scholarly journals Demand prediction model for regional railway services considering spatial effects between stations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rubén Cordera Piñera ◽  
Roberto Sañudo ◽  
Luigi Dell'Olio ◽  
Ángel Ibeas
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Gravity Models ◽  
Spatial Effects ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Distribution Models ◽  
Railway Stations ◽  
Ticket Sales ◽  
Demand Prediction ◽  
Passenger Demand ◽  
Railway Infrastructure

The railways are a priority transport mode for the European Union given their safety record and environmental sustainability. Therefore it is important to have quantitative models available which allow passenger demand for rail travel to be simulated for planning purposes and to evaluate different policies. The aim of this article is to specify and estimate trip distribution models between railway stations by considering the most influential demand variables. Two types of models were estimated: Poisson regression and gravity. The input data were the ticket sales on a regional line in Cantabria (Spain) which were provided by the Spanish railway infrastructure administrator (ADIF – RAM). The models have also considered the possible existence of spatial effects between train stations. The results show that the models have a good fit to the available data, especial the gravity models constrained by origins and destinations. Furthermore, the gravity models which considered the existence of spatial effects between stations had a significantly better fit than the Poisson models and the gravity models that did not consider this phenomenon. The proposed models have therefore been shown to be good support tools for decision making in the field of railway planning.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2016.4053

scholarly journals Environmental Performance Enters Construction Materials

MRS Bulletin ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 454-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Bonfield
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Construction Materials ◽  
Energy Performance ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Legal Term ◽  
Chain Of Custody ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
Impact Cost

The environmental sustainability of materials used in construction applications is driving a requirement for the quanti-fcation of performance attributes of such materials. For example, the European Union (EU) Energy Performance in Buildings Directive will give commercial buildings an energy rating when rented or sold. The Code for Sustainable Homes launched by the U.K. Government's Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) in January 2007 sets out the requirement for all new homes to be carbonneutral by 2016. In addition, homes in the United Kingdom will need to signifcantly reduce water consumption from today's average 160 liters (1) per person per day to less than 801 per person per day. Similarly stringent targets are required for waste, materials, and other factors. Such environmental and energy standards are complementing characteristics such as strength, stiffness, durability, impact, cost, and expected life with factors such as “environmental profle,” “ecopoints” (a single unit measurement of environmental impact arising from a product throughout its lifecycle that is used in the United Kingdom), “carbon footprint” (amount of CO2 produced for the lifecycle of the item), “recycled content,” and “chain of custody” (a legal term that refers to the ability to guarantee the identity and integrity of a specimen from collection through to reporting of test results).

scholarly journals New tools and opportunities in growth and climate friendly greening for small and medium enterprises in the European Union

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-31
Author(s):  
Xénia Szanyi-Gyenes ◽  
György Mudri ◽  
Mária Bakosné Böröcz
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Small And Medium Enterprises ◽  
Sustainable Growth ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Easy Access ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Access To Finance ◽  
Medium Enterprises ◽  
The Eu

The role of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) is unquestionable in the European economies, while financial opportunities are still inadequate for them. The more than 20 million SMEs play a significant role in European economic growth, innovation and job creation. According to the latest EC Annual Report , SMEs are accounting for 99% of all non-financial enterprises, employing 88.8 million people and generating almost EUR 3.7 tn in added value for our economy. Despite the fact that there is plenty of EU funding available for these SMEs, for certain reasons these funds hardly reach them. But we have to see that the EU supports SMEs by various way, e.g. by grants, regulatory changes, financial instrument, direct funds. On the other hand, SMEs and decision makers realised that the environmental sustainability has to be attached to the economic growth, therefore more and more tools are available for these enterprises. Over the last few years, public institutions, the market, the financial community and non-governmental associations have explicitly demanded that firms improve their environmental performance. One of the greatest opportunities might lay in the Climate- and Energy Strategy till 2030 as 20% of the EU budget is allocated to climate-related actions, however the easy access to finance is still a key question. Does the EU recognise the actual difficulties? Is there a systemic reason behind the absorption problems? Is the EU creating a more businessfriendly environment for SMEs, facilitating access to finance, stimulates the green and sustainable growth and improving access to new markets? The paper analyses the current European situation of the SMEs and the effectiveness of some new tools, which are specially targeting SMEs. JEL classification: Q18

scholarly journals FACTORS INFLUENCING THE FEE FOR USE OF THE RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURE

2017 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Petr Novák ◽  
Václav Cempírek
Keyword(s):  
Current System ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Technical Parameters ◽  
Production Factors ◽  
International Trends ◽  
Academic Paper ◽  
Railway Infrastructure ◽  
Market Situation ◽  
Current Production ◽  
Legislative Changes

It is necessary to update the current system of levying charges for railway infrastructure to reflect the current market situation, to take into account the new transport strategy established by the European Union, and to reflect legislative changes in relation to Directive 2012/34/EU on creating a single European railway area. International trends aim to categorize tracks according to technical parameters and parameters based on shipment time, as well as many others. The existence of different opinions on the amount and way to charge fees for railway infrastructure have led the authors of this academic paper to create a plan for a system of charges to be derived from the current production factors as well as from a number of specific new factors used in countries neighboring the Czech Republic.

Japan-EU Relations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Söderberg
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
World Order ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Strategic Partnership ◽  
The European Union ◽  
The Face ◽  
Partnership Agreement ◽  
High Standards

Japan and the European Union have recently made several agreements aiming to deepen their cooperation. An example of this is the “Partnership on Sustainable Connectivity and Quality Infrastructure between the European Union and Japan,” by which both EU and Japan agreed to “promote free, open, rules-based, fair, non-discriminatory and predictable regional and international trade and investment, transparent procurement practices, the ensuring of debt sustainability and the high standards of economic, fiscal, financial, social and environmental sustainability.” This is just the latest part in an effort by both to revive multilateral cooperation in the face of US withdrawal from international agreements and the rise of a more assertive China. Japan and EUs Strategic Partnership Agreement provides a legally binding framework for further cooperation in the field of politics, security, and development. Underpinning it are shared values and principles of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and fundamental freedoms. For the protection of democracy and the liberal world order, Japan and the EU seem like ideal partners. The question is whether ongoing shifts in the power balance, geopolitics, crises of liberalism, domestic politics, and legal and technological changes will lead to broader and deeper cooperation. This chapter provides a historical background to Japan-European relations from WWII until today. The relation started with a heavy emphasis on trade and business. It is only recently that the two have broadened their cooperation and now stand up as two of the strongest defenders of a liberal rule-based world order.

Passenger Mobility Prediction via Representation Learning for Dynamic Directed and Weighted Graphs

2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Yuandong Wang ◽  
Hongzhi Yin ◽  
Tong Chen ◽  
Chunyang Liu ◽  
Ben Wang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Route Planning ◽  
Representation Learning ◽  
Data Representation ◽  
Weighted Graphs ◽  
Spatial And Temporal Patterns ◽  
Graph Representations ◽  
Demand Prediction ◽  
Passenger Demand ◽  
Real World Datasets

In recent years, ride-hailing services have been increasingly prevalent, as they provide huge convenience for passengers. As a fundamental problem, the timely prediction of passenger demands in different regions is vital for effective traffic flow control and route planning. As both spatial and temporal patterns are indispensable passenger demand prediction, relevant research has evolved from pure time series to graph-structured data for modeling historical passenger demand data, where a snapshot graph is constructed for each time slot by connecting region nodes via different relational edges (origin-destination relationship, geographical distance, etc.). Consequently, the spatiotemporal passenger demand records naturally carry dynamic patterns in the constructed graphs, where the edges also encode important information about the directions and volume (i.e., weights) of passenger demands between two connected regions. aspects in the graph-structure data. representation for DDW is the key to solve the prediction problem. However, existing graph-based solutions fail to simultaneously consider those three crucial aspects of dynamic, directed, and weighted graphs, leading to limited expressiveness when learning graph representations for passenger demand prediction. Therefore, we propose a novel spatiotemporal graph attention network, namely Gallat ( G raph prediction with all at tention) as a solution. In Gallat, by comprehensively incorporating those three intrinsic properties of dynamic directed and weighted graphs, we build three attention layers to fully capture the spatiotemporal dependencies among different regions across all historical time slots. Moreover, the model employs a subtask to conduct pretraining so that it can obtain accurate results more quickly. We evaluate the proposed model on real-world datasets, and our experimental results demonstrate that Gallat outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

scholarly journals Water Price: Environment Sustainability and Resource Cost

Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 3176
Author(s):  
Sonia Sanabria ◽  
Joaquín Torres
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Total Water ◽  
First Approximation ◽  
Pricing System ◽  
Current Water ◽  
Resource Cost ◽  
Open Discussion ◽  
Environment Sustainability

The determination of a price for water is an open discussion among related players, directly or indirectly, in water management. In the context of the recovery of water service costs, as referred to in Article 9 of the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC (WFD), legislation applicable in all member countries of the European Union, the total water cost is broken down into three blocks; financial, environmental, and resource. It is the last component that generates the most uncertainty both in its conceptualization and in its valuation. The need to establish a pricing system for water (water tariff) implies that the different concepts that make it up are correctly delimited. The main goal of this paper is to propose a first approximation to a new theoretical framework to establish a relationship between environmental sustainability and the valuation of the resource cost—given that current water consumption can provoke future water availability difficulties, making it a scarce commodity that resource cost must be correctly delimited. Taking into account the prospective nature of environmental sustainability, the measure of its value should be based on the use of stochastic models that reflect the associated uncertainty.

scholarly journals Remotely Sensed Variables of Ecosystem Functioning Support Robust Predictions of Abundance Patterns for Rare Species

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (18) ◽  
pp. 2086 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Arenas-Castro ◽  
Adrián Regos ◽  
João F. Gonçalves ◽  
Domingo Alcaraz-Segura ◽  
João Honrado
Keyword(s):  
Species Distribution ◽  
Ecosystem Functioning ◽  
Environmental Changes ◽  
Predictive Accuracy ◽  
Species Abundance ◽  
Habitats Directive ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Distribution Models ◽  
Essential Information ◽  
Abundance Patterns

Global environmental changes are affecting both the distribution and abundance of species at an unprecedented rate. To assess these effects, species distribution models (SDMs) have been greatly developed over the last decades, while species abundance models (SAMs) have generally received less attention even though these models provide essential information for conservation management. With population abundance defined as an essential biodiversity variable (EBV), SAMs could offer spatially explicit predictions of species abundance across space and time. Satellite-derived ecosystem functioning attributes (EFAs) are known to inform on processes controlling species distribution, but they have not been tested as predictors of species abundance. In this study, we assessed the usefulness of SAMs calibrated with EFAs (as process-related variables) to predict local abundance patterns for a rare and threatened species (the narrow Iberian endemic ‘Gerês lily’ Iris boissieri; protected under the European Union Habitats Directive), and to project inter-annual fluctuations of predicted abundance. We compared the predictive accuracy of SAMs calibrated with climate (CLI), topography (DEM), land cover (LCC), EFAs, and combinations of these. Models fitted only with EFAs explained the greatest variance in species abundance, compared to models based only on CLI, DEM, or LCC variables. The combination of EFAs and topography slightly increased model performance. Predictions of the inter-annual dynamics of species abundance were related to inter-annual fluctuations in climate, which holds important implications for tracking global change effects on species abundance. This study underlines the potential of EFAs as robust predictors of biodiversity change through population size trends. The combination of EFA-based SAMs and SDMs would provide an essential toolkit for species monitoring programs.

The migration–tourism nexus in the EU28

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (8) ◽  
pp. 1374-1393
Author(s):  
Davide Provenzano
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Topological Structure ◽  
Gravity Models ◽  
Direct Influence ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Migration Networks ◽  
Investigation Methods ◽  
Main Determinants ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Tourism Flows

This study explores the nexus between tourism and migration on an intra-European scale over the period 2000–2015. Complex-network analysis and gravity models were the investigation methods preferred. For each year under study, we built two country-to-country networks to map and reveal the connections between states as shaped by migration stocks and tourism flows, respectively. Then, the main determinants of the correlation patterns between the two networks were investigated by several econometric analysis. Results point to a quite similar topological structure for the tourism and migration networks as well as to a significant and reciprocal direct influence between tourism and migration movements inside the European Union. No relevant indirect causal relationship is present in the tourism–migration nexus instead.

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