Due to severe congestion before the Three Gorges Dam, roll-on/roll-off and container carriers are encouraged to adopt water-land transshipment mode. Owing to high transit and road costs, however, carriers are reluctant to adopt this mode. In this paper, we study the spatial-temporal relationship between the transshipment mode and the transshipment cost. Furthermore, we analyze the feasibility of subsidy strategies with regards to water-land transshipment from the standpoint of the government. An evolutionary game theory model is used to identify the equilibrium points of transshipment and non-transshipment, as well as subsidy and non-subsidy strategies available to carriers and the government, respectively, under different scenarios. With a transshipment job for a major carrier as an example, freight prices offered by carriers and subsidies provided by the government under water-road and water-road-water modes are analyzed, with the aim of providing strategic input for both the government and the carriers.INDEX TERMS Three Gorges Dam, transshipment, evolutionary game theory.

The passenger-cargo Roll on/Roll off ship stowage (PRSS) is the core step of passengercargo Roll on/Roll off (RoRo) transportation. The layout of vehicles in the cabin is directly related to the space utilization of the cabin and the efficiency of stowage operations, which in turn affects the economic benefits of the port. In this paper, we address the PRSS problem in the context of passenger-cargo RoRo transportation in the Qiongzhou Strait of China. By focusing on the utilization ratio of the cabin area, the PRSS problem can be viewed as a special version of a two-dimensional knapsack packing (2D-KP) problem with additional constraints, such as two-phase, complex rotation and safe navigation constraints. Then we present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) mathematical model and an algorithm framework to tackle the PRSS problem. In the algorithm framework, a novel multi-phase heuristic stowage method is proposed to improve the current manual stowage decision-making state which completely depends on operational experience. Finally, several instances are generated based on the realistic date of Qiongzhou Strait to verify the effectiveness of the model and stowage method. Computational results show that the proposed model and stowage method are well suited to solve the PRSS problem and the algorithm framework has a strong robustness in large-scale application experiments. INDEX TERMS Maritime transportation, ship stowage planning, passenger-cargo roll-on/roll-off, twodimensional knapsack packing, multi-phase heuristic.

With the development of the Internet and e-commerce, the express delivery volume is growing rapidly，and the accurate prediction of express delivery volume is of great significance to the planning of the express industry.This paper proposes a new method for predicting express delivery volume—Lasso-BP-GM-MLR model. Firstly, the Lasso method is used to filter the input parameters of BP neural network and construct lasso-BP network.Then the Lasso-BP-GM-MLR model is constructed by combining the advantages of the Lasso-BP network, GM (1, 1) and MLR (multiple linear regression) models. Finally, the case analysis of China's express delivery volume shows that the Lasso-BP model has better prediction effect than BP, Lasso-RBF and Lasso-GRNN models, while the Lasso-BP-GM-MLR model has higher accuracy than the Lasso-BP network, GM (1, 1) and MLR models.

Congestion before the Three Gorges Dam has been an obstacle to the sustainable development of the Yangtze River. Water–land transshipment can be a better way to alleviate congestion. Consequently, the government started to offer subsidies to evacuate ships’ traffic flow through transshipment despite that it increases environmental pollution. In this paper, we analyze the effects of subsidies on carriers’ adoption behavioral strategies, congestion and transshipment on the environment, and subsidies on pricing considering environmental emissions. Two different models are constructed, and a simulation analysis is carried out with different scenarios by varying the values of different parameters. The results show that subsidies can affect carriers’ behavioral strategies. Both lockage and transshipment modes can increase environmental emissions. Pricing under the subsidy scenario can be more competitive with profit maximization. The results offer important implications to policymakers, carriers, shippers.