Managing the drone revolution: A systematic literature review into the current use of airborne drones and future strategic directions for their effective control

Commercial and private deployment of airborne drones is revolutionising many ecosystems. To identify critical issues and research gaps, our systematic literature review findings suggest that historic issues such as privacy, acceptance and security are increasingly replaced by operational considerations including interaction with and impacts on other airspace users. Recent incidents show that unrestricted drone use can inflict problems on other airspace users like airports and emergency services. Our review of current regulatory approaches shows a need for further policy and management response to both manage rapid and efficient drone usage growth, and facilitate innovation (e.g. intraurban package delivery), with one promising strategic response being low altitude airspace management (LAAM) systems for all drone use cases.     

A scenario planning approach for the flood emergency logistics preparation problem under uncertainty

This paper aims to develop a decision-making tool that can be used by government agencies in planning for flood emergency logistics. In this article, the flood emergency logistics problem with uncertainty is formulated as two stochastic programming models that allow for the determination of a rescue resource distribution system for urban flood disasters. The decision variables include the structure of rescue organizations, locations of rescue resource storehouses, allocations of rescue resources under capacity restrictions, and distributions of rescue resources. By applying the data processing and network analysis functions of the geographic information system, flooding potential maps can estimate the possible locations of rescue demand points and the required amount of rescue equipment. The proposed models are solved using a sample average approximation scheme. Finally, a real example of planning for flood emergency logistics is presented to highlight the significance of the proposed model as well as the efficacy of the proposed solution strategy.     

A stochastic programming approach for floods emergency logistics

This article presents a model to assist decision makers in the logistics of a flood emergency. The model attempts to optimize inventory levels for emergency supplies as well as vehicles’ availability, in order to deliver enough supplies to satisfy demands with a given probability. A spatio-temporal stochastic process represents the flood occurrence. The model is approximately solved with sample average approximation. The article presents a method to quantify the impact of the various intervening logistics parameters. An example is provided and a sensitivity analysis is performed. The studied example shows large differences between the impacts of logistics parameters such as number of products, number of periods, inventory capacity and degree of demand fulfillment on the logistics cost and time. This methodology emerges as a valuable tool to help decision makers to allocate resources both before and after a flood occurs, with the aim of minimizing the undesirable effects of such events.     

Understanding tourism development of historic districts from a representational perspective

This study investigated the tourism development of historic districts in Old South Downtown of Nanjing (China) from a representational perspective. Twenty-six residents, who are living or had lived within the four main historic districts of Old South Downtown area, were interviewed using snowball sampling. All written notes and audio records collected during the interviews were transcribed and coded by themes in the framework of social representation theory. The findings indicated that tourism development, as an unfamiliar phenomenon, was generally considered as negative impacts in the beginning (e.g. deprivation of residents’ homes and loss of traditional culture), especially by residents living within the districts for decades. Thereafter, tourism development in historic districts experienced an anchoring and objectification process. Anchoring is reflected in images of construction, reconstruction and demolition. In the objectifying process, struggling for individual's rights is obviously observed. Finally, propaganda conducted by mainstream media has helped residents of historic districts to form common sense and foster social identity. Problems of tourism development in historic districts were discussed as well.     

Disability,wages, and commuting in New York

In the U.S., substantial employment and wage gaps persist between workers with and without disabilities. A lack of accessible transportation is often cited as a barrier to employment in higher wage jobs for people with disabilities, but little is known about the intraurban commuting patterns of employed people with disabilities in relation to their wage earnings. Our study compares wages and commute times between workers with and without disabilities in the New York metropolitan region and identifies the intraurban zones where residents experience higher inequities in wage earnings and commute times. We obtained our data from the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the American Community Survey (ACS) for the 2008–2012 time period. We used linear mixed-effects models and generated separate models with log hourly wage or one-way commute time as the dependent variable. We find significant differences in wages and commute times between workers with and without disabilities at the scale of the metropolitan region as well as by intraurban zone. At the metropolitan scale, disabled workers earn 16.6% less and commute one minute longer on average than non-disabled workers. High commute and wage inequalities converge in the center, where workers with disabilities are more likely to use public transit, earn 17.1% less, and travel nearly four minutes longer on average than workers without disabilities. These results suggest that transport options are less accessible and slower for disabled workers than they are for non-disabled workers. Our findings indicate a need for more accessible and quicker forms of transportation in the center along with an increased availability of centrally located and affordable housing to reduce the disability gap in wages and commute times. We also find that workers with disabilities generally seek higher wages in exchange for longer commute times, but the results differ by race/ethnicity and gender. Compared to white men, minority workers earn much less, and white and Hispanic women have significantly shorter commute times. Our findings offer new geographic insights on how having a disability can influence wage earnings and commute times for workers in different intraurban zones in the New York metropolitan region.     

Market effects of regional high-speed trains on the Svealand line

When the Svealand line in Sweden opened in 1997, it replaced an older railway line between Eskilstuna and Stockholm (a distance of 115 km). Service on the Svealand line is operated with regional high-speed trains. In a case study of the effects of regional high-speed train services, changes in knowledge, valuations and travel behaviour have been analysed. The Svealand line has sparked an increase in regional rail travel of up to seven times compared to the old railway between Eskilstuna and Stockholm. Additionally, the market share has risen from 6% to 30%. Travelling times are valued highly and motorists, particularly, place great value on the high-speed train mode of transport.A general conclusion is that regional high-speed train services have had a major impact on the travel market and on travel behaviour. The improved accessibility to Stockholm, in particular, is especially noticeable among residents living close to the railway stations.     

Drone service response: Spatiotemporal heterogeneity implications

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, often called drones, have rapidly emerged for commercial and personal use in recent years. Drones are a promising and effective transportation mode because they can travel faster than traditional ground-based vehicles, particularly when obstacles limit quick response or in cases of congestion. An important consideration for drones is that travel times are impacted in various ways by real-time local conditions, including weather and terrain. While goods and supplies can be acquired at more traditional outlets (e.g., stores, warehouses, restaurants, hospitals, fire stations, etc.), drones are being increasingly relied upon to extend access, particularly for special services associated with food, drug, and equipment delivery. The reason is that they can reliably access almost anywhere, providing quick response without the need for more expensive (and larger) vehicles that are restricted to congested roadways. How to locate drone base stations and allocate service in order to optimize overall response is a challenging task, especially given spatiotemporal heterogeneity in distributed demand and service response times/costs that can vary over a day. This paper introduces an extension of p-median problem to aid in the deployment of a drone system that accounts for continuous planar travel costs. Results show that drone travel times can be significantly reduced across a region. A key feature in this work is the representation of both demand and flight trajectories across a continuous terrain.     

A statistical approach to small area synthetic population generation as a basis for carless evacuation planning

Natural or man-made hazards that require evacuation put already vulnerable populations in a more precarious situation. However, when plans and decisions about evacuation are made, the assumption of access to a private car is typically made and differences in income levels across a community is rarely accounted for. The result is that carless members of a community can find themselves stranded. Low income carless residents need alternative transportation means to reach shelters in case of an emergency. Thus, evacuation plans, decisions and models need necessary information that identifies and locates these populations. In this paper, data from the American Community Survey, US Census, Internal Revenue Services and the National Household Travel Survey are used to generate synthetic population for Anne Arundel County, Maryland using the copula concept. Geographic locations of low-income residents are identified within each subarea of the county (census tract) and their car ownership is estimated with a binomial logit model. The developed population synthesis method will allow officials to have a more accurate account of disadvantaged populations for emergency planning and identify locations of shelters, triage points as well as planning carless transportation services.     

A multiple dispatch and partial backup hypercube queuing model to analyze emergency medical systems on highways

The hypercube is a spatially distributed queuing model based on Markovian analysis approximations, used to analyze the configuration and operation of server-to-customer emergency systems. In the present study we adapted the model to analyze emergency medical systems (EMS) on highways, which operate within particular dispatching policies. The study takes into consideration that: the emergency calls are of different types; the servers are distinct (e.g., rescue ambulances, medical vehicles); only certain servers in the system can service calls in a given region (partial backup); and, depending on the type of call, one or more identical or distinct servers are immediately dispatched to service such calls (multiple dispatch). We also consider that the arriving calls take place either along the highway or at the home location of a server – in which case the server does not need to travel to the call location. Finally, we analyzed the computational results of applying such an approach to the case study of an EMS operating on Brazilian highways.     

Freight train scheduling with elastic demand

A train slot selection model based on multicommodity network flow concepts is developed for determining freight train timetables for scheduling rail services along multiple interconnected routes. The model seeks to minimize operating costs incurred by carriers and delays incurred by shippers while ensuring that the schedules and demand levels are mutually consistent. A column generation-based methodology is proposed for train slot selection to meet frequency requirements. This methodology is embedded in a simulation-based iterative framework, where demand for rail services is re-computed in accordance with the train schedule obtained by solving the freight train scheduling problem.     

Port service chains and port performance evaluation

This paper provides a novel and unique methodology for evaluating the effectiveness performance of a port’s individual services by utilizing the concept of a port service chain – a service network utilized by a port’s service providers in the provision of the port’s services that accounts for the quality-of-service relationships among the services. If such relationships are ignored, the resource allocations by the port’s service providers to improve the quality of their port services will either over- or underestimate the amount of resources needed. A cooperative port service chain will always (under certain conditions) be more effective than a non-cooperative port service chain.     

The case of Paratransit - ‘Trotro’ service data as a credible location addressing of road networks in Ghana

Road networks are by far the largest mobility infrastructure in Sub-Sahara Africa, and are key to providing access to economic and social opportunities. Yet the majority of road networks in Ghana and other countries in Sub-Sahara Africa are not geographically referenced, to facilitate their uses for road maintenance and management, transport planning, emergency services, disaster cases, logistics, tourism and other location based services. Consequently, this study takes advantage of paratransit service and the location of landmarks to provide location addressing of road networks in Ghana. The paratransit service, popularly known as Trotro in Ghana is a local transit system that uses an automobile to move people and goods along a prescribed travel route on a road network, with locally known stops where people get on and off the vehicle. The Trotro service is popular in Ghana, yet there is no critical investigation demonstrating its spatial coverage, relevance as a credible location addressing for road networks, or as a comprehensive location data for location based services. This study provides evidence for this case, and investigates the spatial coverage of road networks used by the Trotro vehicles, and the mapping of their service stops together with landmarks in the Asokore Mampong Municipality (AMM) of Ashanti region in Ghana. It was found that the location data from both Trotro service and landmarks covered about 86% of the entire road network in AMM; providing a large coverage of the road network and greater geographic detail. A service area estimation undertaken using the generated location data shows a high geographic accessibility, with travel distances as low as 160 m from any location to the nearest Trotro service or landmark covering about 80% of the road networks. These results show the capability of the generated location data to tackle the problem of spatially unreferenced road networks, and to significantly improve their effective uses. The popularity of paratransit in Sub-Sahara Africa means that this study can be adapted to other countries where the majority of the road networks are not spatially referenced.     

The loyalty process of residents and tourists in the festival context

Few attempts have been made to find out if the loyalty process for residents and tourists in the context of cultural festivals is the same. This study investigated the influence of involvement on satisfaction as factors contributing to the likelihood of returning to an annual festival for residents and tourists. A sample of 412 attendees of a cultural and historic festival in the Midwest region of the USA was surveyed. The results showed that both residents and tourists who were more involved with the festival had higher satisfaction levels. However, only residents who were highly satisfied with the festival were more likely to attend again, whereas tourists' satisfaction level did not significantly influence their likelihood of returning. For tourists, it is likely that their quest for novelty is influential in shaping their future intentions. Implications of this result for the sustainability of cultural festivals are discussed.     

Measuring the vulnerability of public transport networks

In the last years, studies on the vulnerability of public transport networks attract a growing attention because of the repercussions that incidents can have on the day-to-day functioning of a city. The aim of this paper is to develop a methodology for measuring public transport network vulnerability taking the Madrid Metro system as an example. The consequences of a disruptions of riding times or the number of missed trips are analysed for each of the network links with a full scan approach implemented in GIS (Geographic Information Systems). Using real trips distribution, each link in the network is measured for criticality, from which the vulnerability of lines and stations can be calculated. The proposed methodology also makes it possible to analyse the role of circular lines in network vulnerability and to obtain a worst-case scenario for the successive disruption of links by simulating a targeted attack on the network. Results show the presence of critical links in the southern part of the network, where line density is low and ridership high. They also highlight the importance of the circular line as an element of network robustness.     

Sociocultural Impacts of Tourism: A Case Study from Norway

This article examines residents' perceptions of sociocultural impacts in the North Cape community in Norway. Case study, as a qualitative methodology, was employed to gather the necessary data. Based on the in-depth interviews with 22 permanent residents of the North Cape community, 10 influential factors were empirically identified: source of income; quality of life; community structure; demonstration effect; crime and alcohol; acculturation; perspective; status and community pride; conflicts; and physical impact. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing theory, the current study suggests that both those who are, and who are not economically dependent on the tourism industry perceive tourism positively. Both long-term and short-term residents believe that tourism's benefits outweigh tourism's costs. No noteworthy differences are found across sociodemographic factors such as education and marital status with respect to the residents' perception. The almost overwhelmingly positive response of the residents can be attributed to the current stage of destination development cycle at the North Cape.     

Developing metropolitan tourism on the fringe of central London

The paper examines the growth of a ‘new tourism area’ in Islington, north London — a locality that lacks a large attraction, acknowledged distinctive heritage and has not been planned as a destination. We review supply side changes and link them to the recent literature on economic and spatial trends in cities, particularly the role of amenity. We report on a survey of Islington visitors that shows they are drawn by distinctive qualities of place rather than particular attractions. The visitors have characteristics that distinguish them from visitors to London as a whole, but we speculate that they have similarities to Islington workers and residents in their search for amenity, entertainment and high‐level consumption services. In the final section of the paper we explore the consequences of our findings for understanding the growth of urban tourism. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

An emergency logistics distribution approach for quick response to urgent relief demand in disasters

Quick response to the urgent relief needs right after natural disasters through efficient emergency logistics distribution is vital to the alleviation of disaster impact in the affected areas, which remains challenging in the field of logistics and related study areas. This paper presents a hybrid fuzzy clustering-optimization approach to the operation of emergency logistics co-distribution responding to the urgent relief demands in the crucial rescue period. Based on a proposed three-layer emergency logistics co-distribution conceptual framework, the proposed methodology involves two recursive mechanisms: (1) disaster-affected area grouping, and (2) relief co-distribution. Numerical studies with a real large-scale earthquake disaster occurring in Taiwan are conducted, and the corresponding results indicate the applicability of the proposed method and its potential advantages. We hope that this study can not only make the proposed emergency logistics system available with more benefits to the development of emergency logistics systems for the urgent needs of disaster areas around the world but also stimulate more excellent researches concerning emergency logistics management.     

Using geographical information systems to organize police patrol routes effectively by grouping hotspots of crash and crime data

Applying Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) can help police departments allocate limited resources more efficiently. By focusing on hazardous areas, highly visible traffic law enforcement simultaneously can reduce both crime and crashes. Most studies have focused on the reduction of crime and crashes after applying new patrol routes, but few have documented how to improve or change police dispatch time. The objective of this study was to compare the police dispatch time between two conditions: (1) police patrol routes with organized hotspots, and (2) police patrol route patterns without focusing on hotspots. A secondary objective consisted of developing a procedure to describe the calculation of the change in dispatch time.This study used data obtained from the College Station Police Department. Crime and crash data were collected between January 2005 and September 2010, which included 65,461 offense reports and 14,712 crash reports. The study procedure includes four steps: (1) geocoding the data, (2) defining the hotspots, (3) organizing the best patrol routes, and (4) estimating the effectiveness. ArcGIS was used for the data analysis. The results indicate that using DDACTS principles can potentially reduce police dispatch time by 13% and 17% when the top five and top ten hotspot routes respectively are included in the analysis. The procedure can be used by law enforcement agencies to estimate whether or not the DDACTS protocols can be an effective tool for reducing law enforcement dispatch times when crash and crime data are analyzed simultaneously.     

Walking distances from services and destinations for residential aged-care centres in Australian cities

Aged-care centres are one of the common places used by the older Australian population as their residence. While these centres provide many health supports and assistance for the well-being of the residents, there are still many health benefits for this population by walking in the environment outside the centre, because of the positive effect of walking on health and the opportunities it provides for social interaction. However, to choose walking is dependent on several factors, some of which pertain to the availability of and accessibility to the facilities around the care centres. This paper has approached accessibility as a matter of walking distance to the facilities or services, or to the public transport with potential access to them.For this purpose, the paper has analysed the walking distances from residential aged-care centres to services and transport in the six largest Australian cities which host over 50% of the residential capacity of the aged-care centres within the country. The services included cafés, pharmacies, grocery stores, news agents, lottery outlets, and post offices. The study has used the 2017 database of aged-care centres from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and Google Map API services to locate the services and transport stops around the centres and calculate the walking distances to them. The results indicated that in all cities, most of services were only in a walking distance for healthier residents, while the less mobile residents might have difficulty walking to the services, especially the pharmacies. Nevertheless, majority of centres were within a walking distance to points of public transport. In addition, the study found that the centres' distance to services varied considerably both inside a city and between cities, which implied there might have been no prior planning in the selection of the locations for building or repurposing the centres.     

Driver behaviour,truck motion and dangerous road locations – Unfolding from emergency braking data

Road vehicles equipped with measurement, computing, data storage and data communication capabilities can be utilised as probe-vehicles. Data received from such vehicles can provide valuable traffic and traffic safety information in respect of the covered routes and the connecting road network. In this study, trucks negotiating their normal daily haulage trips were used as probe-vehicles and the data recording their vehicular emergency events, such as abrupt braking events, detected by their on-board vehicular safety systems were analysed. The motivation for such an analysis is manifold. The aspect emphasized here is that the recorded vehicular emergency actions and events can be seen as surrogate safety events. Some of these surrogate safety events mark traffic incidents and therefore can be used as input by the surrogate safety assessment methodology. Though the vehicular emergency data used herein provides only sparse spatial and temporal coverage of the road network investigated, its analysis led to some interesting findings about interactions between drivers, trucks and roads.