Amount Of Containers Research Articles

Management of refined and personalized newborn blood specimen collection

BackgroundIatrogenic blood loss is an important cause of neonatal anemia. In this study, a spreadsheet tool was developed to reduce blood collection, providing a new idea for the prevention of iatrogenic blood loss in newborns. MethodsBased on hematocrit, minimum test volume and dead volume, a new tool was to calculate the minimum blood collection volume and the number of containers required for the test portfolio. We collected data from October 2022 to October 2023 from Xiamen Maternal and Child Health Hospital for analysis and validation. ResultsDuring this year, there were 16,434 patients and 13,696 plasma/serological samples in the neonatology department. Among them, there were 8 test combinations of greater than 1%, and 9490 samples in total. According to the hospital manual, the recommended amount of blood collection is 27,534 ml and 9490 containers. Through the analysis of this tool, total blood collection was 8864.77 ml, marked qnantity of upward containers (closest level to the calculated blood collection volume) was 10301 ml, and the amount of containers was 8835, which decreased by 67.8%, 62.58% and 6.9% respectively. Besides, if the hematocrit information cannot be obtained in advance and the high hematocrit is calculated as 0.8, the recommended amount of blood collection is 14334.3 ml, and the marked amount of the upward container markering is 17340 ml, decreasing by 47.9% and 37.02% respectively. ConclusionWe have developed an auxiliary tool that can manage neonatal blood specimen collection in a fine and personalized way and can be applied among different laboratory instruments by parameters modification.

A Latency-Driven Availability Assessment for Multi-Tenant Service Chains

Nowadays, most telecommunication services adhere to the Service Function Chain (SFC) paradigm, where network functions are implemented via software. In particular, container virtualization is becoming a popular approach to deploy network functions and to enable resource slicing among several tenants. The resulting infrastructure is a complex system composed by a huge amount of containers implementing different SFC functionalities, along with different tenants sharing the same chain. The complexity of such a scenario lead us to evaluate two critical metrics: the steady-state availability (the probability that a system is functioning in long runs) and the latency (the time between a service request and the pertinent response). Consequently, we propose a latency-driven availability assessment for multi-tenant service chains implemented via Containerized Network Functions (CNFs). We adopt a multi-state system to model single CNFs and the queueing formalism to characterize the service latency. To efficiently compute the availability, we develop a modified version of the Multidimensional Universal Generating Function (MUGF) technique. Finally, we solve an optimization problem to minimize the SFC cost under an availability constraint. As a relevant example of SFC, we consider a containerized version of IP Multimedia Subsystem, whose parameters have been estimated through fault injection techniques and load tests.

Заготовительная деятельность потребительской кооперации Краснодарского края в условиях восстановления хозяйства (1943–1945 гг.)

Introduction. The relevance of the problem considered in the article is connected with the need for creative use of the experience of economic activity of consumer cooperation. The novelty of the research is connected with the study of the problem that has not received proper coverage in the historical literature. The purpose of the study is to analyze the procurement activities of consumer cooperatives of the Krasnodar Territory during the Great Patriotic War. Materials and methods. The research is based on the principles of objectivity, historicism and a systematic approach. The following special historical methods were used in the preparation of the study: historical-genetic, historical-comparative and statistical. Analysis. During the Great Patriotic War, the importance of procurement activities of consumer cooperatives has significantly increased. In particular, the procurement of agricultural products and raw materials played an important role in the conditions of the restoration of the economy of the Krasnodar Territory in 1943–1945. Despite the objective difficulties, the Kuban consumer cooperation has been increasing the volume of agricultural products and raw materials every month. Metal billets were of primary importance as it was one of the areas of assistance to the front. The main factors in the development of procurement work were the increase in the level of procurement organization by the leadership of the district consumer unions and the procurement office, as well as the hard work of employees. At the same time, during the procurement, such shortcomings as the limited availability of goods allocated for exchange, the lack of the necessary amount of containers, the irresponsible attitude of a number of leaders of consumer societies and theft of material values were revealed. At the end of the war, certain successes were achieved in the fight against these negative phenomena. Results. According to the results of the study, it can be concluded that the procurement activity of consumer cooperatives played an important role in the conditions of economic recovery of the Krasnodar Territory.

Storage-Saving Scheduling Policies for Clusters Running Containers

Container technology plays an important role in the virtualization landscape today. A container uses its own file system consisting of a stack of layers, which are stored on the execution server's disk. Containers running on the same server share the layers they have in common, and this sharing results in valuable savings in server storage space. Many containers can run on a single server, but when their resource demands grow enough, they are distributed across a cluster of nodes/servers by orchestration systems, such as Kubernetes. In this work, we found that for the same amount of containers to run, the storage required is higher for clusters consisting of a larger number of nodes. The severity of this storage overhead depends on the scheduling policy used to select the nodes that run the containers. By comparing different storage-saving scheduling policies that differ from each other in the depth of storage knowledge they leverage to make decisions, our analysis reveals that only deep, layer-level knowledge can effectively counter the growth in storage demand as the cluster size increases. Policies with coarser-grained knowledge achieve limited benefit because they achieve performance that is nearly equal to that of a random, zero-knowledge policy.

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON MARITIME TRADE AND TRANSPORTATION: AN ESTIMATION OF THE MARITIME TRADE POST-COVID-19

The coronavirus which emerged in December 2019 has affected the health of people and the whole world’s social and working life. This pandemic has impressed not only people’s health and life but also the world economy and especially maritime trade. International organizations and maritime authorities such as World Health Organization (WHO) and International Maritime Organization (IMO) have taken several measures and responses to mitigate the impact the Covid-19 on the maritime industry. Taking precautions, implementing protocols, and complying with guidelines at ships and ports which helps to protect the health of seafarers, passengers, port workers, and the general public have adversely affected the entire world economy and international trade. The study aims to identify the impacts of Covid-19 on maritime trade and transportation and to estimate world maritime trade for the years 2023, 2025, and 2030. In the study, a literature review was conducted, the impact of the Covid-19 on world maritime trade, maritime transportation, port calls, and shipping companies have been examined and the least squares method which is a form of regression analysis was used to estimate maritime trade and container throughput for these years. According to the result of the analysis, it is estimated that the world maritime trade will be 24,100.8 million tons in 2023, 25,163.2 million tons in 2025, and 27,819.2 million tons in 2030, and the estimated total container throughput at container ports in the world will be 906,104.1 thousand TEU in 2023, 959,701.5 thousand TEU in 2025 and 1,093,695 thousand TEU in 2030. It has been concluded that the total global maritime trade and amount of containers handled will increase gradually.

A constraint programming approach for the premarshalling problem

The enormous amount of containers handled at ports hampers the efficiency of terminal operations. The optimization of crane movements is crucial for speeding up the loading and unloading of vessels. To this end, the premarshalling problem aims to reorder a set of containers placed in adjacent stacks with a minimum number of crane movements, so that a container with an earlier retrieval time is not below one with a later retrieval time. In this study, we present a series of constraint programming models to optimally solve the premarshalling problem. Extensive computational comparisons show that the best proposed constraint programming formulation yields better results than the state-of-the-art integer programming approach. A salient finding in this paper is that the logic behind the model construction in constraint programming is radically different from that of more traditional mixed integer linear programming models.

Transshipment operations optimization of sea-rail intermodal container in seaport rail terminals

This paper tackles the sea-rail transshipment operation problem of seaport rail terminals, which includes two key sub-problems involved in sea-rail intermodal container transportation, namely train schedule template and transshipment plan of inbound containers. With limited resources and time constraints, operators need to decide the placed-in and taken-out time of trains to coordinate with vessels’ unloading time and the transshipment plan of inbound containers (i.e. the amount of containers that are transshipped between different vessels and trains in each time slot) to maximize the number of direct-transshipment containers while minimizing the storage time and dwell time of inbound containers. The problem is formulated as an integer programming model, and a tailored rolling horizon approach with the adaptive horizon and backtracking strategy is proposed. The performance of the algorithm is verified by a set of instances. The results suggest that the handling capacity of rail-mounted gantry cranes shows a more significant effect on the performance of transshipment operation than other factors. The negative effect caused by insufficient handling capacity could be alleviated by methods like prolonging the feasible service time of trains and enhancing the operational capacity of shunting engines.

Berth scheduling at marine container terminals

Purpose Marine transportation has been faced with an increasing demand for containerized cargo during the past decade. Marine container terminals (MCTs), as the facilities for connecting seaborne and inland transportation, are expected to handle the increasing amount of containers, delivered by vessels. Berth scheduling plays an important role for the total throughput of MCTs as well as the overall effectiveness of the MCT operations. This study aims to propose a novel island-based metaheuristic algorithm to solve the berth scheduling problem and minimize the total cost of serving the arriving vessels at the MCT. Design/methodology/approach A universal island-based metaheuristic algorithm (UIMA) was proposed in this study, aiming to solve the spatially constrained berth scheduling problem. The UIMA population was divided into four sub-populations (i.e. islands). Unlike the canonical island-based algorithms that execute the same metaheuristic on each island, four different population-based metaheuristics are adopted within the developed algorithm to search the islands, including the following: evolutionary algorithm (EA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and differential evolution (DE). The adopted population-based metaheuristic algorithms rely on different operators, which facilitate the search process for superior solutions on the UIMA islands. Findings The conducted numerical experiments demonstrated that the developed UIMA algorithm returned near-optimal solutions for the small-size problem instances. As for the large-size problem instances, UIMA was found to be superior to the EA, PSO, EDA and DE algorithms, which were executed in isolation, in terms of the obtained objective function values at termination. Furthermore, the developed UIMA algorithm outperformed various single-solution-based metaheuristic algorithms (including variable neighborhood search, tabu search and simulated annealing) in terms of the solution quality. The maximum UIMA computational time did not exceed 306 s. Research limitations/implications Some of the previous berth scheduling studies modeled uncertain vessel arrival times and/or handling times, while this study assumed the vessel arrival and handling times to be deterministic. Practical implications The developed UIMA algorithm can be used by the MCT operators as an efficient decision support tool and assist with a cost-effective design of berth schedules within an acceptable computational time. Originality/value A novel island-based metaheuristic algorithm is designed to solve the spatially constrained berth scheduling problem. The proposed island-based algorithm adopts several types of metaheuristic algorithms to cover different areas of the search space. The considered metaheuristic algorithms rely on different operators. Such feature is expected to facilitate the search process for superior solutions.

A MODEL FOR ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL EVALUATION OF INTER-/INTRA-TERMINAL CONTAINERS FLOWS

European maritime ports play a fundamental role in maritime transport of containers. One of the more common problem of these ports is related to the berth congestion; in these cases solutions recommended by industry officials is to expand terminal capacity; when this solution is not available the ‘Dry port’ represents an effective alternative. The dry port is an external area directly connected with one or several seaports by rail and/or road transport. The adoption of a dry port leads to benefits on terminal congestion; depending on the distance of the dry port from the port as well as on the amount of containers stocked in the dry port area, the transport of the containers from port to dry port requires resources. In this paper, a model that allows optimizing the inter-/ intra-terminal flows of the containers is proposed. The model aims at the minimization of costs and environmental impact due to the handling of containers. A full case study concerning a multi-terminal maritime system located in Port of Bari is developed.

Tighter MIP models for Barge Container Ship Routing

This paper addresses the problem of optimal planning of a liner service for a barge container shipping company. Given estimated weekly demands between pairs of ports, our goal is to determine the subset of ports to be called and the amount of containers to be shipped between each pair of ports, so as to maximize the profit of the shipping company. In order to save possible leasing or storage costs of empty containers at the respective ports, our approach takes into account the repositioning of empty containers. The line has to follow the outbound–inbound principle, starting from the port at the river mouth. We propose a novel integrated approach in which the shipping company can simultaneously optimize the route (along with repositioning of empty containers), the choice of the final port, length of the turnaround time and the size of its fleet. To solve this problem, a new mixed integer programming model is proposed. On the publicly available set of benchmark instances for barge container routing, we demonstrate that this model provides very tight dual bounds and significantly outperforms the existing approaches from the literature for splittable demands.We also show how to further improve this model by projecting out arc variables for modeling the shipping of empty containers. Our numerical study indicates that the latter model improves the computing times for the challenging case of unsplittable demands. We also study the impact of the turnaround time optimization on the total profit of the company.

Port-IO: an integrative mobile cloud platform for real-time inter-terminal truck routing optimization

Besides the transport of containers between transshipment areas, an increasing amount of containers needs to be moved to value-added logistics and auxiliary service areas leading to additional container flows within a seaport. Both real-time information exchange and optimization are necessary to efficiently coordinate actors and container movements being involved in respective inter-terminal transport (ITT). However, there is no decision support system facilitating real-time planning and management of ITT taking advantage of modern information technologies and optimization algorithms. In this paper, we formulate the inter-terminal truck routing problem as a novel optimization problem and propose two greedy heuristics and two hybrid simulated annealing algorithms. The computational experiments, conducted using real locations from the Port of Hamburg (Germany), are evaluated extensively. They indicate that the proposed hybrid simulated annealing algorithms are able to report feasible and improved routes within seconds. The optimization component is embedded into a scalable cloud platform that integrates both real-time data from truck drivers using a mobile app and current traffic data. As such, the proposed mobile cloud platform realizes the vision of a decision support system facilitating real-time communication and context-aware ITT planning for reducing costs and the carbon footprint.

A branch-and-price method for integrated yard crane deployment and container allocation in transshipment yards

With the trend towards mega-vessels and shipping alliance, the importance of transshipment activities keeps increasing. In transshipment yards, a “yard template” is often used to stack containers in dedicated areas (sub-blocks) pre-reserved for their own destination vessels. At short-term planning level, the yard template is given, but the containers going to a specific vessel still have high flexibility to be allocated among many pre-reserved sub-blocks. The amount of containers allocated to each sub-block, i.e. “container allocation”, not only affects the traffic congestion, but more importantly determines the number of yard cranes (YCs) required in each block. The limited YCs have to switch blocks to fit the needs of container allocation in different periods, i.e. “YC deployment”. This study integrated these two closely related problems and formulated a MIP model. Since the model has a nice block-diagonal structure, column generation under Dentzig Wolfe decomposition was proposed to get lower bounds. A novel branch-and-price (B&P) method was proposed to find near-optimal solutions. To reduce the searching tree size, our B&P method branched on YC paths during the planning horizon, instead of branching on decision variables directly. Numerical experiments under both small and large scale problems showed that our B&P method could efficiently solve the integrated planning problem. The results also showed that YC movements could be reduced effectively without sacrificing operational efficiency or using more yard cranes.

A matheuristic for the Cargo Mix Problem with Block Stowage

The cargo-mix problem aims at selecting the amount of containers of a given type to load on a vessel. In this article we present an extended definition that includes the analysis of a circular route with draft restrictions, limitations on expected cargo and the use of a block stowage strategy. A compact formulation of the problem based on the state-of-the-art heuristic decomposition is shown not to be able to solve the extended problem, thus a matheuristic approach is presented that can achieve high quality results in a matter of seconds.

Applying a time–space network to reposition reefer containers among major Asian ports

Empty container repositioning is a complicated daily operation that liners have to deal with due to the imbalanced cargo flows. This operation is comprised of two main problems: repositioning both dry containers and special containers. Due to the considerable amount of containers and high similarity, dry containers are usually moved in batches. In addition, leasing and pooling are also complementary strategies commonly used to adjust the allocation of empty dry containers. On the contrary, reefer containers have to be repositioned more precisely than dry containers because they can yield high profits and cannot be substituted easily. This study formulates a time–space model suitable for dealing with this large scale mathematical problem. A comparison between the model output and real operation is made to demonstrate the performance of the proposed model.

Antalya Limanı Konteyner Trafiğinin Bulanık Sinir Ağı İle Tahmini

In recent years, a large part of general cargo of international maritime transportation has been transported by containers. For both operational cost reduction of handling time and the concerns for the safety of transported cargo, the container traffic will rapidly increase in the coming years. The small number of ports handling containers and/or inadequate capacity of such ports reduces the international competitiveness of Turkish ports in its region. Therefore, the proactive and accurate detection of future trends of port container traffic and duly preparation of revision plans have become imperative. Through this study, the future handling of Port of Antalya has been forecasted by modeling the amount of containers handled at the port with fuzzy neural network. The consistency of the forecasts obtained by the proposed method and that of other methods has been compared in the study. It is found that the proposed method results are more consistent than those of the others

Identification of junk buyers’ contribution to recycling of household waste in Hanoi, Vietnam, through a physical composition analysis

Even in developing countries, the amount of containers and packaging waste are increasing in line with population concentration and lifestyle changes in urban areas. This can cause serious problems for the disposal of municipal solid waste. Through a physical composition analysis of household waste in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, this study aimed to identify the contribution made by junk buyers to recycling. Interviews on the handling of recyclable waste by households were conducted. About 232 kg of recyclable waste was sampled from a total of 115 households, and about 230 kg of municipal solid waste was sampled from a total of 101 households and sorted into 69 categories for measurement by volume and weight. The interview survey revealed that a high proportion of households tended to routinely store recyclable waste for sale or donation to junk buyers. Junk buyers accounted for 8.8% of recycling by weight or 26.0% by volume according to the results of the physical composition analysis. In addition, the results suggested that containers and packaging waste accounted for the largest proportion of household waste by volume. Junk buyers recycled 25.5% by weight of containers and packaging waste. In the formulation of new plans for municipal solid waste management to improve the current situation and handle future challenges, the role of the informal sector should be monitored carefully and reliable data on recyclable waste should be collected continuously.

Study on the Container Transport Chain Security under the Condition of Customs Non-Traditional Security

Confronted with the unstable global environment and the threat of transitional terrorism, besides from the traditional function of supervising the economy frontier, the non-tradition functions Customs has become more and more important. In the supervision of foreign trade, Customs not only ensure the enforcement of legislations, but protect the country from terrorism attack. However, the tremendous amount of containers and the request of trade facilitation have always challenged the sufficiency of Customs supervision. Customs must adopt risk management into its work. This paper studies the risk assessment of container security using FTA and FMECA in order to quantitative the risk in the container cargo shipping process and help Customs regulate efficiently.

Performance analysis of berth configurations at container terminals

The containerized trade market has been growing rapidly since its introduction. The capacity of ships and the amount of containers being transshipped at container terminals increases significantly. Terminals should handle their operations efficiently to provide the necessary capacity and customer service. In designing a container terminal, terminal management has to consider the choice for a certain type of berth. In this paper, we compare by means of a simulation study the performance of traditional one-sided marginal berths and indented berths. An indented berth enables quay cranes to unload and load containers from both sides of the ship. As a result, more quay cranes can work on a single ship. As main performance measure in this comparison we use the total vessel operation time required to unload and load a ship. This time depends next to crane productivity also on the efficiency of the transportation and storage and retrieval processes in the terminal. We have performed a sensitivity analysis in which we also study the relation between the selection of an indented berth and other design and control issues in the terminal.

컨테이너 안전 수송을 위한 센서데이터 기반의 상황 모델링과 상황인식 미들웨어 구현

Currently, the amount of containers is growing up continuously. However, they still depend on humans checking or validating. In this situation, humans must participate in the systems. Situation-awareness technologies allow human participation to be minimized. The situation-awareness technologies provide data or service appropriate to the object`s current state, and the state is recognized automatically by the system. They can automatically execute working processes without human intervention. We suggest a middleware system based on situation-awareness technologies using an ontology for the safety transportation of containers. The middleware is aware of the current state and sends the data required by an application. It can help build new applications by enhancing agility, and it can also support automated service processing by invoking the service required like fire-fighting, fixing container, and so on. Improving transportation of containers process automation with situation-awareness technologies reduces manpower requirements for checking and validating containers, and so saves logistics costs of container transportation.

자동화 컨테이너 터미널을 위한 컨테이너 트랜스퍼 크레인의 안티스웨이 시스템: Part Ⅱ-모델 크레인 및 실험 검증

Automated container terminals have been being developed over the world for recent years and many countries are interested in it because the amount of containers exported or imported is rapidly increasing. The conventional container terminals were not designed to control this kind of heavily many containers. They would face many structural problems soon or later, although they have managed to do well so far. One of the most important things in developing automated container terminal is to develop the equipment able to handle many containers efficiently. Those are maybe automated transfer cranes, automatic guided vehicles, and automated quay-side cranes. The word `automated` means the equipment is operated without drivers and those equipments are able to work without any interruption in working schedule. Through the researches on the conventional transfer cranes, we decided that the structure of the conventional transfer cranes is not efficient in automated container terminal and it`s not possible to handle so many containers in limited time. Therefore we have been studying on the proper structure of the automated container crane for past several years and a new type of transfer crane has been developed. Design concept and control method of a new type of transfer crane had been presented in the previous paper: Part Ⅰ. Experimental features will be presented with a model transfer crane in this paper: Part Ⅱ.