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In the process of training and examining professional drivers who serve as commercial trucks and coaches' drivers, studying the willingness of taking training courses is a crucial concern for transport authorities for developing training programs on transportation. To this purpose, an adapted version of the statistical method of Kolmogorov-Smirnov, three sample, has been utilized to investigate the similarity of distribution functions for three types of drivers who receive permission with taking training courses and examinations, taking examinations without training courses, and receiving permissions without examination and training courses. Data, for those received permissions across the West-Asian country of Iran, has been collected for a year through the system used for issuing drivers' permissions for commercial transportation followed by categorizing into thirty-one provinces and analysis. The results revealed that their distribution functions are different for three types of drivers over the provinces. Therefore, transport authorities should design driver's exams and training courses different province to province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While selecting the most appropriate interchange type is a major concern that transport and traffic experts are dealing with, one of the essential questions that repeatedly appears on the table is how to select the best interchange based on the contributing criteria. In the present study, the influencing factors on selecting interchange type are extracted by Delphi method followed by their clustering utilizing card sorting technique to the environment, safety, cost, executive constraint, regional, geometric characteristics, and traffic, and eventually applied the multi-criteria decision-making process of Dematel to select the best interchange type. The well-known intersection of Sanaat Square in the Iranian capital of Tehran has been selected as a case study and the proposed procedure performed by receiving experts' opinions. After validating the proposed procedure, the results revealed that land use, accident reduction rate, domestic interchange construction experience, noise pollution reduction, distance to adjacent interchange, and construction cost are the main factors that play significant roles in interchange type selection for interchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic is a severe global health problem, health authorities are focusing on managing patients' treatment and healthcare facilities. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between personal characteristics, symptoms, and underlying diseases nominated as predictors, and the hospitalized duration of treatment for the patients contracted to Covid-19 as a dependent variable. To this purpose, patients have been divided into three categories of recovered, transferred, and death followed by developing separate regression models with the above-mentioned variables. Data have been collected for 1015 patients who were positively contracted to Covid-19 and received clinical treatment or intensive care. The results revealed that age causes significant effects on the hospitalized duration of treatment among the aforementioned contributing factors, so the health service managers can estimate the patient hospitalized duration based on the age even if the symptoms and underlying diseases may cause significant effects on the infection rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transport authorities who are dealing with drivers' training procedures are interested in improving drivers' skills to enhance public transport productivity and promoting road safety. The present research work has been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of written examination based training courses on freight drivers' reaction, learning, behavior, and reduction on their accidents and traffic violations, so the well-known model of Kirk-Patrick has been utilized. Tehran province, the capital province of Iran, has been selected as the case study where gathering data process has been done through filling out a standard questionnaire composed of 45 pre-designed questions. Commercial freight drivers, consignees, goods owners, and experts filled out the questionnaires and results revealed that the written examination based training courses do not have significant effects on drivers' reactions, learning, behaviors, and performances in freight transportation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a difficult of dynamic match inner-tool election and distribution of operation with part and tool movement policies in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) environment. For this design, a novel 0-1 Non linear integer programming multi objective model is demonstrated in such a way that each tool and each part can move during the production phase. It is assumed that there are sets of tools and machines that can manufacture different kinds of orders (or part types). Therefore, in this study, we make use of one of the various objective decision-making methods, a global criterion approach, to improve a multi-objective model for find a solution FMS scheduling problems with payment of two performance measures, namely minimum machining cost, set up cost as first objective and minimum machining time, tools and parts transportation time and machines average idle time as second objective, at the same time. SMOSA algorithm approach is applied to optimize the model and the outcomes of the computational experiments are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While passenger and freight transportation are growing up in developing countries, traffic congestion, accidents and environmental pollution are getting to be a serious concern for policy makers. Using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) has been recently introduced as a main solution to overwhelm the above problems. Since, Weigh In Motion system (WIM) is known as a very important component of ITS, its usage is increasingly to be applied for overloading enforcement. Huge investment in construction and maintenance of pavement lead policy makers to tackle overloading using weigh in motion systems. Installing weight in motion system is a constructive project with high investment in terms of special pavement, electronic devices, data transferring devices and human resource to overloading reduction and save pavement condition in the proper situation. Following the above mentioned, it is necessary to develop a trade-off model between pavement cost repairing and installing weigh in motion system. So, in this research will be presented on the basis of break-even at the cost of purchase, installation, operating and maintenance costs of the system and saves the cost to repair the pavement as the top model in terms of the income. The average overloaded axles under enforcement performed by authorities to tackle overloading is studied a criterion and the proposed model determines the minimum average overloaded axes in which installing WIM would be a profitable project. The proposed model is as a parametric pattern and an installed WIM system has also been selected as case study and the number of required enforcement. Results will help decision-makers in the field of transport, as in the operation of WIM to achieve a balance between costs and revenues from it the right decision to take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Route determination for hazardous material (Hazmat for short) transportation is a main concern in Hazmat management in which transport risk and cost are considered as the main attributes. The pre-defined priorities for risk and cost cause different mathematical models developed to determine the best routes which are not necessarily the shortest paths. In this paper, a tolerated risk usage is utilized to develop mathematical model for selecting the best route for carrying hazardous materials according to risk and path distance. Mathematical model has been developed using preemptive goal programming approach in which transport risk is considered more important than distance at the first step for developing model and route distance is minimized subject to pre-defined risk tolerance at the second stage. Experimental data including eighty-nine nodes and onehundred and one links in a real network has been selected for numerical analysis and results have been discussed. Results revealed that there are some alternative routes when risk tolerance is getting to be increased or long distance paths used for hazardous materials transportation. In addition, using tolerated risk can satisfy both national/local authorities in hazmat management and transport companies as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road traffic volumes in intercity roads are generally estimated using probability functions, statistical techniques of regression or meta-heuristic approaches such as artificial neural networks. Although, road traffic volumes may be dependent upon input variables of road geometrical design, weather conditions, weekend, national holiday and so on, but traffic volumes are also estimated by using pattern recognition techniques. The main question from the researchers, here, is to check the using chaotic pattern of daily traffic volume and the performance of chaos theory to estimate daily traffic volume. In this research work, the existing of chaotic behavior in daily traffic volume in intercity roads has been examined while the performance of chaos theory is discussed compared to probability functions. The ratio between the minimum and maximum of daily traffic volume is considered as chaos factor. Data, gathered through two installed automatic traffic counters over a year, have been used in analytical process. Results show that daily traffic volumes have chaotic behavior with defined twenty-four hour time span, but applying the principle of chaos theory is not appropriate method for estimating daily traffic volumes comparing to a good fitness probability function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]