Intermodal passenger transport and destination competitiveness in Greece

Effective transport is impeded by a number of caveats, including problems of accessibility to the destination, poor infrastructure, social, and environmental issues. In this context, the implementation of intermodal solutions is essential to meet customer demand, resolve problems of transport supply, and enhance destination competitiveness. Based on a suitable theoretical framework, this paper examines the attitude of Greek passengers towards intermodal transport and their willingness-to-pay more to be provided with such a seamless service to allow for (partial at least) cost recovery of the related transport infrastructure. The findings suggest that there are many respondents who would actually pay more to be provided with a door-to-door intermodal travel experience; answers are highly dependent on their place of residence

Airline Deregulation, Competitive Environment and Safety

Air traffic has substantially increased since the introduction of deregulation in both the USA and the European Union. Moreover, aircraft accidents involving fatalities have exhibited a downward trend over time. Still, a series of recently publicized accidents has raised again a serious issue, namely whether cost reduction in a deregulated aviation environment is achieved at the expense of safety standards. To address this question, the paper proposes a mathematical model, which highlights the relationship between competitive behaviour and tort liability. The model has important policy implications suggesting that the level of airline penalisation should be reduced when market rivalry is relaxed and conversely.

Evolving airline and airport business models

Document type: Part of book or chapter of boo

Economic Recession, Job Vulnerability, and Tourism Decision Making: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Occupational uncertainty has a considerable effect upon consumer decisions during a recession, especially with respect to discretionary products and services such as tourism. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the study examines the complex relations among job vulnerability, disposable income for tourism, marketing activities, and price and quality issues for Greek holiday makers returning from their vacations. The article also compares QCA with the two dominant linear methods of analysis (i.e. correlation and regression) and highlights the suitability of QCA when dealing with complexity in tourism. The results reveal four configurations explaining the attributes of Greek residents’ tourism decisions, characterized by value-for-money orientation, achievement of best available purchase, psychological strengthening, and price sensitivity. The study also employs predictive validity for the presented models. The findings are valid from both a methodological and managerial perspective suggesting new research insights

Civil aviation and tourism demand in Montenegro: A panel data approach

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to investigate the role of civil aviation in the case of Montenegro, one of the smallest countries in Europe and one whose economy heavily relies on tourism. Methods: For this research, a dynamic panel data approach is used, where five models are proposed for modelling tourism demand. Available seats per kilometer, the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, jet fuel prices, exchange rates, and seasonality are used as the models' explanatory variables, in line with the available litetrature. Results: The econometric results show that all suggested models are valid, the explanatory variables are statistically significant, and their coefficients have the expected sign, suggesting a strong relationship between tourism demand and civil aviation. Implications: Apart from being one of the first attempts to highlight the civil aviation and tourism nexus in the context of Montenegro, this paper contributes to the literature by suggesting a way forward for destination managers and policymakers in small countries with great tourism potential

Digital Repositories and the Semantic Web: Semantic Search and Navigation for DSpace

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : DSpace User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-21 08:30 AM – 10:00 AMIn many digital repository implementations, resources are often described against some flavor of metadata schema, popularly the Dublin Core Element Set (DCMES), as is the case with the DSpace system. However, such an approach cannot capture richer semantic relations that exist or may be implied, in the sense of a Semantic Web ontology. Therefore we first suggest a method in order to semantically intensify the underlying data model and develop an automatic translation of the flatly organized metadata information to this new ontology. Then we propose an implementation that provides for inference-based knowledge discovery, retrieval and navigation on top of digital repositories, based on this ontology. We apply this technique to real information stored in the University of Patras Institutional Repository that is based on DSpace, and confirm that more powerful, inference-based queries can indeed be performed

Open skies

New air travel opportunities for Ceuta, a Spanish remoter region in Northern Africa, generated by air transport liberalisation in neighbouring Morocco. Spatial discontinuity and lack of seamless transport connections between Ceuta and the Spanish mainland pose significant accessibility challenges for the Spanish exclave

Breast cancer normal tissue complication modelling and parameter uncertainties

ABSTRACT: External radiation treatment (ERT) is one of the treatment methods against breast cancer. As all therapies, radiation is linked with side effects. Utmost goal during the treatment with radiation is to maximize the benefit for the patient (efficacy of the treatment) while sparing other vital organs from radiation that could lead to organ’s toxicity. The assessment of the overall benefit of a radiation treatment can be modelled with the help of linear quadratic model. That model simulates the cell killing for a specific type of cell (each cell cancerous or healthy has different properties: radiosensitivity, proliferation) under a given radiation prescription and schema. With the help of modelling, oncologists and medical physicists can simulate and predict the outcome of a radiation treatment schema

Enabling European archaeological research: The ARIADNE E-infrastructure

Research e-infrastructures, digital archives and data services have become important pillars of scientific enterprise that in recent decades has become ever more collaborative, distributed and data-intensive. The archaeological research community has been an early adopter of digital tools for data acquisition, organisation, analysis and presentation of research results of individual projects. However, the provision of einfrastructure and services for data sharing, discovery, access and re-use has lagged behind. This situation is being addressed by ARIADNE: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Archaeological Dataset Networking in Europe. This EUfunded network has developed an einfrastructure that enables data providers to register and provide access to their resources (datasets, collections) through the ARIADNE data portal, facilitating discovery, access and other services across the integrated resources. This article describes the current landscape of data repositories and services for archaeologists in Europe, and the issues that make interoperability between them difficult to realise. The results of the ARIADNE surveys on users' expectations and requirements are also presented. The main section of the article describes the architecture of the einfrastructure, core services (data registration, discovery and access) and various other extant or experimental services. The ongoing evaluation of the data integration and services is also discussed. Finally, the article summarises lessons learned, and outlines the prospects for the wider engagement of the archaeological research community in sharing data through ARIADNE