This paper investigates whether the efficiency effect of product market dispersion is a function of the infrastructural and policy environment. We hypothesize that more developed transportation and communication infrastructure and lower government regulation may reduce transaction costs, intensifying the competition associated with a given market structure, and we use data from the recently lib...

In the last decades the development of very high speed trains in railway transportation requires new maintenance strategies. New trolleys equipped with innovative measuring systems have been employed for monitoring overhead lines (catenaries). Using this system gives two great advantages: i) the diagnose can be performed with a low level of breaking in railway traffic; ii) the monitoring can be...

This paper considers the effect of train speed on railroad hazardous materials transportation risk. A statistical method was developed to estimate the speed-dependent conditional probability of release (CPR) of tank cars involved in accidents with the objective of assessing its effect on risk analysis results. A case study of a representative hazardous materials route was conducted in which ris...

This study is aimed at developing automated methods to recognize railroad infrastructure from 3D LIDAR data. Railroad infrastructure includes rail tracks, contact cables, catenary cables, return current cables, masts, and cantilevers. The LIDAR dataset used in this study is acquired by placing an Optech Lynx mobile mapping system on a railcar, operating at 125 km/h. The acquired dataset covers ...

The engineering processes for safety-critical systems, for instance in the health care or transportation domains, are regulated by law. For software in the railroad industry in Europe the certification procedures have to obey the norm EN50128. This paper presents the method that was introduced and employed for the development and the successful certification of the software for the vehicle cont...

Japan’s Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) project for safe and comfortable transpor­ tation is steadily progressing. To improve safety, information technology (IT) should be applied to most of Japan’s traffic environments. In response, the Fujitsu Group has installed IT equipment into motor vehicles in line with a government policy of using IT to bring transportation systems fully into the 21...

This paper describes an optimization model developed to determine the most efficient way to enhance the safety design of tank cars used to transport toxic inhalation hazard (TIH) materials in North America and a quantitative risk analysis conducted to assess the risk and potential benefit of implementing enhanced safety-design tank cars. The conditional probability of release and the car's weig...

An important role in the market of transport services belongs to container transportation. Railroads, especially under conditions increased competition from road transport, must respond quickly needs and growing demand for transportation, including interstate traffic. Demand transportation can vary significantly during year, which testifies expediency introducing removable equipment on universa...

This paper presents the procedures and results of a simulation project of a railroad coal transportation system. The model keeps locomotives and wagons at the system, instead similar works that put the trains at start of the line, and removes it on the other side, just to analyze the line utilization and traffic. The case was based on the Estrada de Ferro Vitória-Minas (EFVM), managed by Compan...

In this paper we consider a problem that occurs when drawing public transportation networks. Given an embedded graph G = (V,E) (e.g. the railroad network) and a set H of paths in G (e.g. the train lines), we want to draw the paths along the edges of G such that they cross each other as few times as possible. For aesthetic reasons we insist that the relative order of the paths that traverse a ve...