Integrating passenger and freight transportation : model formulation and insights

Integrating passenger and freight flows creates attractive business opportunities because the same transportation needs can be met with fewer vehicles and emissions. This paper seeks an integrated solution for the transportation of passenger and freight simultaneously, so that fewer vehicles are required. The newly introduced problem concerns scheduling a set of vehicles to serve the requests such that a part of the journey can be carried out on a scheduled passenger transportation service. We propose an arc-based mixed integer programming formulation for the integrated transportation system. Computational results on a set of instances provide a clear understanding on the benefits of integrating passenger and freight transportation in the current networks, considering multi-modality of traditional passenger-oriented transportation modes, such as taxi, bus, train or tram

Plasmodium berghei Hsp90 contains a natural immunogenic I-A^b-restricted antigen common to rodent and human Plasmodium species

Thorough understanding of the role of CD4 T cells in immunity can be greatly assisted by the study of responses to defined specificities. This requires knowledge of Plasmodium-derived immunogenic epitopes, of which only a few have been identified, especially for the mouse C57BL/6 background. We recently developed a TCR transgenic mouse line, termed PbT-II, that produces CD4+ T cells specific for an MHC class II (I-Ab)-restricted Plasmodium epitope and is responsive to both sporozoites and blood-stage P. berghei. Here, we identify a peptide within the P. berghei heat shock protein 90 as the cognate epitope recognised by PbT-II cells. We show that C57BL/6 mice infected with P. berghei blood-stage induce an endogenous CD4 T cell response specific for this epitope, indicating cells of similar specificity to PbT-II cells are present in the naïve repertoire. Adoptive transfer of in vitro activated TH1-, or particularly TH2-polarised PbT-II cells improved control of P. berghei parasitemia in C57BL/6 mice and drastically reduced the onset of experimental cerebral malaria. Our results identify a versatile, potentially protective MHC-II restricted epitope useful for exploration of CD4 T cell-mediated immunity and vaccination strategies against malaria

The pickup and delivery problem with time windows and scheduled lines

\u3cp\u3eIntegrating freight flows with scheduled public transportation services creates attractive business opportunities as the same transportation needs can be met with fewer operating costs. The pickup and delivery problem with time windows and scheduled lines (PDPTW-SL) aims at routing a given set of vehicles to transport freight requests from their origins to their corresponding destinations, where the requests can use scheduled passenger transportation services as a part of their journeys. We describe the PDPTW-SL as an arc-based mixed-integer program. Computational results on a set of small-size instances provide a clear understanding of the benefits of using scheduled line services as a part of freight's journey.\u3c/p\u3

Spot Market versus Full Charter Fleet: Decision support for full truck load tenders

Given the dynamics of today’s markets, decision support based on advanced analytics is required to help market players keep their top position. This paper presents an approach to help business decision-makers gain market share by providing competitive tender offers for Full Truck Load (FTL) services. In particular, we compare operating a fleet of full charter trucks (FCT), using Spot-Market (SM) capacity and a mixture of both options against each other. A Pickup and Delivery Problem is modeled, and solved using an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search heuristic. Computational results indicate strong service benefits combining FCT and SM usage. Numerical experiments are presented in detail to support the findings. Additionally, a real-life case study originating from DB Schenker is presented

An adaptive large neighborhood search heuristic for the pickup and delivery problem with time Windows and scheduled lines

The Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows and Scheduled Lines (PDPTW-SL) concerns scheduling a set of vehicles to serve freight requests such that a part of the journey can be carried out on a scheduled public transportation line. Due to the complexity of the problem, which is NP-hard, we propose an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) heuristic algorithm to solve the PDPTW-SL. Complex aspects such as fixed lines׳ schedules, synchronization and time-windows constraints are efficiently considered in the proposed algorithm. Results of extensive computational experiments show that the ALNS is highly effective in finding good-quality solutions on the generated PDPTW-SL instances with up to 100 freight requests that reasonably represent real life situations

Acid sphingomyelinase deficiency: A clinical and immunological perspective

Acid sphingomyelinase deficiency (ASMD) is a lysosomal storage disease caused by deficient activity of acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) enzyme, leading to the accumulation of varying degrees of sphingomyelin. Lipid storage leads to foam cell infiltration in tissues, and clinical features including hepatosplenomegaly, pulmonary insufficiency and in some cases central nervous system involvement. ASM enzyme replacement therapy is currently in clinical trial being the first treatment addressing the underlying pathology of the disease. Therefore, presently, it is critical to better comprehend ASMD to improve its diagnose and monitoring. Lung disease, including recurrent pulmonary infections, are common in ASMD patients. Along with lung disease, several immune system alterations have been described both in patients and in ASMD animal models, thus highlighting the role of ASM enzyme in the immune system. In this review, we summarized the pivotal roles of ASM in several immune system cells namely on macrophages, Natural Killer (NK) cells, NKT cells, B cells and T cells. In addition, an overview of diagnose, monitoring and treatment of ASMD is provided highlighting the new enzyme replacement therapy available

Metaheuristics for Periodic Electric Vehicle Routing Problem

International audienceThis paper proposes two metaheuristics based on large neighbourhood search for the PEVRP (Periodic Electric Vehicle Routing Problem). In the PEVRP a set of customers have to be visited, one times, on a given planning horizon. A list of possible visiting dates is associated with each customer and a fixed fleet of vehicles is available every day of the planning horizon. Solving the problem requires assigning a visiting date to each customer and defining the routes of the vehicles in each day of the planning horizon, such that the EVs could be charged during their trips at the depot and in the available external charging stations. The objective of the PEVRP is to minimize the total cost of routing and charging over the time horizon. The first proposed metaheuristic is a Large Neighbourhood Search, whose choice of destroy/repair operators has been determined according to the experimental results obtained in previous research. The second method is an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search, which could be described as a Large Neighborhood Search algorithm with an adaptive layer, where a set of three destroy operators and three repair operators compete to modify the current solution in each iteration of the algorithm. The results show that LNS is very competitive compared to ALNS for which the adaptive aspect has not made it more competitive than the LNS