Volume 17 (2016): Issue 2 (June 2016)

Although airports play an important role the global and European economies, according to the new guidelines of the EU Commission on the new state aid rules for a competitive aviation industry (EC, 2014), it will be more difficult for unprofitable airports, to get financial public subsidies in the future. The Commission noted that the majority of regional airports experience severe problems to cover their operative costs, resulting from among other things from overlapping of airports’ catchment areas. The main objective of the above mentioned measures is not to close the regional airports, but to motivate them to operate on cost efficient, profitable and more flexible basis, stating however that and that the most inefficient airports will be still closed. In order face upcoming challenges, the regional airports shall reconsider their future development plans. Traditionally, the airports including small and regional airports focus on the passenger traffic and thus, the possible benefits and opportunities of the air cargo market are totally underestimated or even completely ignored. Most regional airports in the Baltic Sea region act totally isolated and do not have a clear picture of the current situation on the international air cargo market today, its future perspectives and sustainable development plans remain basically hidden. There are some examples when trying to meet the market demand, the regional airports have made huge, but unfortunately unjustified investments, e.g. improving airport infrastructure, runways, etc. However, the airports’ infrastructural investments alone cannot fulfil the expected “remedy” role for the airports’ sustainability. This paper aims at investigating the positioning and the role of the regional airports in the current hub-and-spoke network, focusing on the relevance and potential of the air cargo sector for the regional airports development. The optional freight value proposition for the development of the regional airports and their possible participation in the air cargo market as a supplement instrument to generate additional revenue also by means of so-called “air trucking” services will be presented and discussed.

The article discovers the methodical approaches to the study of logistic activities controlling at the Russian enterprises. There are defined the phases of the controlling research management and described the initial sample of the enterprises surveyed. The methodology of the logistics controlling research is based on the system analysis, the methods of economic cybernetics, operations research, mathematical statistics, the theory of optimal decision-making, and the management theory.

The article presents the main results of the research specifying the state of logistics controlling at the Russian enterprises. The study has conducted a systematic analysis of the status and trends of logistics controlling at the domestic enterprises specialized in the industry, trade and services fields. Top managers of logistics departments in the Russian enterprises were interviewed about the logistics controlling. The survey was undertaken in the form of written and online surveys. The results are documented and processed by a special technique.

Various forecasting schemes have been proposed to manage traffic data, which is collected by videos cameras, sensors, and mobile phone services. However, these are not sufficient for collecting data because of their limited coverage and high costs for installation and maintenance. To overcome the limitations of these tools, we introduce a hybrid scheme based on intelligent transportation system (ITS) and global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Applying the GNSS to calculate travel time has proven efficient in terms of accuracy. In this case, GNSS data is managed to reduce traffic congestion and road accidents. This paper introduces a short-time forecasting model based on real-time travel time for urban heterogeneous road networks. Travel time forecasting has been achieved by predicting travel speeds using an optimized exponential moving Average (EMA) model. Furthermore for speed adaptation in heterogeneous road networks, it is necessary to introduce asuitable control strategy for longitude, based on the GNSS. GNSS products provide worldwide and real-time services using precise timing information and, positioning technologies.

Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. In 2013 in the European Union more than 6 % of all who died in road traffic crashes were cyclists. The number of cyclist killed on roads in the EU has decreased by only 9 %, compared to the total fatality decrease of 18 % from 2010 to 2013. The majority of cyclist fatalities are males (78 %). For the larger countries, Belgium and The Netherlands had the highest proportion of female cyclist fatalities (> 30 %). In general, 55 % of the bicycle fatalities in the EU countries were killed inside urban areas but there are large differences between the countries. In the last couple of years there has been an enormous effort on reduction in cycling fatality numbers across almost all ages in the EU. As a result of this effort, the number of accidents started to slightly decrease.

This paper reviews the literature concerning cyclist-motor vehicle collision and road safety management according to the cyclist role in the accident rise. The paper examines pedestrians safety in order to determine what kind of factors of transport infrastructure, vehicle technical parameters, cyclist behavior and road or street category have the influence on cyclist and vehicle accidents and identify technical reasons of the accidents rise. A review is conducted of information in the literature on the injury outcome of a cyclist/vehicle collision for a given impact speed and the likely consequences of reducing the travelling speeds of vehicles in terms of the frequency and severity of cyclist injuries.

The new common approach for integrity checking of digital images is developed. The new features of formal parameters defining image are revealed, theoretically grounded and practically tested. The characteristics of the mutual arrangement of left and right singular vectors corresponding to the largest singular value of the image’s matrix (block of matrix) and the vector composed of singular numbers is obtained. Formal parameters are obtained using normal singular decomposition of matrix (block of matrix) which is uniquely determined. It is shown that for most blocks of original image (no matter lossy or lossless) the angle between the left (right) mentioned singular vector and vector composed of singular numbers is defined by the angle between the n-optimal vector and the vector of standard basis of the range corresponding dimension. It is shown that the determined feature brakes for the mentioned formal parameters in a non-original image. This shows the integrity violation of the image, i.e. the existence of the additional information embedded using steganography algorithms. So this can be used as a basis for development of new universal steganography methods and algorithms, and one example of the realization is proposed. The efficiency of the proposed algorithm won’t depend on the details of steganography method used for embedding. All the obtained results can be easily adapted for the digital video and audio analysis.

Dynamic development of the country’s transport system leads to the increase of the length of highways, traffic interchange, including places of crossing with the railway. Notification time for crossing is determined by the maximum speed of the train, which is a significant disadvantage of the automatic crossing signaling. In reality the train speed is less than the estimated one, so the idles at transport intersection (crossing) reach 30-30 minutes, creating not only inconveniences to vehicle traffic, but also unfavorable environmental conditions.

In the development of intellectual control system automatic crossing signaling there is applied the principles patterns recognition with lots of informative features and decisive functions with the procedure of “learning” the decisive function “teacher”.

This article deals with research of laboratory testing by active and passive UHF tags and therefore mutual coexistence of active and passive RFID technology, which is a part of automatic identification and data capture. In this article we would like to describe an identification of transport unit based on passive technology and also by active technology. We would like to specify, how this technologies can work together and in which application focuses on postal and logistics. All results are verified by measurement in our AIDC laboratory, which is located at the University of Žilina. Our research contains different types of measurements in order to point out the possible influence of these two technologies. The results of our research bring the new point of view and indicate the ways using of UHF RFID technology in postal and logistics applications. At the end of this article is characterized the utilization of the RFID technology in postal logistics chain by using both passive and active technologies.

The results of satellite monitoring of oil pollution in the Southeastern Baltic Sea in 2004-2015 are discussed in the paper. Interannual and seasonal variability of oil pollution is investigated. A steady decrease in total oil pollution was observed from 2004 to 2011. After a sharp increase of oil pollution in 2012, oil pollution level has established at 0.39 PI Index. Maximum of oil spills is observed in the spring and summer, which is probably due to favorable weather conditions for the detection of oil spills on radar images. According to the analysis of the shapes of the detected oil spills, it was concluded that the main polluters of the sea surface are vessels. No oil spills originated from the oil platform D-6 was detected in 2004-2015. Results of numerical experiments with the Seatrack Web oil spill model show that in the case of potential discharge of oil from the D-6 platform, oil will not reach the Curonian Spit beaches during 48 h after an accident.