ROUTE SELECTION AND TRADE-OFFS EVALUATION OF THE INTERMODAL FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION

Identification of optimum routes and mode of transport play vital roles in freight transport decision making. This paper presents the research carried out for the modelling and analysis of intermodal transport network. The study evaluates the trade-offs associated with different modes of freight transportation. Geographic Information System (GIS) and MATLAB were applied to design the hypothetical intermodal freight transportation network, modelling, analysis and user-interface design. An optimum route and transport mode for different pairs of origins and destinations were determined across decision objectives such as distance, time, emission and cost. The trade-offs among different modes of freight transportation were explored. Based on the assumptions of this study, the results showed that the road was the fastest mode, while waterway was not only the most costefficient but also was the most environmental-friendly transport mode in terms of carbon dioxide emission. Although the transport network of the study was small size and hypothetical, this paper demonstrates the potentiality of this methodology for analysing larger and real intermodal networks

LINEAR KERNEL SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES FOR MODELING PORE-WATER PRESSURE RESPONSES

Pore-water pressure responses are vital in many aspects of slope management, design and monitoring. Its measurement however, is difficult, expensive and time consuming. Studies on its predictions are lacking. Support vector machines with linear kernel was used here to predict the responses of pore-water pressure to rainfall. Pore-water pressure response data was collected from slope instrumentation program. Support vector machine meta-parameter calibration and model development was carried out using grid search and k-fold cross validation. The mean square error for the model on scaled test data is 0.0015 and the coefficient of determination is 0.9321. Although pore-water pressure response to rainfall is a complex nonlinear process, the use of linear kernel support vector machine can be employed where high accuracy can be sacrificed for computational ease and time

GEOSTATISTICAL BASED SUSCEPTIBILITY MAPPING OF SOIL EROSION AND OPTIMIZATION OF ITS CAUSATIVE FACTORS: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Soil erosion hazard is the second biggest environmental challenges after population growth causing land degradation, desertification and water deterioration. Its impacts on watersheds include loss of soil nutrients, reduced reservoir capacity through siltation which may lead to flood risk, landslide, high water turbidity, etc. These problems become more pronounced in human altered mountainous areas through intensive agricultural activities, deforestation and increased urbanization among others. However, due to challenging nature of soil erosion management, there is great interest in assessing its spatial distribution and susceptibility levels. This study is thus intend to review the recent literatures and develop a novel framework for soil erosion susceptibility mapping using geostatistical based support vector machine (SVM), remote sensing and GIS techniques. The conceptual framework is to bridge the identified knowledge gaps in the area of causative factors’ (CFs) selection. In this research, RUSLE model, field studies and the existing soil erosion maps for the study area will be integrated for the development of inventory map. Spatial data such as Landsat 8, digital soil and geological maps, digital elevation model and hydrological data shall be processed for the extraction of erosion CFs. GISbased SVM techniques will be adopted for the establishment of spatial relationships between soil erosion and its CFs, and subsequently for the development of erosion susceptibility maps. The results of this study include evaluation of predictive capability of GIS-based SVM in soil erosion mapping and identification of the most influential CFs for erosion susceptibility assessment. This study will serve as a guide to watershed planners and to alleviate soil erosion challenges and its related hazards

Comparative analysis of single- and multi-criteria container transport modes in Peninsular Malaysia

This study investigates the transport of containers via intermodal transport network of Peninsular Malaysia by comparatively analysing the use of trucks, trains and ships with respect to time, CO2 emission and cost. The study is aimed at proposing the best route/mode of container transport in Peninsular Malaysia. ArcMap and MATLAB were employed to identify the single-objective route/modal choices. The multi-criteria route/modal choices were achieved by integrating the Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique (SMART) and sensitivity analysis. The single-objective results indicated that the use of trucks on road was the fastest mode of container transport. However, the combination of ship and train was the most environmental-friendly for Case 1, while transport by ship generated the least CO2 emission for Case 2. Train was found to be the cheapest mode of container transport, followed by ship and truck. It can be inferred from the multi-criteria analysis that container transport via rail is the ideal and least-cost route and mode of transport.</p

Route/Modal choice analysis and tradeoffs evaluation of the intermodal transport network of Peninsular Malaysia

In Malaysia, containerized freight transport has been growing and is expected to continue in that trend in the future. This research aims to provide a model for the assessment of containerized freight movement through intermodal transport network of Peninsular Malaysia. To design such a model, ArcMap software was used to build the transport network and MATLAB software was used to design the user-interface and to develop shortest path algorithm for analyzing the transport network. The focus of the analysis was to identify the optimum route and mode(s) of transport from origin to destination for different objective functions such as distance, time, emission and cost. Besides, the study explored tradeoffs associated with least-distance, least-time, least-emission and least-cost routes. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model, two case studies were analyzed. The presented methodology and procedures are applicable not only on any origin-destination pair in the transport network of Malaysia, but also on any other intermodal transport networks

Productivity Enhancement of a Double Slope Solar Still Coupled with a Solar System

Water shortage is rising to become a global challenge due to the variations in climate change and population increment. Converting the seawater to potable water using the desalination technology is among the existing options highlighted by researchers. However, these processes are expensive and require much energy to operate. The solar desalination technology was reported as highly adequate since it utilizes the natural sunlight and the simple concepts of evaporation and condensation to produce the drinking water. The main challenge to date is the low productivity of the technology, which must be adequately improved in order to enhance productivity and optimize performance. In this study, the productivity and efficiency of conventional double slope solar still were assessed using a solar system. Two solar still models (active and passive) were fabricated with the same evaporation and condensation areas. The troughs were made of stainless steel with dimensions of 50×32 ×5 cm. In turn, while the cover was made of glass with dimensions of 48×60×0.3 cm and the inclination angle was 60°. In addition, the solar system consisted of two solar panels with 50 W capacity each, one battery of 100 Ah – 12 V, a charging controller of 30 A, and a single immersed DC water heater of 50 W – 12 V capacity. Both models were tested simultaneously for two sunny days, 24 hours each. The results showed that the water productivity of the active solar still was 55% higher than that of the passive solar still. On 15th July, the total amounts of solar still productivity were 7.85 L/m2/d and 19.3 L/m2/d for active and passive stills, respectively. This is due to the existence of the heating element in the active still which allowed it to produce water for 24 hours continuously. Moreover, the trough temperature was found to be the highest for both models, because it was made from steel. Finally, the produced water in both cases was found to be directly proportional to such parameters as solar radiation intensity and ambient temperature