210 research outputs found

    Geological map of the Shackleton Range, Antarctica

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    Geological map and supplementary tex

    Exact and heuristic approaches for the ship-to-shore problem

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    After a natural disaster such as a hurricane or flooding, the navy can help by bringing supplies, clearing roads, and evacuating victims. If destinations cannot be reached over land, resources can be transported using smaller ships and helicopters, called connectors. To start aid on land as soon as possible this must be done efficiently. In the ship-to-shore problem, trips with their accompanying resources are determined while minimising the makespan. Limited (un)loading capacities, heterogeneous connector characteristics and constraints posed by priority of the resources and grouping of the resources (resource sets) all require that the connector trips are carefully coordinated. Despite the criticality of this coordination, existing literature does not consider resource sets and has only developed heuristics. We provide a formulation that incorporates resource sets and develop (i) an exact branch-and-price algorithm and (ii) a tailored greedy heuristic that can provide upper bounds. We find that 84% of our 98 practical instances terminate within an hour in on average 80 s. Our greedy heuristic can find optimal solutions in two-thirds of these instances, mostly for instances that are very constrained in terms of the delivery order of resources. When improvements are found by the branch-and-price algorithm, the average gap with the makespan of the greedy solution is 40% and, in most cases, these improvements are obtained within three minutes. For the 20 artificial instances, the greedy heuristic has consistent performance on the different types of instances. For these artificial instances improvements of on average 35% are found in reasonable time.</p

    Estimating Performance in a Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System

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    This paper models Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems and analyzes their performance. A Robotic Mobile Fulfillment System is an automated, parts-to-picker storage system where robots bring pods with products to a workstation. It is especially suited for e-commerce distribution centers with large assortments of small products, and with strong demand fluctuations. Its most important feature is the ability to automatically sort inventory and to adapt the warehouse layout in a short period of time. Queueing network models are developed for both single-line and multi-line orders, to analytically estimate maximum order throughput, average order cycle time, and robot utilization. These models can be used to quickly evaluate different warehouse layouts, or robot zoning strategies. Two main contributions are that the models include accurate driving behavior of robots and multi-line orders. The results show that: (1) the analytical models accurately estimate robot utilization, workstation utilization, and order cycle time, (2) maximum order throughput is quite insensitive to the length-to-width ratio of the storage area and (3) maximum order throughput is affected by the location of the workstations around the storage area

    Geochemistry and petrology of palaeocene coals from Spitzbergen — Part 2: Maturity variations and implications for local and regional burial models

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    The Central Tertiary Basin is an uplifted part of the North Barents Shelf and should be an ideal location to understand the thermal history, maximum burial depth and overburden thickness in this petroleum-rich area. Efforts to quantify the thermal history of the region have been hampered by reports of hyper-thermal conditions, maturity gaps and maturity inversions in the Tertiary vitrinite reflectance (Ro) record. This has been attributed to thermal insulation effects, vitrinite reflectance due to bitumen impregnation and later Tertiary volcanism. Through the use of Ro, organic maturity parameters, 13C NMR and Rock–Eval pyrolysis, this study aims to explain the unusual maturity effects observed and the implications for burial models. Within single seams, Ro % ranges from 0.5 to 0.78 with increasingly bimodal distribution up-seam. Analysis of coal aromaticity and the results of Rock–Eval analysis confirm that maturity gaps and inversions only occur where the vitrinite reflectance has been suppressed by high bitumen content (300–400 mg/g coal). Samples with the lowest hydrogen index values (< 250 mg HC / TOC) provide the most accurate estimates of the vitrinite reflectance. Results indicate maximum burial temperatures of 120 °C in the basin centre and 100 °C at the basin margins with a hyper-thermal gradient of approximately 50 °C/km. This gradient implies a total overburden of 2 km of which 1 km has been lost. Maximum burial depth and total erosional sediment load to the Barents Shelf are therefore at the lower end of current estimates
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