Tiantian Bao

With the formal inclusion of the shipping industry in the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), the speed optimization of ocean-going container ships must simultaneously balance operating costs, incorporating carbon emission costs and shipper satisfaction with transportation timeliness. Taking ocean-going container liner routes as the research object, this paper establishes a ship navigation resistance model based on meteorological and hydrological conditions, and constructs a route segmentation mechanism and a ship fuel consumption model on this basis. The spatially differentiated carbon accounting rules of the EU ETS are introduced, a fuzzy membership function is adopted to quantify shipper satisfaction, and a Q-learning-based solution algorithm for ship speed optimization that balances operating costs and shipper satisfaction is designed. Numerical experiments on a 20,150 Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) container ship demonstrate that the proposed framework reduces total operating costs by 5.56%, EU ETS carbon compliance costs by 18.72%, and total voyage carbon emissions by 11.01% compared with the conventional constant-speed strategy. Meanwhile, the algorithm can spontaneously form an optimal speed strategy adapted to meteorological conditions and policy rules. Through parameter sensitivity analysis, this paper further extracts management implications for liner-operating companies.

Evaluating the degradation of hull and ship performance and exploring their degradation pathways is crucial for developing scientific and reasonable ship maintenance plans. This paper proposes a two-stage optimization (TSO) algorithm that combines the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, capable of simultaneously optimizing input features and model parameters to enhance the accuracy and generalization ability of speed prediction models. Additionally, a performance degradation assessment method based on speed loss is provided, aimed at evaluating the degradation of hull and propeller performance, as well as extracting the performance degradation paths. The results indicated that the proposed TSO-LSTM-GA algorithm significantly outperformed existing baseline models. Furthermore, the provided performance degradation assessment method demonstrated certain effectiveness on the target ship data, with a measured degradation rate of 0.00344 kn/d and a performance degradation of 9.569% over 478 days, corresponding to an annual speed loss of 1.257 kn.

Evaluating and prioritizing the service quality of higher education is an essential issue for the successful implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This study investigates an evaluation framework to assess the performances of higher education institutes (HEIs) within the context of ESD based on student-perceived service quality. First, a conceptual model of the evaluation indicator system is explored by embedding sustainability-related indicators into the fuzzy SERVQUAL scale. Then, the evaluation of student-perceived service quality can be thought of as a problem of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) that involves uncertainty and bounded rationality. Thus, an evaluation technique called hybrid fuzzy TODIM-ERA is proposed to address such evaluation problems by synthesizing the theoretical strengths of the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory, the evidential reasoning algorithm (ERA), and the TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for interactive and multicriteria decision-making). Finally, a case study of five Chinese HEIs in maritime transportation is used to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Results provide the ranking order of all the alternative HEIs and the improvement strategies of each HEI for student-perceived service quality dimensions.

Dempster–Shafer (D-S) evidence theory plays an important role in multisource data fusion. Due to the nature of the Dempster combination rule, there can be counterintuitive results when fusing highly conflicting evidence data. To date, conflict management in D-S evidence theory is still an open issue. Inspired by evidence modification considering internal indeterminacy and external support, a novel method for conflict data fusion is proposed based on an improved belief divergence, evidence distance, and belief entropy. First, an improved belief divergence measure is defined to characterize the discrepancy and conflict between bodies of evidence (BOEs). Second, evidence credibility is generated to describe the external support based on the complementary advantages of the improved belief divergence and evidence distance. Third, belief entropy is utilized to quantify the internal indeterminacy and further determine evidence weight. Lastly, the classical Dempster combination rule is applied to fuse the BOEs modified by their credibility degrees and weights. As the results of numerical examples and an application show, the proposed divergence measure can overcome the invalidity of the existing measures in some special cases. Additionally, the proposed fusion method recognizes the correct target with the highest belief value of 98.96%, which outperforms other related methods in conflict management. The proposed fusion method also displays better convergence, validity, and robustness.