At rail-road transshipment yards, gantry cranes move containers from freight trains to trucks and vice versa. They constitute important entities in today's intermodal transportation systems. Real-world yards are often partitioned into several disjunct crane areas, so that crane interferences during container transshipment are avoided. In practice, the lengths of such crane areas are typically d...

In order to improve the operating efficiency of mixture storage yard, the problem of multiple yard cranes scheduling (MYCS) must to be solved. The paper develops a multiple yard cranes scheduling MIP model in order to minimize the sum of trucks’ waiting cost and yard cranes’ moving cost. An important feature is that the future has to be taken into account: the interference between two yard cran...

The principal spring staging areas of the midcontinent population of sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) are along the Platte and North Platte rivers in south-central Nebraska. Most of these lands are privately owned and managed for corn and cattle production. Diurnal habitat use by radio-tagged cranes was primarily in cropland (55%), native grassland (28%), and tame hayland (15%). Ninety-nine pe...

From 1990-2001, we made 188 successful captures of 166 different greater sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis tabida) through experimental use of alpha-chloralose (AC). Most captures took place during September (72.3%; n = 136), followed by August (14.9%; n = 28), and October (12.8%; n = 24). Territorial pairs were captured more successfully than family groups. Overall morbidity (6.4%) and mortalit...

An estimated 9,500 sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) died in Gaines County, Texas and Roosevelt County, New Mexico between 1982 and 1987. The predominant clinical sign observed in sick cranes was their inability to hold their heads erect, both while standing and flying. Multiple muscle hemorrhages and submandibular edema were the most common lesions seen at necropsy. Mycotoxins produced by Fusa...

Since the discovery of nesting whooping cranes in Wood Buffalo National Park, the Canadian Wildlife Service has conducted aerial surveys to monitor the population. Aerial survey techniques have varied over the years; however, they have generally followed the techniques used by the author since 1991. The technique involves flying a combination of circular flights and transects over known nesting...

Motion-induced vibration can be greatly reduced by properly shaping the reference command. Input shaping is one type of reference shaping method that is based largely on linear superposition. In this paper we document the impact of nonlinear crane dynamics on the effectiveness of input shaping. As typical bridge cranes are driven using Cartesian motions, they behave nearly linearly for lowand m...

This paper develops an operator guidance system for an industrial process which involves scheduling ideas from manufacturing systems. The industrial process under study is the converter aisle in a copper smelter. Our objective is to increase throughput by improving utilization of the smelter’s resources. This paper partly addresses this objective by applying scheduling techniques to optimize th...

Tower cranes in large construction projects are likely to collide with other cranes close to them during the operation, which is a severe hazard to the security of the staff. Thus, a WSN-based monitoring system for avoiding collision of tower cranes is proposed. The 3D data positioning technology is used to install angle and position sensors at intervals in the cranes in order to collect positi...

At present, about 160,000 and 100,000 cranes are migrating on the West-European and on the Baltic-Hungarian routes, respectively, from the northern, middle, and northeastern parts of Europe. On both routes, the resting maxima, simultaneously determined since the 1980’s, has increased three-fold. This increase in migratory cranes is the result of shorter migration routes with higher return rates...