A Network Simulation of High-congestion Road-traffic Flows in Cities with Marine Container Terminals

Port cities where marine cargo terminals are located are generally near urban areas characterized by high-congestion road traffic. Changes in cargo traffic volumes into a marine terminal, or in the surrounding traffic arteries, which carry this traffic, can significantly affect the terminal's operations. Conversely, activity at the terminal can have an impact on the traffic levels and congestion for a considerable distance from the terminal. This paper demonstrates a methodology useful for studying the impact of road traffic flows on marine container terminals located in highly congested areas. This model was developed at the request of the Virginia Center for World Trade and was used to answer three planning questions in the port of Hampton Roads, Virginia, USA-what would be the impact of: opening a new section of interstate highway, a projected doubling of container traffic at one terminal, and a daily unit train in the vicinity of another terminal. The problem was made more challenging by limited data-collection funds. None the less, the model was deemed valid by a panel of traffic experts and officials from several major state and private agencies involved in marine traffic management. The model results were subsequently a factor in two major decisions related to terminal management.     

The Laplace transform on time scales revisited

In this work, we reexamine the time scale Laplace transform as defined by Bohner and Peterson [M. Bohner, A. Peterson, Dynamic Equations on Time Scales: An Introduction with Applications, Birkhäuser, Boston, 2001; M. Bohner, A. Peterson, Laplace transform and Z-transform: Unification and extension, Methods Appl. Anal. 9 (1) (2002) 155-162]. In particular, we give conditions on the class of functions which have a transform, develop an inversion formula for the transform, and further, we provide a convolution for the transform. The notion of convolution leads to considering its algebraic structure—in particular the existence of an identity element—motivating the development of the Dirac delta functional on time scales. Applications and examples of these concepts are given.     

Vapour and plasma ignition thresholds for visible pulsed-laser ablation of metallic targets

The coupling of visible nanosecond laser pulses to metallic targets irradiated in vacuum is studied. The expressions of the vapour and plasma ignition times are obtained. Two cases for vapour breakdown in the plasma ignition process are considered. The first case is that 40 generations of new electrons are born in vapour generation time before plasma formation as assumed in the literature. The second case is that 10 generations of new electrons are born in vapour generation time. Molybdenum (Mo), niobium (Nb) and aluminium (Al) targets are considered for illustrations of our results. The expression of the plasma ignition time for the Al target is substantially different from that reported in the literature. The vapour and plasma ignition threshold laser intensities are calculated and compared with those reported in the literature. Reasons for disagreement are discussed. The plasma ignition threshold estimated in the second case is noted to be in good agreement with the reported experimental result.     

g-Natural Contact Metrics on Unit Tangent Sphere Bundles

We construct a three-parameter family of contact metric structures on the unit tangent sphere bundle T ₁ M of a Riemannian manifold M and we study some of their special properties related to the Levi-Civita connection. More precisely, we give the necessary and sufficient conditions for a constructed contact metric structure to be K-contact, Sasakian, to satisfy some variational conditions or to define a strongly pseudo-convex CR-structure. The obtained results generalize classical theorems on the standard contact metric structure of T ₁ M.     

Hochschild cohomology of Möbius algebras

The additive structure of the Hochschild cohomology ring for a Möbius algebra is described. We use the structure of the bimodule minimal projective resolution of the algebra, constructed in a previous paper. Bibliography: 4 titles.