-commerce, either between Businesses to Business (B2B) or Business to Customers (B2C), and the adoption of electronic technology within businesses. This paper presents some results from a study commissioned by the Australian National Transport Secretariat (NTS) to assist Australian business and government pro-actively address the transport issues arising from e-business. The resulting working papers will be used to establish a research framework for identifying policy and planning levers to maximize benefits to Australia from national and global e-business activity. The study sought to investigate three principal questions on e-business impacts: how will the transport task change; what will be affected; and how can the transport system respond? Current literature suggests that growth in e-business stems from the combined existence of market demand, suitable enabling technology, and skills and familiarity in management/users/ industry/government. The results of the study suggest that e-business will have implications for urban freight including higher levels of demand for goods and services, increased requirements for logistics distribution, changes in location preferences and improved transport network performance

Three essays on horizontal regulation limiting alcohol sales

2022 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation considers the impact of loosening horizontal regulations that limit competition among alcohol retailers on producers, retailers, and consumers. A recent trend towards the liberalization of alcohol retail has led many states, including Washington, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Utah, Kansas, and Colorado, to relax horizontal restrictions and allow for the sale of alcohol at grocery and convenience stores. Prior to the law changes, the sale of almost all alcoholic beverages was restricted to liquor stores. The new retail channels have created opportunities and challenges for alcohol producers and traditional retailers while creating more choices for consumers. The first chapter provides a brief overview of the alcohol industry and regulation in the U.S. The second chapter examines how the legalization of full-strength beer sales in grocery and convenience stores impacted craft brewers in Colorado, a core region for craft beer production. A statewide survey of the marketing strategies of craft breweries revealed that the new retail channels brought limited change to how craft breweries sell beer. Large breweries appear able to leverage their scale and brand recognition to gain access to the grocery stores, while smaller breweries face significant logistical and distribution barriers. Grocery stores captured a substantial share of craft beer sales at the expense of liquor stores. Sales of craft beer in convenience stores remain negligible. The third chapter investigates the effect of liberalized beer sales on Colorado liquor stores. While prior research has examined the effects of alcohol liberalization on liquor stores at the state-level, the impact may vary between rural and urban communities. I exploit a novel dataset containing firm-level foot traffic patterns from SafeGraph Inc. to investigate the impact of liberalizing beer sales on liquor store foot traffic using two empirical approaches: interrupted time series analysis and state space forecasting. The policy change caused liquor store foot traffic to substantially decline in urban counties, but had no impact in rural counties, suggesting that rural liquor store shoppers did not substantially change shopping behavior. I discuss the implications for alcohol retailers, producers, and consumers. In my final chapter, I broaden my analysis of the effect of liberalized alcohol sales on liquor stores to include two additional states: Oklahoma and Kansas. I exploit heterogeneity in state policy to determine whether different levels of alcohol liberalization (e.g. legalizing beer and wine sales outside of liquor stores vs legalizing beer sales only) impacts the magnitude of the effect on consumers' decision to shop at liquor stores. I estimate the effect in each state using firm-level foot traffic data from SafeGraph Inc. and a novel difference-in-differences estimator. I find that alcohol liberalization had a substantial negative impact on liquor store foot traffic in all states, however, my ability to differentiate the impact of different levels of alcohol liberalization was limited. Results can help policy makers weigh the costs to liquor stores against the benefit to consumers

A sequence to sequence long short-term memory network for footwear sales forecasting

Footwear sales forecasting is a critical task for supporting product managerial decisions, such as the management of footwear stocks and production levels. In this paper, we explore a recently proposed Sequence to Sequence (Seq2Seq) Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning architecture for multi-step ahead footwear sales Time Series Forecasting (TSF). The analyzed Seq2Seq LSTM neural network is compared with two popular TSF methods, namely ARIMA and Prophet. Using real-world data from a Portuguese footwear company, several computational experiments were held. Focusing on daily sales, we analyze data recently collected during a 3-year period (2019-2021) and related with seven types of products (e.g., sandals). The evaluation assumed a robust and realistic rolling window scheme that considers 28 training and testing iterations, each related with one week of multi-step ahead predictions. Overall, competitive predictions were obtained by the proposed LSTM model, resulting in a weekly Normalized Mean Absolute Error (NMAE) that ranges from 5% to 11%.- This work was financed by the project "GreenShoes 4.0 Calcado, Marroquinaria e Tecnologias Avancadas de Materiais, Equipamentos e Software" (N. POCI-01-0247-FEDER-046082), supported by COMPETE 2020, under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF)

A novel Big Data analytics and intelligent technique to predict driver's intent

Modern age offers a great potential for automatically predicting the driver's intent through the increasing miniaturization of computing technologies, rapid advancements in communication technologies and continuous connectivity of heterogeneous smart objects. Inside the cabin and engine of modern cars, dedicated computer systems need to possess the ability to exploit the wealth of information generated by heterogeneous data sources with different contextual and conceptual representations. Processing and utilizing this diverse and voluminous data, involves many challenges concerning the design of the computational technique used to perform this task. In this paper, we investigate the various data sources available in the car and the surrounding environment, which can be utilized as inputs in order to predict driver's intent and behavior. As part of investigating these potential data sources, we conducted experiments on e-calendars for a large number of employees, and have reviewed a number of available geo referencing systems. Through the results of a statistical analysis and by computing location recognition accuracy results, we explored in detail the potential utilization of calendar location data to detect the driver's intentions. In order to exploit the numerous diverse data inputs available in modern vehicles, we investigate the suitability of different Computational Intelligence (CI) techniques, and propose a novel fuzzy computational modelling methodology. Finally, we outline the impact of applying advanced CI and Big Data analytics techniques in modern vehicles on the driver and society in general, and discuss ethical and legal issues arising from the deployment of intelligent self-learning cars

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. Strategic Corporate Research Report

[Excerpt] Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (hereinafter Wal-Mart) is the second-largest company in the world. It has more annual revenue than the GDP of Switzerland. It sells more DVDs, magazines, books, CDs, dog food, diapers, bicycles, toys, toothpaste, jewelry, and groceries than any other retailer does worldwide. It is the largest retailer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the second-largest in the United Kingdom, and the third largest in Brazil, With its partners, it is the largest retailer in Central America. Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and it has 1.8 million employees around the globe. Wal-Mart is so huge that it effectively sets the terms for large swaths of the global economy, from retail wages to apparel prices to transoceanic shipping rates to the location of toy factories. Indeed, if there is one single aspect to understand about the company, it is the fact that Wal-Mart is transforming the relations of production in virtually every product category it sells, through its relationships with suppliers. But its influence goes far beyond the economy. It sets social policy by refusing to sell certain types of birth control. Its construction of supercenters molds the landscape, shapes traffic patterns, and alters the local commercial mix. The retail goliath shapes culture by selling the music of patriotic country singer Garth Brooks but not the critical (and hilarious) The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (the Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction. It influences politics by donating millions to conservative politicians and think tanks. Wal-Mart is, in short, one of the most powerful entities in the world. Not surprisingly, Wal-Mart has developed a long list of critics, including unions, human rights organizations, religious groups, environmental activists, community organizations, small business groups, academics, children’s rights groups, and even institutional investors. These groups have exposed the company’s illegal union-busting tactics, its many violations of overtime laws, its abuse of child labor, its egregious healthcare policies, its super-exploitation of immigrant workers, its rampant gender discrimination, the horrific labor conditions at its suppliers’ factories, and its unlawful environmental degradation. They have also chronicled the deleterious effect Wal-Mart has on the public coffers and the quality of community life. New Wal-Mart stores and distribution centers often swallow up government subsidies and tax breaks, take public land, create more congestion, reduce overall wages, destroy retail variety, and increase public outlays for healthcare. To its critics, Wal-Mart represents the worst aspects of 21st-eentury capitalism. Wal-Mart usually counters any criticism with two words: low prices. It is a powerful mantra in a consumerist world. The company does make more products affordable to more people, and that is nothing to sneeze at when wages are stagnant, jobs insecure, pensions disappearing, and health coverage shrinking. With low prices, Wal-Mart helps working men and women get more from their meager paychecks, more necessities like bread, and more luxuries, like roses, too. It is a brilliant and incontrovertible argument, and Wal-Mart’s most ardent defenders take it even farther. They say its obsession with low prices makes the entire economy more efficient and more productive. Suppliers and competitors have to produce more and better products with the same resources, and that redounds to everyone. In the micro, it means falling prices and rising product quality. In the macro, it means economic growth, more jobs, and higher tax revenues. To its defenders, Wal-Mart represents the best aspects of 21st-century capitalism. Despite their radical opposition, critics and defenders of the world’s largest corporation agree on one thing: Wal-Mart represents 21st-century capitalism. It symbolizes a system of increasing market penetration and decreasing social regulation, where more and more aspects of life around the world are subject to economic competition. Wal-Mart’s success rests upon the ongoing destruction of social power in favor of corporate power. It takes advantage of the conditions of the neo-liberal world, from the availability of instant and inexpensive global communication to the continuing collapse of agricultural employment around the world to the rapid diffusion of technological innovation to the oversupply of subjugated migrant labor in nearly every country to the continued existence of undemocratic and corporate-dominated governments. For some, this is as it should be, all part of capitalism’s natural and ultimately benign development. For the rest of us, Wal-Mart is at the heart of what is wrong with the world

Aeronautical Engineering. A continuing bibliography with indexes, supplement 156

This bibliography lists 288 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in December 1982