A lot of attention in the debate on the 2014–2020 programming period of the EU CAP and rural development policy revolves around the policy's contribution to enhancing resource use efficiency, decreasing environmental impact, restoring ecosystems and how to ensure more efficient and effective...

Conservation agriculture (CA) is promoted as a promising technology to stabilize or improve crop yields in Africa and Madagascar. However, small-scale farmers face difficulties to retain soil cover, mainly because of competing uses for the biomass produced, especially to feed cattle. To explore...

Multi-echelon distribution strategy in which freight is delivered to customers via intermediate depots rather than using direct shipments is an increasingly popular strategy in urban logistics. This is primarily to alleviate the environmental (e.g., energy usage and congestion) and social (e.g.,...

Global supply chains require integrated cost optimisation of sourcing, production and distribution through flexible networks of suppliers, manufacturers and logistics operators. The minimisation of environmental impacts of freight flows must be considered for sustainable development and should...

A new mathematical model for positioning alternative fuel (AF) refueling stations on directed-transportation networks with the objective of maximizing the coverage of path flow volume is proposed. This model is especially designed for developing an AF infrastructure on toll roads and other...

Cluster analysis refers to finding subsets of vertices of a graph (called clusters) which are more likely to be joined pairwise than vertices in different clusters. In the last years this topic has been studied by many researchers, and several methods have been proposed. One of the most popular...

High logistics and handling costs prevent the bioenergy industry from making a greater contribution to the present energy market. Therefore, a mathematical model, OPTIMASS, is presented to optimise strategic (e.g. facility location and type) and tactical (e.g. allocation) decisions in all kinds...

The paper assesses the impact of electric-drive vehicles (EDVs) on power system reliability. For this purpose, it introduces direct optimization of reliability indices LOLE (Loss of Load Expectation) and EENS (Expected Energy Not Served). The analysis is performed by the proposed optimization...