The Interoceanic corridor of Mexico stands as a pivotal infrastructure project poised to significantly enhance Mexico's national and regional economy. Anticipated to start the operations in 2025 under the auspice of the national government, this corridor represents a strategic counterpart to the Panama Canal, which faces capacity constraints due to climate change and environmental impacts. Positioned as a promising alternative for transporting goods from Asia to North America, this corridor will offer a new transport route, yet its real operational capacity and spatial impacts remains uncertain. In this paper, the authors undertake a preliminary, informed analysis leveraging publicly available data and other specific information about infrastructure capacities and economic environment to forecast the potential throughput of this corridor upon full operationalization and in the future. Applying simulation techniques, the authors simulate the future operations of the corridor according to different scenarios to offer insights into its potential capacity and impacts. Furthermore, the paper delves into the opportunities and challenges that are inherent in this project and gives a comprehensive analysis of its potential impact and implications.
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The constant growth of air traffic, especially in Europe, is putting pressure on airports, which, in turn, are suffering congestion problems. The airspace surrounding airport, terminal manoeuvring area (TMA), is particularly congested, since it accommodates all the converging traffic to and from airports. Besides airspace, airport ground capacity is also facing congestion problems, as the inefficiencies coming from airspace operations are transferred to airport ground and vice versa. The main consequences of congestion at airport airspace and ground, is given by the amount of delay generated, which is, in turn, transferred to other airports within the network. Congestion problems affect also the workload of air traffic controllers that need to handle this big amount of traffic.This thesis deals with the optimization of the integrated airport operations, considering the airport from a holistic point of view, by including operations such as airspace and ground together. Unlike other studies in this field of research, this thesis contributes by supporting the decisions of air traffic controllers regarding aircraft sequencing and by mitigating congestion on the airport ground area. The airport ground operations and airspace operations can be tackled with two different levels of abstractions, macroscopic or microscopic, based on the time-frame for decision-making purposes. In this thesis, the airport operations are modeled at a macroscopic level.The problem is formulated as an optimization model by identifying an objective function that considers the amount of conflicts in the airspace and capacity overload on the airport ground; constraints given by regulations on separation minima between consecutive aircraft in the airspace and on the runway; decision variables related to aircraft entry time and entry speed in the airspace, landing runway and departing runway choice and pushback time. The optimization model is solved by implementing a sliding window approach and an adapted version of the metaheuristic simulated annealing. Uncertainty is included in the operations by developing a simulation model and by including stochastic variables that represent the most significant sources of uncertainty when considering operations at a macroscopic level, such as deviation from the entry time in the airspace, deviation in the average taxi time and deviation in the pushback time. In this thesis, optimization and simulation techniques are combined together by developing two methods that aim at improving the solution robustness and feasibility. The first method acts as a validation tool for the optimized solution, and it improves the robustness of solution by iteratively fine-tuning some of the optimization model input parameters. The second method embeds the optimization in a simulation environment by taking full advantage of the sliding window approach and creating a loop for a continuous improvement of the optimized solution at each window of the sliding window approach. Both methods prove to be effective by improving the performance, lowering the total amount of conflicts up to 23.33% for the first method and up to 11.2% for the second method, however, in contrast to the deterministic method, the two methods they are not able to achieve a conflict-free scenario due to the effect of uncertainty.In general, the research conducted in this thesis highlights that uncertainty is a factor that affects to a large extent the feasibility of optimized solution when applied to real-world instances, and it, moreover, confirms that using simulation together with optimization has the potentiality toivdeal with uncertainty. The framework developed can be potentially applied to similar problems and different optimization solving methods can be adapted to it.Keywords: Optimization, Simulation, Integrated airport operations, Uncertainty
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Third chapter of the English version of the book 'Energieke Arbeid' published by the Centre of Applied Labour Market Research and Innovation (Dutch abbreviation: KCA) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of applied labour market research at Hanze University of Applied Sciences. This chapter discusses the second line of research of KCA: The Labour Market in the EnergyPort Groningen Region.
Drones have been verified as the camera of 2024 due to the enormous exponential growth in terms of the relevant technologies and applications such as smart agriculture, transportation, inspection, logistics, surveillance and interaction. Therefore, the commercial solutions to deploy drones in different working places have become a crucial demand for companies. Warehouses are one of the most promising industrial domains to utilize drones to automate different operations such as inventory scanning, goods transportation to the delivery lines, area monitoring on demand and so on. On the other hands, deploying drones (or even mobile robots) in such challenging environment needs to enable accurate state estimation in terms of position and orientation to allow autonomous navigation. This is because GPS signals are not available in warehouses due to the obstruction by the closed-sky areas and the signal deflection by structures. Vision-based positioning systems are the most promising techniques to achieve reliable position estimation in indoor environments. This is because of using low-cost sensors (cameras), the utilization of dense environmental features and the possibilities to operate in indoor/outdoor areas. Therefore, this proposal aims to address a crucial question for industrial applications with our industrial partners to explore limitations and develop solutions towards robust state estimation of drones in challenging environments such as warehouses and greenhouses. The results of this project will be used as the baseline to develop other navigation technologies towards full autonomous deployment of drones such as mapping, localization, docking and maneuvering to safely deploy drones in GPS-denied areas.
ATAL: Automated Transport and Logistics Automatisering van transportmodaliteiten is overal ter wereld gaande. Met een Duurzaam Living Lab kunnen multimodale geautomatiseerde transportoperaties verder in de praktijk duurzaam en opschaalbaar worden ontwikkeld. Hierbij worden beleidsmakers en organisaties ondersteund in deze transitie. De maatschappelijke voordelen van grootschalige uitrol van Automated Trucks en Platooning, Automated Train Operations en Autonomous Sailing zijn onder andere minder energieverbruik en emissies, betere doorstroming en betere verkeersveiligheid. De Duurzame Living Lab heeft betrekking op het haven-achterland vervoer van Rotterdam richting Duitsland en België. Het wegvervoer maakt gebruik van de TULIP-Corridor, water en spoor modaliteit volgen de MIRT goederencorridors tot in het Ruhrgebied.
Client: Foundation Innovation Alliance (SIA - Stichting Innovatie Alliantie) with funding from the ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) Funder: RAAK (Regional Attention and Action for Knowledge circulation) The RAAK scheme is managed by the Foundation Innovation Alliance (SIA - Stichting Innovatie Alliantie) with funding from the ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Early 2013 the Centre for Sustainable Tourism and Transport started work on the RAAK-MKB project ‘Carbon management for tour operators’ (CARMATOP). Besides NHTV, eleven Dutch SME tour operators, ANVR, HZ University of Applied Sciences, Climate Neutral Group and ECEAT initially joined this 2-year project. The consortium was later extended with IT-partner iBuildings and five more tour operators. The project goal of CARMATOP was to develop and test new knowledge about the measurement of tour package carbon footprints and translate this into a simple application which allows tour operators to integrate carbon management into their daily operations. By doing this Dutch tour operators are international frontrunners.Why address the carbon footprint of tour packages?Global tourism contribution to man-made CO2 emissions is around 5%, and all scenarios point towards rapid growth of tourism emissions, whereas a reverse development is required in order to prevent climate change exceeding ‘acceptable’ boundaries. Tour packages have a high long-haul and aviation content, and the increase of this type of travel is a major factor in tourism emission growth. Dutch tour operators recognise their responsibility, and feel the need to engage in carbon management.What is Carbon management?Carbon management is the strategic management of emissions in one’s business. This is becoming more important for businesses, also in tourism, because of several economical, societal and political developments. For tour operators some of the most important factors asking for action are increasing energy costs, international aviation policy, pressure from society to become greener, increasing demand for green trips, and the wish to obtain a green image and become a frontrunner among consumers and colleagues in doing so.NetworkProject management was in the hands of the Centre for Sustainable Tourism and Transport (CSTT) of NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences. CSTT has 10 years’ experience in measuring tourism emissions and developing strategies to mitigate emissions, and enjoys an international reputation in this field. The ICT Associate Professorship of HZ University of Applied Sciences has longstanding expertise in linking varying databases of different organisations. Its key role in CARMATOP was to create the semantic wiki for the carbon calculator, which links touroperator input with all necessary databases on carbon emissions. Web developer ibuildings created the Graphical User Interface; the front end of the semantic wiki. ANVR, the Dutch Association of Travel Agents and Tour operators, represents 180 tour operators and 1500 retail agencies in the Netherlands, and requires all its members to meet a minimum of sustainable practices through a number of criteria. ANVR’s role was in dissemination, networking and ensuring CARMATOP products will last. Climate Neutral Group’s experience with sustainable entrepreneurship and knowledge about carbon footprint (mitigation), and ECEAT’s broad sustainable tourism network, provided further essential inputs for CARMATOP. Finally, most of the eleven tour operators are sustainable tourism frontrunners in the Netherlands, and are the driving forces behind this project.
