Impacts on modal choices of new generation freights terminals

Increasing pollution, congestion of roads and worries about the spatial and environmental impacts of road transports have promoted the idea of transferring part of freight transportation from roads to railways and waterways. Given the limited density of these two modes' networks, this policy implies necessarily the development of inter-modal transports. But their operation on a large scale is meeting several problems : the additional cost of transferring the commodities from one mode or means to another, the size of investments in new technology equipment for terminals, specialized rolling stock and information systems, the involvement of several intermediaries plus the control and management of safety and reliability of the services. In the past, many innovative plans and projects for bundling and transshipping were developed, but many plans were abandoned, and despite a steady growth of inter-modal transports, the results obtained are still limited. At the present time, the most promising projects seem to be the introduction of new shuttle connections on transport links with important flows of transports. However, lower costs and better management of services could probably make attractive the organization of more complex schemes like hub-and-spokes organizations. The paper presents a methodology to model bundling concepts on multi-modal freight networks. It is based on the extensive use of virtual links as they are implemented in the NODUS software developed by GTM . Different configurations of inter-modal networks are modeled which are implemented in a digitized trans-European multi-modal network (rail, road and waterway). Cost functions are associated with every (virtual) link which corresponds to a particular transport operation. A matrix of origins and destinations throughout the European space is generated on the basis of global EUROSTAT statistics by the use of a weighted stochastic procedure. Given this transportation task a minimization of generalized costs can be made which assigns transport flows between paths, modes and means of transport. Hence, successive simulations for different configurations and various parameters' values provide a set of measures of their impacts, which can be used for assessing the interest of concrete inter-modal propositions. The indicators are the market shares, the total operating cost of the transportation task, the total cost of a particular operation, the distances covered, the times of transport, the service frequency required, the energy consumption, etc. This research is part of the EU Commission's TERMINET project which focuses on the potentialities of innovative bundling concepts for transport nodes and terminals.

Evolution of coupled fermions under the influence of an external axial-vector field

The evolution of coupled fermions interacting with external axial-vector fields is described with help of the classical field theory. We formulate the initial conditions problem for the system of two coupled fermions in (3+1)-dimensional space-time. This problem is solved using the perturbation theory. We obtain in the explicit form the expressions for the leading and next to the leading order terms in the expansion over the strength of external fields. It is shown that in the relativistic limit the intensity of the fermion field coincides with the transition probability in the two neutrinos system interacting with moving and polarized matter.Comment: RevTeX4, 8 pages, 1 eps figure; revised variant, neutral currents interactions of flavor neutrinos are included, some typos corrected, 1 reference added; accepted for publication in Eur.Phys.J.

Seals and sealing practices in early administration in southwestern Asia and Egypt during the fourth to third millennium BCE

Egypt and southwestern Asia developed into societies with hierarchical organization during the 4th millennium BCE. Cylinder seals first came into use as administrative devices in these regions during this period. By examining how cylinder seals were used in both regions in the 4th to 3rd millennium, this thesis investigates how cultural and administrative practices related to cylinder sealing first emerged and developed in these regions. Changes in seal use over time in southwestern Asia and Egypt are also explored, taking into account the emergence of stamp seal use in Egypt in the 3rd millennium. Fourth millennium countersealing practices (the practice of impressing more than one seal on a piece of clay used for administrative purposes) in both regions are also scrutinized as a means of examining the development of seal use in southwestern Asia and Egypt. Previous studies of early cylinder seals from these regions have focused on seal inscriptions or the iconography of the seals. Instead, this thesis analyses locations where seals and impressions were found (i.e. settlements, tombs), to investigate how both southwestern Asia and Egypt employed cylinder seals as well as stamp seals, and seal impressions. Administrative practices employing these devices are examined along with the unique cultural perceptions of these artefacts at each site. This evidence is used to examine how these two complex societies developed differently during the 4th to 3rd millennium

A multicriteria analysis of stated preferences among freight transport alternatives

Stated preferences data can be of different types: choice data, rankings or ratings. In all cases, these data can be used in different ways as inputs of econometric discrete choice models. This allows to estimate the weights of the different attributes characterizing an alternative. For freight transport, an alternative's attributes would be, for example, reliability, safety, frequency, etc., besides time and cost. Depending on the data sample, number of alternatives and number of attributes, it is possible to proceed to an analysis of individual data or of aggregated data. In case one is interested to analyze individual behaviors in depth, the option exists to rely on some kind of multicriteria analysis for deriving individual utility functions (actually, decision functions) rather than on a classic discrete choice model. Such a procedure also can be useful for deriving individual utilities as input in a hybrid model combining individual utilities with group data. Such a multicriteria approach is envisaged in the context of a stated preference experiment that is currently applied to freight shippers in Belgium. The data in this case are rankings of alternatives, and there is multicritera method that is particularly well adapted for such data: the UTA models developed by Jacquet-Lagrèze and Siskos. It is based on the specification of an additive utility made of non-linear partial utility functions that are piecewise linear. This allows the convenient set-up of a linear goal programming problem which estimates all the functions and their weights. The paper intends to present the ranking experiment, and to use some of the preliminary interviews to illustrate this UTA methodology. Also, it will be shown how it can be used to derive equivalent money values for each attributes on the basis of the cost attribute, and how to distinguish valuations in terms of willingness to pay and willingness to accept a compensation.