Bus transit provides shorter-distance public transportation services, which are subject to various disability discrimination acts with various dedicated features. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that disabled individuals shall have equal rights to receive fare bus transit services, including fixed-route and door-to-door bus services. Most previous studies were mainly focused on policy aspects as part of the efforts of disability rights. The proper planning of demand requests from disabled individuals has been a critical issue but has gained insufficient attention. The existing methodologies in planning route for special transit buses for disabled individuals normally do not consider passengers' waiting time, lack sufficient flexibility, and have strict restrictions on the total number of served destinations. This paper proposes a four-module based methodology for the planning of bus transit, including demand information collection, demand clustering, transit bus assignment, and a linear programming-based route planning with different objective functions. Houston MetroLift bus transit service was employed as an example to illustrate the proposed method. Three scenarios during the route planning module were designed in this case study: (1) planning for pre-timed shortest distance, (2) planning for the pre-timed shortest waiting time of passengers, and (3) flexible planning. Results showed that scenario 1 obtained the shortest total travel time and the highest benefit for bus providers, scenario 2 is with the shortest average waiting time, while scenario 3 is real-time based with longer total travel time and longer waiting time. Scenarios 2 and 3 consider the special needs of disabled passengers.

The production and sales of electric vehicle lithium-ion batteries (EV LIB) have experienced rapid growth in the past decade, resulting in an extensive and intricate supply chain network (SCN). The SCNs orchestrated by different focal firms are interdependent due to the joint suppliers and customers. This interdependence, coupled with geographical segmentation, introduces vulnerability to the global EV LIB SCN. Focal firms need management insights from the multiplexity of the global EV LIB SCN to address the potential vulnerability. This investigation utilizes the empirical data regarding the supplier–buyer relationships of the top six EV LIB manufacturers in 2020 to construct the multilayered EV LIB SCN. Then, a focal firm-specific analysis is conducted to explore the multiplexity of the global EV LIB SCN, including identifying the influential firms, measuring the structure of SCNs led by different focal firms, and distinguishing the dependence and discrepancies of different focal firms’ SCNs. Furthermore, an SCN vulnerability (SCNV) index was designed to assess the vulnerability of such a multilayered SCN in two disruption scenarios, i.e., single-country blockade and intercountry blockade. The structural analysis can assist focal firms in allocating vulnerability-coping resources more effectively. Besides, the assessment of SCNV can assist managers in identifying potential risk sources beyond their own SCNs.

Carbon cap-and-trade mechanism is a government-mandated, market-based scheme to reduce emissions, which has a significant effect on manufacturers’ operation decisions. Based on the cap-and-trade mechanism, this paper studies the joint production and emission reduction problem of a manufacturer. The manufacturer faces emissions-sensitive demand impacted by consumers’ environmental preferences (CEP). An extended newsvendor model is used to find the optimal production quantity and emissions reduction quantity. We explore the impacts of market price of carbon credits, emission reduction investment coefficient and CEP on the optimal strategies. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the theoretical results and orthogonal experimental design technique was applied to find robust system parameters. It is concluded that among all parameters, emissions cap has the greater impact on the expected profit, which is followed by than the market price of carbon credits. This means that the government plays a major role in economic development. The total carbon emissions are mainly affected by the carbon trading price and the product’s sale price, which indicates the carbon trading market and product market play a larger role in controlling environmental benefits. Several valuable managerial insights on helping governments and industries understand how market conditions change and make better long-term decisions are further concluded.