Search results

The Mediterranean Fleet entered the 1930s looking back to the lessons of Jutland and the First World War but also seeking to incorporate new technologies, notably air power. Unfortunately in the depression years of the early 1930s there was a lack of funds to remedy deficiencies. The problem became critical during the Abyssinian crisis of 1935. The crisis wound down by mid-1936 but the respite did t last long. In June 1936 the Spanish Civil War broke out and the Mediterranean Fleet was soon involved in evacuations of British and other endangered foreigners from Spanish ports as well as the protection of British flagged merchant ships in the war zone. In addition to the Spanish Civil War there was an increase of tension with Germany in 1938 that culminated with the Czechoslovak crisis in September. The situation of the Mediterranean Fleet and its possible actions had the Munich agreement t been reached are described. The Spanish Civil War ended in 1939 with the victory of the Nationalists and the Mediterranean Fleet was again involved in evacuations. By w the prospect of war with Germany and possibly Italy was quite clear and serious preparations for war continued. The plans for war in the Mediterranean are reproduced in detail.

The marines on the First Fleet refused to sail without it. Convicts risked their necks to get hold of it. Rum built a hospital and sparked a revolution, made fortunes and ruined lives. In a society with few luxuries, liquor was power. It played a crucial role, not just in the lives of individuals like James Squire - the London chicken thief who became Australia's first brewer - but in the transformation of a starving penal outpost into a prosperous trading port. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary sources, Grog offers an intoxicating look at the first decades of European settlement and explores the origins of Australia's fraught love affair with the hard stuff

This monograph addresses several critical problems to the operations of shipping lines and ports, and provides algorithms and mathematical models for use by shipping lines and port authorities for decision support. One of these problems is the repositioning of container ships in a liner shipping network in order to adjust the network to seasonal shifts in demand or changes in the world economy. We provide the first problem description and mathematical model of repositioning and define the liner shipping fleet repositioning problem (LSFRP). The LSFRP is characterized by chains of interacting activities with a multi-commodity flow over paths defined by the activities chosen. We first model the problem without cargo flows with a variety of well-known optimization techniques, as well as using a novel method called linear temporal optimization planning that combines linear programming with partial-order planning in a branch-and-bound framework. We then model the LSFRP with cargo flows, using several different mathematical models as well as two heuristic approaches. We evaluate our techniques on a real-world dataset that includes a scenario from our industrial collaborator. We show that our approaches scale to the size of problems faced by industry, and are also able to improve the profit on the reference scenario by over US$14 million.

Since World War II, it seems like the result of America's participation in war has fallen short of our goals. We enter with the best of intentions, seeking a low cost, swift conflict and an overwhelming victory without excessive casualties (American, civilian or even enemy). During the opening stages of these conflicts the overriding question seems to be "what is the exit strategy?" Muddled in there may be an idea of what victory might look like. We seem reluctant to ask, "How do we win?" and instead wring our hands saying, "Tell me how this ends." This paper discusses how for American policy makers and military leadership, understanding war as a wicked problem is the first step necessary to reframe our understanding and response to the need to use military force. This site displays abstracts of MOC Warfighter articles. Department of Defense CAC-authenticated users may download full copies of the articles at this site. Others may request copies of specified articles by contacting the MOC Warfighter administrator.

On 7 October 2001, the Navy aircrews catapulted from Carl Vinson (CVN 70) made history, twice over. First, they provided America's opening response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September in the first wave of Operation Enduring Freedom. They also streaked into Afghanistan with a "big picture" overview of the history, culture and politics of the Middle East and southern Asia, made possible by the Naval Postgraduate School's (NPS) Regional Security Education Program (RSEP).

In The First British Trade Expedition to China, Nicholas D. Jackson explores the pioneering British trade expedition to China launched in the late Ming period by Charles I and the Courteen Association. While utilizing the vivid and unique perspective of its commander, Captain John Weddell, this study concentrates on the fleet's adventures in south China between Portuguese Macao and the provincial capital, Guangzhou (Canton). Tracing the obscure origins of Sino.

Since passage of the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) in 1992, the U.S. federal government has imposed procurement restrictions on state government fleets. Regulations, overseen by the Department of Energy (DoE), require that a high percentage of new state fleet acquisitions be "green" alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs). This article first reviews AFV technologies, advanced technology designs, and alternative fuels. A discussion of the EPAct mandates and other policy incentives for state fleets follows. The next section presents findings of a survey of state fleet managers regarding their compliance obligations. The article concludes with a discussion of the recently passed EPAct of 2005 and how its provisions may affect the continued greening of state fleets.

Selecting the right aircraft for an airline operation is a vastly complex process, involving a multitude of skills and considerable knowledge of the business. Buying the Big Jets has been published since 2001 to provide expert guidance to all those involved in aircraft selection strategies. This third edition brings the picture fully up to date, representing the latest developments in aircraft products and best practice in airline fleet planning techniques. It features a new section that addresses the passenger experience and, for the first time, includes regional jet manufacturers who are now.

[EN] To ensure cities sustainability, we must deal with, among other challenges, traffic congestion, and its associated carbon emissions. We can approach such a problem from two perspectives: the transition to electric vehicles, which implies the need for charging station infrastructure, and the optimization of traffic flow. However, cities are complex systems, so it is helpful to test changes on them in controlled environments like the ones provided by simulators. In our work, we use SimFleet, an agent-based fleet simulator. Nevertheless, SimFleet does not provide tools for easily setting up big experiments, neither to simulate the realistic movement of its agents inside a city. Aiming to solve that, we enhanced SimFleet introducing two fully configurable generators that automatize the creation of experiments. First, the charging stations generator, which allocates a given amount of charging stations following a certain distribution, enabling to simulate how transports would charge and compare distributions. Second, the load generator, which populates the experiment with a given number of agents of a given type, introducing them dynamically in the simulation, and assigns them a movement that can be either random or based on real city data. The generators proved to be useful for comparing different distributions of charging stations as well as different agent behaviors over the same complex setup. ; This work was partially supported by MINECO/FEDER RTI2018-095390-B-C31 project of the Spanish government. Pasqual Martí and Jaume Jordán are funded by UPV PAID-06-18 project. Jaume Jordán is also funded by grant APOSTD/2018/010 of Generalitat Valenciana - Fondo Social Europeo. ; Martí Gimeno, P.; Jordán, J.; Palanca Cámara, J.; Julian Inglada, VJ. (2020). Load Generators for Automatic Simulation of Urban Fleets. Springer. 394-405. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51999-5_33 ; S ; 394 ; 405 ; Campo, C.: Directory facilitator and service discovery agent. FIPA Document Repository (2002) ; Dong, J., Liu, C., Lin, Z.: ...

AbstractIn dispatching a taxi fleet to meet random customer demand, two types of strategies must be defined: (a) the dispatching strategy, which sets the rules for choosing a taxi to serve a given call, and (b) the idle time strategy, which determines how the idle taxis are to be distributed most advantageously to meet future demand. The effect of dispatching and idle‐time strategies on taxi utilization and on passenger service is demonstrated under several conditions of operation. First, the simples taxi model is examined: random demand between two points serviced by one taxi. Next, we consider the effect of different strategies on the operation of a taxi fleet when demand is uniformly distributed in a two‐dimensional region. In the last section, the main properties of these simplified models are exhibited in an intermediate case by a Monte Carlo simulation of taxi service between a number of discrete points. The purpose of the paper is to provide simple and practical methods to determine the payoff in customer waiting time and/or taxi savings resulting from more sophisticated dispatching and idle‐time strategies. We conclude that good taxi redistribution policies markedly decrease customer waiting times, except when the level of taxi utilization is too high. Our results apply most directly to private transportation fleets, rather than to automobile taxi companies where cruising may be important.