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This paper addresses a competitive airline hub-and-spoke network design problem in a duopolistic market with sequential airline entry. Two airlines, a leader and a follower, enter the market sequentially to make decisions about their own flight networks. Each must consider their opponent's reactions and respond to each other's decisions in making their own, leading to interactive competition between them. A bi-level model is proposed to formulate the behaviors and decisions of the two airlines. In addition, an interactive solution procedure based on a genetic algorithm (GA) is developed to repeatedly solve the upper and lower level models. Finally, we generate a numerical example based on the regional air market in Taiwan and China. The results provide useful insights and highlight the importance of considering interactive competition for airlines when designing their flight networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of the learning process on consumers' choice behavior for electric motorcycles in Taiwan. The electric motorcycle is a new technological product so consumers need to gather all kinds of information - performance, operating cost, government subsidy policy, etc. - to reduce their uncertainty about the product. In this paper, a four-stage stated preference experiment is designed and a survey applied. At each stage, the survey gives respondents new information about the electric motorcycle. In this process, respondents gather information and update their expectation about electric motorcycles in a Bayesian manner. This paper calibrates a Bayesian learning process model to the data. The results show that respondents have a higher quality perception of the electric motorcycle than the gasoline motorcycle and there is heterogeneous learning across respondents. The manufacturers can use these to target specific consumers to promote the electric motorcycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the productivity changes in Taiwan's port industry for the period 2003–2007. Based on a ‘three-year-window’ data envelopment analysis method, Luenberger productivity indicators are employed to estimate the productivity changes that account for the success of attempts by port agents to control harbor water quality. This is one of the typical environmental concerns in port operations that prior studies on port productivity changes over time have not considered. The results show that the productivity of Taiwan's port industry has experienced growth over the study period, regardless of whether water quality has been considered or not. At a disaggregated level, however, if a port agent has succeeded in controlling water quality, but we do not consider it, the results will misclassify the agent by understating the port's productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper estimates comprehensive operational performance measures for transport services. A network efficiency approach is used to analyze the production efficiency, service efficiency, and operational efficiency in a unified framework to reflect the transportation service characteristics of airline operations. We show how a modified version of the network data envelopment analysis model can be utilized for evaluating the performance of air route operations. This study considers 15 air routes operated by a domestic airline in Taiwan to highlight the value of the approach. The results of the analysis show the inputs and consumed outputs leading to production inefficiency and service inefficiency respectively as well as the magnitudes of excesses and shortfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motorcycle activity in Asian economies is a significant contributor to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, both when moving and when idling at traffic lights. This paper investigates Taiwanese motorcyclists' behavior of turning off the idling engine while stopping at traffic lights based on the theory of planned behavior (TPB), which recognizes that the achievement of voluntary change behavior can be identified by knowing an individual's attitudes (or behavioral intentions [BIs]) in the context of social norms (SN). A structural equation model system is used to identify candidate causal links between attitudes, SN, BI and behavior related to the idling stop behavior of motorcyclists. A partial least squares (PLS) model is built to correct the covariance matrix, given the relatively small sample size. Results suggest that attitudes, SN and perceived behavioral control, are significant determinants of idling stop BI at red lights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), real-time operations of traffic management measures depend on long-term planning results, such as the origin-destination (OD) trip distribution; however, results from current planning procedures are unable to provide fundamental data for dynamic analysis. In order to capture dynamic traffic characteristics, transportation planning models should play an important role to integrate basic data with real-time traffic management and control. In this paper, a heuristic algorithm is proposed to establish the linkage between daily OD trips and dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) procedures; thus results from transportation planning projects, in terms of daily OD trips, can be extended to estimate time-dependent OD trips. Field data from Taiwan are collected and applied in the calibration and validation processes. Dynamic Network Assignment-Simulation Model for Advanced Road Telematics (DYNASMART-P), a simulation-based DTA model, is applied to generate time-dependent flows. The results from the validation process show high agreement between actual flows from vehicle detectors (VDs) and simulated flows from DYNAMSART-P. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to modify the Stage 1 data envelopment analysis (DEA) of the three-stage DEA approach to allow for the fact that undesirable outputs like aircraft noise may not be freely disposable, and the efficiency measure of airport capacity use is modified to allow for an asymmetric treatment of desirable and undesirable outputs. A directional distance function is used to construct an output orientated DEA model with a constant returns to scale assumption. Stage 3 DEA is a repetition of Stage 1 DEA with observed outputs adjusting to account for the effects of variation in the operating environment, variation in statistical noise, and variation in technical-change obtained from stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) regression analysis in Stage 2. Results from the empirical analysis for the case of Taiwan's domestic airports strongly demonstrate that airport capacity efficiency performance turns out to be very sensitive to whether or not environmental impacts, stochastic noises, technical-change factor, and undesirable outputs are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the influences of deregulation on Taiwan's domestic air market, which took place in 1987. The Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, the number of effective competitors, and the concentration ratio of a defined market are used to measure the associated market structure. The market structures of three selected flight routes and the entire domestic air market of Taiwan are analysed using a time-series data set spanning 21 years. Research results indicate that the market structure indicators of all defined markets were volatile after deregulation and then became stable again, with the recent market competition being greater than it was before. This reveals that market competition increased due to deregulation - in both the entire market and the markets of specific flight routes. While the domestic air market of Taiwan is unique - with relatively short flight times and fewer numbers of airlines in the market as compared with markets that are investigated in the literature using the same indicators - the results are promising in that those indices capture the variation of Taiwan's domestic air market due to the implementation of the deregulation policy. It implies that those measures are also suitable for markets with a relatively low degree of competition or which are relatively small scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates route choice behaviour on freeways between Taipei and Taichung in Taiwan under the provision of real-time traffic information. Two types of route choice selection rules (the best-route and habitual-route) are analysed using ordered probit models to identify the major influences on freeway travellers' route choice behaviour. The level of service associated with each route is defined as a generalised cost saving (GCS) and specified non-linearly with a threshold inherent to travellers. The marginal (dis)utility thresholds in the 'best' and 'habitual' behaviour models are identified through a goodness-of-fit grid. The results confirm that the thresholds for changing the inertia behaviour of drivers should be larger than the ones for choosing the best routes. In addition, the drivers are more likely to choose either the best or the habitual routes once the GCS are greater than the identified threshold values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many factors affect the performance of temporary schedule adjustments following incidents. These factors include static recovery scheduling, stochastic flight delays and ‘real-time’ schedule adjustments. Most research on recovery scheduling has focused on improving static recovery scheduling models. None has analyzed these factors from a systems perspective. The research on which this paper is based proposes a framework, embodying a simulation process, that is not only be able to analyze the influence of stochastic flight delays on static recovery scheduling, but can also help to design more effective flexible buffer times and ‘real-time’ schedule adjustment rules. To test the framework we perform a simulation using data from a Taiwan domestic airline. The preliminary results show that the framework could be usefully applied by airlines in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]