Optimization of the Mashaer Shuttle-Bus Service in Hajj: Arafat-Muzdalifah Case Study

Hajj, the fifth pillar of Islam, is held annually in the month of Dhul Al-Hijjah, the twelfth month, in the Islamic calendar. Pilgrims travel to Makkah and its neighbouring areas—Mina, Muzdalifah, and Arafat. Annually, about 2.5 million pilgrims perform spatiotemporally restricted rituals in these holy places that they must execute to fulfil the pilgrimage. These restrictions make the task of transportation in Hajj a big challenge. The shuttle bus service is an essential form of transport during Hajj due to its easy availability at all stages and ability to transport large numbers. The current shuttle service suffers from operational problems; this can be deduced from the service delays and customer dissatisfaction with the service. This study provides a system to help in planning the operation of the service for one of the Hajj Establishments to improve performance by determining the optimal number of buses and cycles required for each office in the Establishment. We will also present a case study in which the proposed model was applied to the non-Arab Africa Establishment shuttle service. At the same time, we will include the mechanism for extracting the information required in the tested model from the considerably large GPS data of 20,000+ buses in Hajj 2018.

Predicting delays in service operations

Delays constitute a key challenge in the management of service operations, causing substantial quality and cost issues. Delays in one service event can cause delays in another service event and so on, which creates challenges in the management of complex services. Assuming a lower-triangular matrix formalism, we develop a novel approach to modelling such chains of delays in complex service operations such as health care and software development. This approach can enable service managers to identify, understand, predict and control delays. Our research provides a novel theoretical contribution to the literature on service delays.

Tandem Design of Bus Priority Based on a Pre-Signal System

Giving buses priority is an important measure to improve the attractiveness of public transport and to reduce urban traffic congestion. Reducing bus service delays as much as possible will have a positive impact on urban traffic. Based on the pre-signal system, a bus at an intersection with a left-turn special phase is optimized by “tandem design”. The design model is applied to the entrance of an intersection to study the process of vehicle arrival and departure at the main signal and pre-signal, and to calculate and analyze the delay changes of buses, straight social vehicles (meaning vehicles other than those required to be open to traffic) and left-turn vehicles before and after the adoption of “tandem design”. The results show that when the vehicle capacity at the intersection is saturated, the delays to buses and the delays of left-turn vehicles will be significantly reduced once the “tandem design” is adopted at the entrance of a cross intersection with a special left-turn phase. However, it has little effect on the delay of straight-on vehicles; with this system, the total delay experienced by straight vehicles will be reduced to one cycle.

Blockchain in air cargo: challenges of new World

The last years’ experience of functioning during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that digital solutions can significantly increase the efficiency of business operational processes. This study focuses on the implementation of digital technologies at the airports to optimize information and financial flows, that are required for the air cargo transportation. The study was carried out based on the analysis of technological schedules of airports and airlines for cargo handling. As a result of this study, we have identified the main problematic operations leading to an increase in the time spent by cargo at the airports. The article examines and summarizes the world practice of using blockchain technology to manage information and financial flows in air cargo. The article has developed a model for the implementation of these technologies in the air cargo industry on the basis of a single blockchain platform. This model allows making optimal use of available airport resources in order to minimize service delays. It solves the main problem of creating the transparency of the information exchange between all air cargo transportation participants.

Inter-Machine Exchange of Real Time in Distributed Computer Systems

The possibilities of increasing the likelihood of timely service and reducing the average waiting time for requests for inter-machine exchange in distributed real-time computer systems are investigated. The analyzed effect is achieved as a result of redundant multi-way transmissions of packets that are critical to delays, which provide for the replication of transmitted packets with the task for each replica of the path (route) of the sequential passage of network nodes. The condition for the timeliness of the reserved transmissions is that the accumulated waiting in the queues of the nodes making up the path, at least for one of the replicas, does not exceed the maximum permissible time. An analytical model is proposed for estimating the average delays of multi-path redundant transmissions, when determined by the average delivery time of the first of the replicas transmitted in different ways. For requests critical to service delays, the influence of the frequency of reservation (replication) of requests on the probability of their timely service and the average waiting time accumulated at the nodes of the path for the replica delivered first was analyzed.