The Princess of the Flaming Womb, the Javanese legend that introduces this pioneering study, symbolizes the many ambiguities attached to femaleness in Southeast Asian societies. Yet, despite these ambiguities, the relatively egalitarian nature of male-female relations in Southeast Asia is central to arguments claiming a coherent identity for the region. This challenging work by senior scholar Barbara Watson Andaya considers such contradictions while offering a thought-provoking view of Southeast Asian history that focuses on women's roles and perceptions. Andaya explores the broad themes of the early modern era (1500-1800) - the introduction of new religions, major economic shifts, changing patterns of state control, the impact of elite lifestyles and behaviors - drawing on an extraordinary range of sources and citing numerous examples from Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese, Philippine, and Malay societies.
A repositioning effort has become crucial to Asia in 2002 as a result of economic crisis, which served as a catalyst for change. This book provides a new model for the Asian region, one which offers the prospect of vital and sustainable growth to the region's economies and companies.
There are reasons for thinking that this is at last Indonesia's moment on the world stage. Having successfully negotiated its difficult transition to democracy after 1998, Indonesia has held three popular elections with a low level of violence by the standards of southern Asia. Recetly its economic growth rate has been high (above 6 per cent a year) and rising, where China's has been dropping and the developed world has been in crisis. Indonesia's admission in 2009 to the G20 club of the world's most influential states seemed to confirm a status implied by its size, as the world's fourth-largest country by population, and the largest with a Muslim majority. Some international pundits have been declaring that Indonesia is the new star to watch, and that its long-awaited moment in the sun may at last have arrived.
The book takes the inventory control perspective to tackle empty container repositioning logistics problems in regional transportation systems by explicitly considering the features such as demand imbalance over space, dynamic operations over time, uncertainty in demand and transport, and container leasing phenomenon. The book has the following unique features. First, it provides a discussion of broad empty equipment logistics including empty freight vehicle redistribution, empty passenger vehicle redistribution, empty bike repositioning, empty container chassis repositioning, and empty container repositioning (ECR) problems. The similarity and unique characteristics of ECR compared to other empty equipment repositioning problems are explained. Second, we adopt the stochastic dynamic programming approach to tackle the ECR problems, which offers an algorithmic strategy to characterize the optimal policy and captures the sequential decision-making phenomenon in anticipation of uncertainties over time and space. Third, we are able to establish closed-form solutions and structural properties of the optimal ECR policies in relatively simple transportation systems. Such properties can then be utilized to construct threshold-type ECR policies for more complicated transportation systems. In fact, the threshold-type ECR policies resemble the well-known (s, S) and (s, Q) policies in inventory control theory. These policies have the advantages of being decentralized, easy to understand, easy to operate, quick response to random events, and minimal on-line computation and communication. Fourth, several sophisticated optimization techniques such as approximate dynamic programming, simulation-based meta-heuristics, stochastic approximation, perturbation analysis, and ordinal optimization methods are introduced to solve the complex stochastic optimization problems. The book will be of interest to researchers and professionals in logistics, transport, supply chain, and operations research.
This book provides a coherent and systematic view of the key concepts, principles, and techniques in maritime container transport and logistics chains including all the main segments: international maritime trade and logistics, freight logistics, container logistics, vessel logistics, port and terminal management, and sustainability issues in maritime transport. Container Logistics and Maritime Transport emphasizes analytical methods and current optimization models to tackle challenging issues in maritime transport and logistics. This book takes a holistic approach to cover all the main segments of the container shipping supply chains to achieve an efficient and effective logistics service system across the entire global transport chain. Sustainability issues such as social concern and carbon emissions from shipping and ports are also discussed. Each maritime transport segment is addressed using an approach from qualitative/descriptive analytics to quantitative/prescriptive analytics. Cutting-edge optimization models are presented and explained to tackle various strategic, tactical, and operational planning problems. The book will help readers better understand operations management in global maritime container transport chain. It will also provide practical principles and effective techniques and tools for researchers to push forward the frontiers of knowledge and for practitioners to implement decision support systems. It will be directly relevant to academic courses related to maritime transport, maritime logistics, transport management, international shipping, port management, container shipping, container logistics, shipping supply chain, and international logistics.
This monograph addresses several critical problems to the operations of shipping lines and ports, and provides algorithms and mathematical models for use by shipping lines and port authorities for decision support. One of these problems is the repositioning of container ships in a liner shipping network in order to adjust the network to seasonal shifts in demand or changes in the world economy. We provide the first problem description and mathematical model of repositioning and define the liner shipping fleet repositioning problem (LSFRP). The LSFRP is characterized by chains of interacting activities with a multi-commodity flow over paths defined by the activities chosen. We first model the problem without cargo flows with a variety of well-known optimization techniques, as well as using a novel method called linear temporal optimization planning that combines linear programming with partial-order planning in a branch-and-bound framework. We then model the LSFRP with cargo flows, using several different mathematical models as well as two heuristic approaches. We evaluate our techniques on a real-world dataset that includes a scenario from our industrial collaborator. We show that our approaches scale to the size of problems faced by industry, and are also able to improve the profit on the reference scenario by over US$14 million.
At the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, South Asia has emerged as a key regional variable in the contemporary global order. The last decade saw the region experiencing a robust phase of economic growth and development. Over time, South Asia's economic progress is expected to accelerate, given its favourable demography and strategic location. The prospects of faster economic growth and development, however, will materialize depending upon the region's success in handling various challenges including security, climate change, political instability and ethnic strife. It is in this context that the Sixth International Conference on South Asia brought together academics and policy specialists to provide insights and contribute to an understanding of the challenges and prospects facing the region in the new decade. This volume is a collection of the papers presented at the Conference and assembles a large and diverse set of viewpoints and perceptions on the region.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization, EMO 2017 held in Münster, Germany in March 2017. The 33 revised full papers presented together with 13 poster presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 submissions. The EMO 2017 aims to discuss all aspects of EMO development and deployment, including theoretical foundations; constraint handling techniques; preference handling techniques; handling of continuous, combinatorial or mixed-integer problems; local search techniques; hybrid approaches; stopping criteria; parallel EMO models; performance evaluation; test functions and benchmark problems; algorithm selection approaches; many-objective optimization; large scale optimization; real-world applications; EMO algorithm implementations.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Logistics, held in Shanghai, China, in September 2012. The 15 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on maritime shipping; logistics and supply chain management; planning and operations; and case studies.
Contemporary practice and scientific innovation consider the logistics aspects of shipping or maritime and seaport operations as one of the most important areas for development of competitive advantages in business and for study and research. This book covers issues having a significant impact on the industry.
