Research in Transportation Business and Management最新文献

Effective Urban Freight Distribution (UFD) relies heavily on the collaboration between government authorities and logistics agents. However, this collaboration can be influenced by the unique interests and requirements of each party involved. The aim of our research is to identify the main challenges and concerns in public-private UFD interactions and to propose solutions to enhance these interactions in cities. To achieve this goal, we conducted semi-structured interviews with key logistics agents operating in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, including both government authorities and private operators. The interviews were transcribed, coded, and analysed using the coefficient of co-occurrence method to determine the most significant relationships. Our results highlight a preference for creating a unified spokesperson role and underscore the need to harmonise regulations and unify operating criteria across neighbouring municipalities. Additionally, we suggest solutions to transition towards a more sustainable model and discuss the future viability of various logistics innovations.

This paper deals with the benchmarking of the technical efficiency of 23 metro systems in Europe. Since financial data reflecting the operating costs and revenues are not often made available to the public, the aim of this work is to develop a method based on production variables to enable large-scale analysis at the European level. The methodology consists of two stages. In the first stage, a gross value of effectiveness is estimated by means of a stochastic frontier regression based on the Cobb-Douglas production function. The results show about half of the considered firms reaching scores higher than 80%. However, these gross effectiveness estimates could be influenced and constrained by long term and external factors that go beyond the control of firms' day-to-day management. For this reason, in the second stage, an exponential multiple regression is estimated to determine the effects of these factors on gross effectiveness. The elasticities obtained through a multiple regression are used for evaluating the net effectiveness, by removing positive or negative contributions to the gross effectiveness that come from the identified “long term” factors. The results show that transit firms operating smaller networks tend to have higher net effectiveness scores in the short-term compared to larger transit firms.

Decarbonisation efforts in shipping have intensified amid recent regulations and net-zero emission pledges from governments and global supply chains. Green ammonia is one of the alternative fuels that can accomplish net-zero targets of the industry. However, considerable challenges exist for green ammonia adoption as the future clean energy source in maritime transport. This study scrutinises the success factors of the industry-wide adoption of green ammonia. We examine the structural relationship between success factors to explore antecedents, illustrate the precedence relationships between success factors, and present a roadmap. We first determine success factors and then employ Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) and Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC) to reveal relationship between success factors and suggest a roadmap. The success factors of an alternative fuel adoption are the availability of the fuel, the cost of the fuel, R&D in the fuel, safety regulations of the fuel, propulsion technology, port infrastructure for the fuel, stakeholder support, setting of carbon tax, public awareness on emissions and early adopter companies using the fuel. 48 experts completed the ISM survey for green ammonia. Results indicate that the most fundamental success factors are stakeholder support, carbon taxation, public awareness, and the number of early adopters. These fundamental success factors would pave the way to safety regulations of ammonia and R&D progress, which would then improve ammonia-powered propulsion systems and support a vast availability of green ammonia. Following the accomplishment of the above listed success factors, ammonia cost reduction and port infrastructure development can be delivered.

Organisations, which operate relatively error-free for a prolonged period, are called Highly Reliable Organisations (HROs). Examples of such organisations are mainly found amongst those sectors, where failures have a high risk of resulting in harm to human life such as healthcare, chemical or nuclear power plants or the aviation industry.

High Reliability Organisations Theory (HROT) stresses five characteristics, which HROs need to have to achieve high standards of stable operations. This paper provides insights on how one of the most important HROs within the aviation sector, i.e., Air Traffic Control (ATC), applies HROT in practice. As ATC is a service provider set up to maintain the high safety levels within the aviation industry, this is an exemplary case to investigate theory versus practice.

Data for the empirical study relied on two Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs), which were able to cover all aspects of the research questions, i.e. the German ANSP Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH as a large organisation and the U.K. ANSP Air Navigation Solutions Ltd. as a smaller one. Data were collected using seventeen semi-structured interviews with ATC management experts across three managerial levels and review of 672 documents.

The findings suggest that although HRO theoretical principles are followed within the case organisations to a very large extent, the HROT applies predominantly in the areas of operations. Any indirectly or only loosely connected areas with ATC operations follow principles found in non HROs. The findings also support the strong correlation of a high level of resilience and HROT. From a policy and management perspective this raises the question, whether HROT needs to further adapt to consider parts of an organisation that are truly relevant to operate in a relatively error-free manner for prolonged periods rather than just organisations as a whole.

One prominent change induced by the COVID-19 pandemic concerns the worldwide use of public transportation for commuting purposes. This study focused on university commuting in Italy by examining the propensity to change transport modes under different infection risk scenarios. Data were collected in 2020 through an online survey of college mobility conducted by the Italian University Network for Sustainable Development. Asking the respondents to consider both a pessimistic and an optimistic scenario, with respect to the risk odds of being infected, we followed a two-step approach to study the prospective travel habits of college users. First, we tested a logit model to estimate the propensity to abandon one's pre-COVID-19 commuting mode. Then, we investigated the factors influencing the choice of switching from public transportation to either cars or active modes by estimating a multinomial logit model. By exploiting the novelty of considering two risk scenarios, this study highlighted that, especially in the pessimistic case, the change to active modes was constrained by spatial aspects in favour of motorized vehicles. From a policy perspective, this COVID-19-based natural experiment advocates transportation authorities taking effective actions to ensure that, in case of emergencies, a modal shift would not benefit more-polluting transport means.

Airport management is a complex and multifarious activity, involving many operators including airlines, retailers and ground handlers, and processes. The presence of wildlife at airports poses a safety risk to aircraft operations and as such managing wildlife hazards is a mandatory legal responsibility. This is important not only from a safety perspective but also from the fact that safety incidents can impact the operational efficiency and the reputation of an airport. Airport operators are required to devise and enact site-specific Wildlife Hazard Management Plans (WHMP) to reduce the risk of aircraft-wildlife interaction under normal airport operating conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, led to an unprecedented reduction in commercial air traffic and the partial or total suspension of flights at some airports. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of COVID-19 related flight reductions on bird prevalence and behaviour and the potential implications for airport management. Drawing on an empirical dataset of wildlife observations at Manchester Airport, UK, in 2019 and 2020, this paper details the airfield ornithology before and during the pandemic and examines the impact of COVID-19 related flight reductions on bird prevalence and behaviour. The findings reveal variations in the frequency and apparency of individual species as well as changes in the spatial location of bird sightings on the airfield. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for post-pandemic operations and for the formulation of future airport wildlife hazard management policies.

Increasing awareness about global warming, and the unsteadiness of oil prices has increased interest in sustainable transportation among consumers as well as researchers. Electric vehicles (EVs) are considered as one of the sustainable road transportations for coping with these challenges. This paper presents a study of the economical, technical, social & attitudinal, infrastructural, and policy and regulatory barriers to the adoption of EVs within an Indian context. Additionally, the study also considered different stakeholders' perspectives on adopting EVs. Various stakeholders viz. consumers/public, businesses, governments, and the scientific community will boost the supply and demand of EVs. All stakeholders' coordinated efforts are creating the groundwork for a stronger EV environment, which will result in increasing acceptability. This study aims to identify the significant barriers to EV adoption. Based on an extensive literature review first, we identified the various barriers, and after that, we prioritized the identified barriers through the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP). FAHP is employed to study the relevance and prioritize the barriers with the help of expert opinions from different stakeholders. The results strongly suggest that a technical barrier is the most critical one among all the stakeholders. The ranking of EV barriers provides a decision-making framework for managers and experts to pay more attention to the critical barriers/sub-barriers in order to eradicate them from the system for the successful adoption of EVs. It recognizes the value of a robust theoretical contribution to the area and intends to investigate theories or models that might offer a more solid foundation for the study in order to support the theoretical framework of this research. The study provides a stronger rationale for the research's importance and potential impact by introducing a comprehensive theoretical framework.

The parcel delivery industry is experiencing rapid growth due to the rise of new retail stores. However, the traditional self-operated delivery model often leads to idle and wasteful distribution resources due to uneven temporal and spatial distribution of delivery orders. In this study, we propose a delivery system that combines crowdsourcing and self-operated delivery for new retail stores using blockchain technology to optimize the delivery algorithm. Our proposed system solves the problem of wasted resources by introducing crowdsourcing delivery and completes the distribution task allocation on a blockchain platform to protect customer privacy and quantify the performance of crowdsourcing couriers. We present a mixed-integer nonlinear programming formulation for the 2-Echelon Winning Determination Problem, in which the delivery decision is based on the lowest total cost. The cost of crowdsourcing delivery is a dynamic cost comprising of crowdsourcing courier service errors and bid prices recorded on the tamper-evident blockchain system. We also analyzed the impact of different crowdsourcing bidding prices on the choice of delivery method and total cost. Synthetic experiments show that our proposed hybrid delivery model ensures high-quality and efficient delivery of new retail stores while saving delivery costs.

How top managers enable employees to exhibit service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior to improve a company's performance and employee satisfaction is an important issue for business operations in the international logistics industry. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is applied to examine the relationships between leader-member exchange (LMX), team-member exchange (TMX), employee satisfaction, the service climate, and service-oriented organizational citizenship behavior (SOCB). Meanwhile the service climate is established as a moderating effect in the relationship between employee satisfaction and SOCB.

The responses of 123 individuals from the international logistics industry were collected via a questionnaire. The results showed that LMX and TMX can directly impact employee satisfaction. In addition, employee satisfaction and the service climate can directly impact SOCB. Moreover, the service climate has a positive moderating effect between employee satisfaction and SOCB. This research suggests that LMX, TMX and the service climate play an important role in improving international logistics companies' SOCB.

Considering making an efficient and sustainable ecosystem, the futuristic Hyperloop with Pod is considered a significant contributor in the coming years. However, the development and construction of the Hyperloop project is not easy. The research aims to analyze and evaluate the major factors involved in the success or failure of the Hyperloop project using the Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) approach and using (Matrice d'Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliquée á un Classement (cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification) MICMAC analysis. This method helped determine the inter-relationship among the factors and identify the key factors affecting the Hyperloop project. The work also explores the subfactors related to each major factor, which helps refine the major factors and understand their complex relationships. The research also includes data from a survey that was conducted to gather public opinion on the Hyperloop project. The survey questions were designed to collect information about factors such as user accessibility, experience, time, cost, convenience, and environmental impact. The collected data was analyzed to conclude public perception and acceptance, which is an important factor in determining the feasibility and viability of the Hyperloop project. The approach provided a holistic view of the project and helped identify potential issues that could arise during the Hyperloop project implementation phase.