Accessibility and Equity Analysis of Transit Facility Sites for Common Carrier Parcel Lockers

Transit goals have typically focused on commuter trips but facilitating urban last mile freight logistics is a potential strategy to increase transit ridership and mitigate the demands of parcel distribution on the transportation network. Presently, most parcel lockers operate out of private businesses, but consumer surveys have found that transit users may be interested in locker facilities at transit facilities. The implementation of an unmanned, secure, common carrier parcel locker system could have benefits for non-transit users as well. This research presents a multiple-criteria approach for analyzing the potential of public transportation facilities as hosts for a common carrier locker system. Several accessibility and equity metrics, including ridership, mode of transportation, spatial distribution, and sociodemographic profiles of coverage areas are utilized. A case study utilizing real-word data from the Portland, OR region and its transit facilities is used to illustrate accessibility and equity tradeoffs. The results demonstrate that multiple facility types have the potential to host a locker system but there are complex accessibility and equity tradeoffs to be considered by stakeholders and policy makers when prioritizing locations.

Iterated local search multi-objective methodology for the green vehicle routing problem considering workload equity with a private fleet and a common carrier

A multi-objective methodology was proposed for solving the green vehicle routing problem with a private fleet and common carrier considering workload equity. The iterated local search metaheuristic, which is adapted to the solution of the problem with three objectives, was proposed as a solution method. A solution algorithm was divided into three stages. In the first, initial solutions were identified based on the savings heuristic. The second and third act together using the random variable neighbourhood search algorithm, which allows performing an intensification process and perturbance processes, giving the possibility of exploring new regions in the search space, which are proposed within the framework of optimizing the three objectives. According to the previous review of the state of the art, there is little related literature; through discussions with the productive sector, this problem is frequent due to increases in demand in certain seasons or a part of the maintenance vehicle fleet departing from service. The proposed methodology was verified using case studies from the literature, which were adapted to the problem of three objectives, obtaining consistent solutions. Where cases were not reported in the literature, these could be used as a reference in future research.

The Net Neutrality Debate is Outdated: Time for a New Wider View

In 2008, former FCC Commissioner McDowell warned that Net Neutrality regulatory rulings could change every two to four years with election results His prediction was prescient. The democrat-led Wheeler Commission used technical definitions of telecommunication and information services to place all carriers under light touch Title II common carrier regulations. The succeeding republican-led Pai Commission rescinded the Wheeler Commission’s Order. The problem with both orders is that telecommunications and information services as separate categories are losing relevance in the online economy. A new approach to Net Neutrality policy is introduced that recognizes the emergence of large platforms and Internet service providers (ISPs) competing against each other. The recommendation is to break regulatory silos and develop a holistic oversight of the online ecosystem that examines in an integrated way anticompetitive behavior associated with communication, information, and services.

The Vehicle Routing Problem with Partial Outsourcing

This paper introduces the vehicle routing problem with partial outsourcing (VRPPO) in which a customer can be served by a single private vehicle, by a common carrier, or by both a single private vehicle and a common carrier. As such, it is a variant of the vehicle routing problem with private fleet and common carrier (VRPPC). The objective of the VRPPO is to minimize fixed and variable costs of the private fleet plus the outsourcing cost. We propose two different path-based formulations for the VRPPO and solve these with a branch-and-price-and-cut solution method. For each path-based formulation, two different pricing procedures are designed and used when solving the linear relaxations by column generation. To assess the quality of the solution methods and gain insight in potential cost improvements compared with the VRPPC, we perform tests on two instance sets with up to 100 customers from the literature.

A Wolfrom transmission without carrier

Wolfrom-transmission are well known planetary transmission with low number of gears and used for very high transmission - ratio for example : i=100 or more. With the book of Mueller “Die Umlaufgetriebe” they are a type of reduced planetary transmission containing two simple transmission one a minus-type and one a plus-type for the two transmission inside. With a common carrier for both transmission and only one sun and two inner gears it is very compact but known for bad efficiency. Firms who produces such transmission are talking about a lot of problems, but no details are published so long. The Author will show that a calculation with low-loss-gears will improve the efficiency very much and that we can produce this type without a carrier. The forces which are active at the planet should be go direct to the housing and not about bearings in a carrier. Details and a modelling of such type will be presented in the conference.