The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 is widely perceived to have deregulated the U.S. freight rail industry. Yet substantial rail traffic remains potentially subject to regulatory rate intervention, and in the Post-Staggers era regulators have developed a detailed and expanding regulatory framework for rail shipments. This regulatory framework embodies elements of traditional public utility regulation...

LL601 is a genetically modified rice variety and unapproved for commercial use. Its presence was found in commercial shipments of U.S. rice in 2006. This article explores its impact on prices and volume marketed for both the United States and Thailand, the major export competitor. The results show a significantly adverse but short duration effect on the U.S. rice market and little to no effect ...

A fuzzy inventory model is proposed to maximize the profit in a two stage supply chain model. In this paper joint total profit of both buyer and vendor are calculated. Shortage for the buyer is allowed and it is completely backlogged. Number of shipments, selling price and order quantity are taken as decision variables. Graded mean integration representation method is applied for defuzzificatio...

RapidIO technology is destined to become one of the dominant embedded interface technologies in a wide range of applications, most notably serving as the primary interconnect for high-speed embedded backplanes and system-level fabrics. According to a report from Crystal Cube Consulting[1], RapidIO technology will experience a five-year average Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 39 percent ...

Today’s motion control equipment faces tougher challenges than ever before. Conveyors, and packing, sorting, and other positioning equipment often operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As demand for faster product shipments increase, manufacturers have also turned up the speed of their equipment. Making these operational changes means hardware wears faster, loses positional accuracies, and...

What drives export quality? Using firm-level data from Portugal on exports by product and destination market, we find that free-on-board unit values increase systematically with distance, and tend to be higher in shipments to richer nations. These relationships reflect not only the selection of firms across markets, but also the within-firm selection of product varieties across destinations. Fu...

We study the problem of finding hazmat road transportation paths minimizing both the total risk of hazmat shipments and the total transportation cost, meanwhile guaranteeing a certain level of risk equity over the population. To ensure the selection of a set of paths that also guarantee an equitable spread of the risk over the population, we introduce a new similarity index. The problem is math...

In an age of free international shipments of mail-ordered seeds and plants, more policing will not stop the global migration of hitchhiking pests. The solution is in a preemptive response based on an internationally coordinated genomic deployment of global biodiversity in the largest breeding project since the "Garden of Eden." This plan will enrich the narrow genetic basis of annual and perenn...