Advanced Warning System to Improve Safety at Train Grade Crossings

The severity of traffic accidents at train grade crossings has led to efforts in mitigating their potential damaging effects. Over the last 45 years, significant investment has been made at these crossings in the United States to reduce the number of accidents. Initially, these improvements reduced accidents, but in the last decade, the numbers have plateaued, even as additional safety investment has continued. Geospatial data from the Federal Railroad Administration was evaluated to ascertain the causes of the efficacy reduction of traditional safety measures. Temporal patterns were detected in diverse parameters that measure accident seriousness such as their frequency, financial damages, injuries, and deaths. An advanced warning system for motorist was proposed in this research to allow them enough time to change their schedules and driving routes, avoiding blockages caused by incoming trains. To avoid pitfalls from previous proposed systems the model will be initially implemented in locations with a high number of accidents and lower layout complexity for the railway, roads, and train grade crossings. Two railways in Texas were selected for the initial implementation of the system. The proposed pilot locations showed high potential for the development of the advanced warning system, in preparation for a broader effort to continue the improvement in safety at railway crossings.

The spatiality of the soybean crop water deficit in Jales and Andradina microregions, state of São Paulo

Knowledge about soil water availability for future planning is the basis for carrying out its rational use. This work aimed to study the spatiality of water precipitation, crop evapotranspiration, and the need for water supplementation in soybean cultivation in the microregions of Jales-SP and Andradina-SP for the summer harvest. The water balance was determined by the Thorthwaite and Mather (1955) method, with data made available by the Agrometeorological Stations Network operated by the Hydraulics and Irrigation area of UNESP Ilha Solteira. We considered an available water capacity (AWC) of 40 mm. The study took place from the simulation of the water condition of a soybean crop sown on November 4, 2020. In the water deficit condition, the actual evapotranspiration (ETa) was considered null at a 20 % deficit, and the other values followed the same mathematical proportion. The mean rainfall of the period, crop evapotranspiration, and water deficit of each weather station were interpolated through ordinary circular kriging in ArcGIS 10.7 software. The water deficit in the soybean crop in the northwest region of São Paulo is related to the poor distribution of precipitation during the cycle and the significant recurrence of Indian summers all through the area. For the producers’ safety, investment in irrigation systems anticipating this poor distribution is justified. The water deficit in the region is variable. In years with good rainfall distribution, it can reach zero values, and in years with poor distribution, it can reach values greater than 180 mm.

Pricing and Safety Investment Decisions in Food Supply Chains with Government Subsidy

As the demand for safe food has been rapidly increasing these years, more and more stakeholders are dedicated to the safety of the food in the supply chain of this sector. To expand the market share of safe food, governments of some countries also provide subsidies to encourage food processors to invest in better food safety efforts. This paper establishes a three-stage game model between the government and a two-stage food supply chain that consists of one supplier and one processor, where the government subsidizes processors to invest in food safety efforts; furthermore, this paper determines the optimal wholesale price, marginal profit, food safety investment, and government subsidies. This paper analyzes the effects of the government subsidies and risk aversion of the food processor and introduces the mode of order quantity-based payment and demand-based payment; moreover, it also analyzes the impacts of subsidies and different payment methods on demands. The results show that suppliers can increase the market share of products by adopting the demand-based payment, but this method does not always benefit the members of the supply chain. As the processor is more risk-averse, the optimal subsidy is higher, encouraging the processor to invest in more efforts. Finally, the supplier’s profit increases with the processor’s risk aversion indicator.

Developing a Dynamic Supervision Mechanism to Improve Construction Safety Investment Supervision Efficiency in China: Theoretical Simulation of Evolutionary Game Process

The construction industry suffers from poor safety performance caused by the joint effect of insufficient safety investment by contractors and inefficient safety supervision by the government because of the information gap between the two sides. The present study aims to put forward a new pathway to improve safety investment supervision efficiency and analyze the decision-making interactions of stakeholders under this new pathway. For this purpose, this study establishes a safety investment information system to eliminate the information gap between the government and contractors for construction projects in China and further develops a dynamic safety investment supervision mechanism based on this. Evolutionary game theory is used to describe the decision-making interactions among stakeholders under the current static supervision mechanism and the dynamic supervision mechanism proposed in this research. Moreover, system dynamics is adopted to simulate the evolutionary game process and analyze the supervision effect and equilibrium state of different supervision mechanisms. The results reveal that the proposed safety investment information system could facilitate the transition of the supervision mode from static to dynamic; the evolutionarily stable strategy does not exist in the current static penalty scenario; and the dynamic supervision mechanism that correlates penalties with contractors’ unlawful behavior probability can restrain the fluctuation of the evolutionary game model effectively and the players’ strategy choices gradually stabilize in the equilibrium state. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic supervision mechanism in improving supervision efficiency. This study not only contributes to the literature on safety supervision policy-making but also helps to improve supervision efficiency in practice.

How Do Spillover Effects Influence the Food Safety Strategies of Companies? New Orientation of Regulations for Food Safety

The food safety strategies of companies are a key point in the reduction of food safety risks. In order to encourage the evolution of food safety strategies of companies from food fraud to safety investment, this study builds an evolutionary game model, taking large and small companies as participants, to reveal the dynamic process of spillover effects influencing the choice of food safety strategies of companies. The study shows that (1) the food safety strategies of companies change from safety investment to food fraud, along with the increasing opportunity costs of safety investment. (2) The costs structure of small companies mainly determines whether the industry reaches the equilibrium of safety investment, while the costs structure of large companies mainly determines whether the industry reaches the equilibrium of food fraud. (3) Both competition effects and contagion effects encourage companies to choose safety investment. The more obvious spillover effects of incidents on food safety are, the more likely it is that companies will choose safety investments. (4) Increasing the costs to companies for incidents on food safety and reducing the opportunity cost of safety investment motivates companies to choose safety investment. Consequently, a new orientation of regulations for food safety is formed: the government should allocate different regulatory resources to counteract food fraud behaviors or technologies with a different benefit, should increase the technical costs and costs incurred from committing acts of food fraud, and should expand spillover effects of incidents on food safety.

Safety Investment Decision Problem without Probability Distribution: A Robust Optimization Approach

Accidents occur frequently, causing huge losses to enterprises and individuals. Safety investment is an important means to prevent accidents, but how much to invest is a dilemma. Previous studies have assumed that the demand of safety investment follows some probability distribution. In practice, the distribution information of safety investment is usually limited or difficult to obtain, i.e., it is unknown. To deal with this kind of problem without a probability distribution, we construct the measures of marginal accident loss (MAL) and marginal opportunity loss (MOL) from the perspective of demand uncertainty. Robust optimization technology is utilized to establish three robust optimization models, which are the absolute robust models (ARM), deviation robust models (DRM), and relative robust models (RRM). The results of numerical analysis show that MAL is positively correlated with safety investment and MOL is negatively correlated with the uncertainty of safety investment. The above robust optimization models in this study can be applied to different enterprise’s risk scenarios. ARM, DRM, and RRM are suitable for high- and nonhigh-risk industries and other industries, respectively.

Decision-Making of Port Enterprise Safety Investment Based on System Dynamics

Safety is the premise of efficiency and effectiveness in the port operation. Safety investment is becoming a vital part of port operation in current era in order to overcome different types of hazards the port operation exposed to. This paper aims to improve the safety level of port operation through analyzing its influencing factors and exploring the interactions between the safety investment and system risk level. By analyzing the key factors affecting the port operation and their mutual relationship within a man–machine–environment–management system, a decision-making model of safety investment in port enterprise was established by system dynamics (SD). An illustration example and a sensitivity analysis were carried out to justify and validate the proposed model. The results show that increasing the total safety investment of port enterprises, improving the safety management investment on personnel, and strengthening the implementation effect of investment can improve the degree of port security to a certain extent. The strength of the proposed work is its practical application in current scenarios using real time data and the ability to provide a baseline approach for port enterprises to formulate safety investment strategy.