Optimising container transfers at multimodal terminals

The use of containers have greatly reduced handling operations at ports and at all other transfer points, thus increasing the efficiency and speed of transportation. This was done in an attempt to cut down the cost of maritime transport, mainly by reducing cargo handling and costs, and ships' time in port by speeding up handling operations. This paper discusses the major factors influencing the transfer efficiency of seaport container terminals. A network model is designed to analyse container progress in the system and applied to a seaport container terminal. The model presented here can be seen as a decision support system in the context of investment appraisal of multimodal container terminals. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd.

Genetic algorithms to schedule container transfers at multimodal terminals

Optimising the container transfer schedule at the multimodal terminals is known to be NP-hard, which implies that the best solution becomes computationally infeasible as problem sizes increase. Genetic Algorithm (GA) techniques are used to reduce container handling/transfer times and ships' time at the port by speeding up handling operations. The GA is chosen due to the relatively good results that have been reported even with the simplest GA implementations to obtain near-optimal solutions in reasonable time. Also discussed, is the application of the model to assess the consequences of increased scheduled throughput time as well as different strategies such as the alternative plant layouts, storage policies and number of yard machines. A real data set used for the solution and subsequent sensitivity analysis is applied to the alternative plant layouts, storage policies and number of yard machines.

Compensation for environmental services and intergovernmental fiscal transfers : the case of India

This paper studies mechanisms to compensate local government for the public provision of environmental services using the theory of optimal fiscal transfers in India. Especially, we analyzed the role of intergovernmental fiscal transfers in achieving the environmental goal. Simply assigning the functions at appropriate levels does not ensure optimal provision of environmental services. Optimality in resource allocation could be achieved by combining the assignment system with an appropriate compensation mechanism. Intergovernmental fiscal transfers would be a suitable mechanism for compensating the local governments and help in internalizing the spillover effects of providing environmental public goods. Illustrations are also provided for India.

Online survey of will drafters - Families and generational asset transfers: Making and challenging wills in contemporary Australia

A national online survey of private and public will drafters distributed through State/public trustee offices in seven states/territories and law societies and community legal centres across all states/territories yielded 257 responses. The survey, using questions, scales and case scenarios sought to canvas perceptions of difficulties facing will drafters and the strategies used to address them.

Review of Public Trustee Files - Families and generational asset transfers: Making and challenging wills in contemporary Australia

The Public Trustee file review was designed to address research questions relating to will disputes and socio-cultural and family norms, expectations and obligations that underpin challenges to wills. Findings from this review will augment the earlier review of all adjudicated succession law cases in Australia between January and December 2011. The research team obtained 139 cases for the review. Within the reviewed cases, parties generally needed some kind of formalised assistance to resolve disputes and almost a third ended up going to court. Most claims launched to contest wills were successful i.e. led to a change in distribution. The existence of poor and/or complex personal relationships between beneficiaries, disputants and/or the deceased were a feature of most cases involving will disputes, particularly where disputes were escalated to court. There are significant costs of will contestation both for the estate and the individuals involved in disputes. Previous research has identified that in addition to the direct costs is the indirect cost of extending the time for probate of the will. This review highlights that one of the most significant costs of will contestation is the damage to familial relationships that appears to both drive and be worsened by contestation. Findings of this review highlight the role of Public Trustees in providing financial management and advocacy services to protect and support vulnerable people in the community such as those with impaired capacity, as well as offering services such as will drafting and deceased estate administration.

New insights into rebound effects : theory and empirical evidence

The main objective of the thesis is to seek insights into the theory, and provide empirical evidence of rebound effects. Rebound effects reduce the environmental benefits of environmental policies and household behaviour changes. In particular, win-win demand side measures, in the form of energy efficiency and household consumption pattern changes, are seen as ways for households and businesses to save money and the environment. However, these savings have environmental impacts when spent, which are known as rebound effects. This is an area that has been widely neglected by policy makers. This work extends the rebound effect literature in three important ways, (1) it incorporates the potential for variation of rebound effects with household income level, (2) it enables the isolation of direct and indirect effects for cases of energy efficient technology adoption, and examines the relationship between these two component effects, and (3) it expands the scope of rebound effect analysis to include government taxes and subsidies. MACROBUTTON HTMLDirect Using a case study approach it is found that the rebound effect from household consumption pattern changes targeted at electricity is between 5 and 10%. For consumption pattern changes with reduced vehicle fuel use, the rebound effect is in the order of 20 to 30%. Higher income households in general are found to have a lower total rebound effect; however the indirect effect becomes relatively more significant at higher household income levels. In the win-lose case of domestic photovoltaic electricity generation, it is demonstrated that negative rebound effects can occur, which can potentially amplify the environmental benefits of this action. The rebound effect from a carbon tax, which occurs due to the re-spending of raised revenues, was found to be in the range of 11-32%. Taxes and transfers between households of different income levels also have environmental implications. For example, a more progressive tax structure, with increased low income welfare payments is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Subsidies aimed at encouraging environmentally friendly consumption habits are also subject to rebound effects, as they constitute a substitution of government expenditure for household expenditure. For policy makers, these findings point to the need to incorporate rebound effects in the environmental policy evaluation process.’

Evidence-based decision making to strengthen local governance : nutritional health interventions in Bantul and Gunungkidul

Since 2001, district governments have had the main responsibility for providing public health care in Indonesia. One of the main public health challenges facing many district governments is improving nutritional standards, particularly among poorer segments of the population. Developing effective policies and strategies for improving nutrition requires a multi-sectoral approach encompassing agricultural development policy, access to markets, food security (storage) programs, provision of public health facilities, and promotion of public awareness of nutritional health. This implies a strong need for a coordinated approach involving multiple government agencies at the district level. Due to diverse economic, agricultural, and infrastructure conditions across the country, district governments’ ought to be better placed than central government both to identify areas of greatest need for public nutrition interventions, and devise policies that reflect local characteristics. However, in the two districts observed in this study—Bantul and Gunungkidul—it was clear that local government capacity to generate, obtain and integrate evidence about local conditions into the policy-making process was still limited. In both districts, decision-makers tended to rely more on intuition,anecdote, and precedent in formulating policy. The potential for evidence-based decision making was also severely constrained by a lack of coordination and communication between agencies, and current arrangements related to central government fiscal transfers, which compel local governments to allocate funding to centrally determined programs and priorities.

Evidence based decision making to strenghten local governance : nutritional health interventions

Since 2001, district governments have had the main responsibility for providing public health care in Indonesia. One of the main public health challenges facing many district governments is improving nutritional standards, particularly among poorer segments of the population. Developing effective policies and strategies for improving nutrition requires a multi-sectoral approach encompassing agricultural development policy, access to markets, food security (storage) programs, provision of public health facilities, and promotion of public awareness of nutritional health. This implies a strong need for a coordinated approach involving multiple government agencies at the district level. Due to diverse economic, agricultural,and infrastructure conditions across the country, district governments’ ought to be better placed than central government both to identify areas of greatest need for public nutrition interventions, and devise policies that reflect local characteristics. However, in the two districts observed in this study—Bantul and Gunungkidul—it was clear that local government capacity to generate, obtain and integrate evidence about local conditions into the policy-making process was still limited. In both districts, decision-makers tended to rely more on intuition,anecdote, and precedent in formulating policy. The potential for evidence-based decision making was also severely constrained by a lack of coordination and communication between agencies, and current arrangements related to central government fiscal transfers, which compel local governments to allocate funding to centrally determined programs and priorities.

Planning for smart urban ecosystems : information technology applications for capacity building in environmental decision making

Since the industrial revolution, our world has experienced rapid and unplanned industrialization and urbanization. As a result, we have had to cope with serious environmental challenges. In this context, an explanation of how smart urban ecosystems can emerge, gains a crucial importance. Capacity building and community involvement have always been key issues in achieving sustainable development and enhancing urban ecosystems. By considering these, this paper looks at new approaches to increase public awareness of environmental decision making. This paper will discuss the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), particularly Webbased Geographic Information Systems (Web-based GIS) as spatial decision support systems to aid public participatory environmental decision making. The paper also explores the potential and constraints of these webbased tools for collaborative decision making.

Sustainable water provision : alternative strategy and sources in the era of climate change

As a result of rapid urbanisation, population growth, change in lifestyles, pollution and the impacts of climate change, water provision has become a critical challenge for planners and policy-makers. In the wake of increasingly difficult water provision and drought, the notion that freshwater is a finite and vulnerable resources is increasingly being realised. Many city administrations around the World are struggling to provide water security for their residents to maintain lifestyle and economic grouth. This paper review the glocalalternatives to current water sources, including that of desalination, water transfers, recycling, and integrated water management. A comparative study on alternative resources is undertaken and the results are discussed.

Granule-based knowledge representation for intra and inter transaction association mining

Abstract With the phenomenal growth of electronic data and information, there are many demands for the development of efficient and effective systems (tools) to perform the issue of data mining tasks on multidimensional databases. Association rules describe associations between items in the same transactions (intra) or in different transactions (inter). Association mining attempts to find interesting or useful association rules in databases: this is the crucial issue for the application of data mining in the real world. Association mining can be used in many application areas, such as the discovery of associations between customers’ locations and shopping behaviours in market basket analysis. Association mining includes two phases. The first phase, called pattern mining, is the discovery of frequent patterns. The second phase, called rule generation, is the discovery of interesting and useful association rules in the discovered patterns. The first phase, however, often takes a long time to find all frequent patterns; these also include much noise. The second phase is also a time consuming activity that can generate many redundant rules. To improve the quality of association mining in databases, this thesis provides an alternative technique, granule-based association mining, for knowledge discovery in databases, where a granule refers to a predicate that describes common features of a group of transactions. The new technique first transfers transaction databases into basic decision tables, then uses multi-tier structures to integrate pattern mining and rule generation in one phase for both intra and inter transaction association rule mining. To evaluate the proposed new technique, this research defines the concept of meaningless rules by considering the co-relations between data-dimensions for intratransaction-association rule mining. It also uses precision to evaluate the effectiveness of intertransaction association rules. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is promising.