Designing of Container Feeder Service Networks Under Unstable Demand Conditions

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly magnified supply challenges in all industries, and virus waves continue to cause an extraordinary amount of variation in both the demand for and the availability of necessary products. This uncertainty has also forced many organizations including container liner shipping to redesign their supply chain. Feeder services from hub ports are essential chain of shipping networks. This chapter addresses the design of feeder networks under consideration of demand fluctuations over the year. For this purpose, a perturbation-based variable neighbourhood search approach is developed in order to determine the feeder ship fleet size and mix, the fleet deployment, service routes, and voyage schedules to minimize operational costs. In the case study investigation, the authors consider the feeder network design problem faced by a feeder shipping company as a sample application. The performance of alternate network configurations is compared under dynamic demand conditions. Numerical results highlight the advantage of dynamic and flexible design of feeder service networks.

Technical and Scale Efficiency of the Brazilian Municipalities’ Water and Sanitation Services: A Two-Stage Data Envelopment Analysis

Seeking to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” is an admirable Sustainable Development Goal and an honourable commitment of the United Nations and its Member States regarding the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation services (WSSs). However, the majority of countries are not on target to achieve this by 2030, with several of them moving away from the best practices. Brazil is one of these cases, given, for example, the existing asymmetries in the access to water supply and sanitation service networks. For this reason, we propose a benchmarking exercise using a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis to measure the technical and scale efficiency of the Brazilian municipalities’ WSSs, noting their contextual environment. Our results point towards low mean efficiency scores, motivated by the existence of significant scale inefficiencies (the vast majority of municipalities are operating at a larger than optimal scale). Furthermore, the Water source was found to be a statistically significant efficiency predictor, with statistically significant differences found in terms of Ownership and Geography. Ultimately, we suggest policy-making and regulatory possibilities based on debureaucratization, the implementation of stricter expenditure control policies, and investment in the expansion of WSSs.

Dancing with Diversity?

Rapid market transition in post-reform China has created various socioeconomic spaces that fall beyond the Leninist mode of control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and thus constitutes a formidable challenge to its ruling capacity. This article examines the evolving adaptations of the CCP and the rise of a new form of Party-society nexus in urban China. We found that Party organisers have been fostering a spatial strategy in the context of ‘disorganised urban socialism’. By spanning institutional and sectoral gaps, engaging so-called ‘floating party members’, and developing community-based service networks, the Party has deliberately combined a specific social mechanism with the Leninist logic of organising. We conclude with a broader discussion of the possible scenario and political implication of CCP’s organisational consolidation from below.

Reforms of the Science and Technology Management System

China’s science and technology system and its developing history were reviewed by this chapter, including science and technology investment, research institutions, research funds, enterprise transformation, scientific research talents, and so on. In recent years, China has stepped up its reform efforts, clarified the positioning of different types of scientific research institutes, established research and development and service networks, opened up the channel for achievement transformation, and supplemented by talent incentive and integration of scientific research bases, so as to effectively solve the problems affecting innovation efficiency. Facing the future, the direction of further reform is to strengthen the construction of legalization and institutionalization.

HIV and Aging: Overcoming Challenges in Existing HIV Guidelines to Provide Patient-Centered Care for Older People with HIV

With advances in antiretroviral therapy and subsequent increase in life expectancy, People with HIV (PWH) now experience multiple geriatric syndromes in the setting of advanced aging and increased multimorbidity. HIV clinicians bear the responsibility of delivering geriatric care to this vulnerable population, despite limited geriatric medicine training and limited support from HIV service networks that were not traditionally designed to care for an aging population. Although HIV clinicians reported formal guidelines specific to older PWH to be among the most helpful interventions, current HIV guidelines present multiple issues in their applicability to the care of older PWH, including multifactorial nature of conditions in older adults, difficulty measuring patient-centered outcomes, lack of representation of older PWH in clinical trials, limited guidelines addressing geriatric syndromes, and the use of chronological age as criteria for inclusion despite advanced aging in PWH. Understanding that updated guidelines addressing above challenges may take many years to develop, we offer strategies on the application of current guidelines, including using baseline attributes, time to benefit, and the Geriatrics 5M model to aid in shared decision making and improve outcomes among older PWH.