Development of Competitive–Cooperative Relationships among Mediterranean Cruise Ports since 2000

Cruise shipping has been extremely popular in recent years, and one of the fastest-growing areas has been the Mediterranean. In the paper, we examine the evaluation of possible competitive–cooperative relationships among Mediterranean cruise ports for the period 2000–2017. To this end, we use three models: the dynamic shift-share model, the Lotka–Volterra model (LVM), and the logistic model (LM). The evaluation of basic market indices is included for completeness. The analysis shows that cruise traffic is in a saturation phase. The shift-share and LVM models reveal that interaction among ports is not significant for the large ports, but could be essential for the small ones.

Symphyotrichum ciliatum in Romania: trends of spread and invaded plant communities

Symphyotrichum ciliatum was reported as invasive in Romania in the early 1970s. In this study we have analysed its invasion history, current distribution in Romania, habitat preferences and the associated plant communities. Data recorded during our recent field work, as well as from herbaria and previously published papers, were used in the analysis. This data confirms its invasive character. Given the abrupt increase in the slope of the invasion curve during the last decade, we can assume that S. ciliatum is still far from reaching the saturation phase of its invasion in Romania. Habitats invaded by this species are mostly anthropogenic herb stands associated with rail and road transport networks, and the continental inland salt steppes. The classical methodology of the Zürich- Montpellier school was used for the field phytosociological research and the classification of the investigated communities was done using the deductive method. The phytocoenoses dominated by S. ciliatum were classified as derivate communities. The description of these communities included data about plant composition, synecology and distribution in the study area.

Saturation Model and Phase Recovering for Phase Measuring Profilometry

Phase measuring profilometry is a method of structured light illumination whose three-dimensional reconstructions are susceptible to error from intensity saturation. Phase error caused by intensity saturation of fringe patterns is studied in this work. A mathematical model is derived for recovering saturated intensity by means of other patterns without saturation, and thus we can decrease the phase error introduced by the saturation. Both simulation and experiment results show that the phase error arisen from intensity saturation can be efficiently suppressed with the proposed algorithm.

Dynamic Anti-Windup Design for Missile Overload Control System

The former research on the overload control system of a supersonic missile didn’t consider actuator saturation. In order to reduce the windup effect caused by actuator saturation, we developed a dynamic anti-windup compensator. The overload control system design adopted a two-step approach. Firstly a sliding mode controller was designed ignoring the saturation. Secondly a dynamic anti-windup compensator was designed. It added to the control system to reduce the windup effect. It disengaged the actuator fast from saturation phase after the actuator entered saturation. Simulation results showed that the dynamic anti-windup compensator reduced 52% of saturation time of the control system. Hence the performance of the overload control system is improved effectively.

Traffic Flow Forecasting Based on Chaos Neural Network

Traffic flow forecasting has become an emphasis question for discussion in traffic engineering domain and one kernel study in Intelligent Transportation System. After ensuring the traffic flow has the characteristic of chaos, traffic flow real data have been used to reconstruct phase space. Calculate the saturation phase space embedding dimension and maximal Lyapunov exponent. By above all, a chaos neural network model is constructed, which can make high precision short-term forecast for the nonlinear big-lagged system even by imperfect and variation inputs. At last, a forecasting example provides that the traffic flow forecasting based on chaos neural network is validity and feasibility.