In recent decades, maritime transport demand has increased along with world population and global trades. This is associated with higher pollution levels, including the emissions of GHG and other polluting gases. Ports are important elements within maritime transport and contribute themselves to pollutant emissions. This paper aims to offer a comprehensive yet technical review of the latest related technologies, explaining and covering aspects that link ports with emissions, i.e., analyzing, monitoring, assessing, and mitigating emissions in ports. This has been achieved through a robust scientific analysis of very recent and significant research studies, to offer an up-to-date and reliable overview. Results show the correlation between emissions and port infrastructures, and demonstrate how proper interventions can help with reducing pollutant emissions and financial costs as well, in ports and for maritime transportation in general. Besides, this review also wishes to propose new ideas for future research: new future experimental studies might spin-off from it, and perhaps port Authorities might be inspired to experiment and implement dedicated technologies to improve their impact on environment and sustainability.

Due to urbanization, large portions of vegetated territory have been replaced by waterproof surfaces. The consequences are greater outflows, lower infiltration, and lower evapotranspiration. Pavement systems made with permeable surfaces allow the infiltration of water, ensuring reduction of runoff volume. In this paper, the methods of analysis of the hydrological and environmental performance of the pavement systems are reviewed in the context of urban drainage and regarding their durability. The purpose is to present an overview of the studies published during the last decade in the field. The Pubmed and Web Science Core Collection electronic databases were used to conduct the scientific literature survey. This generated 1238 papers, of which only 17 met the criteria and were included and discussed in this review. The evidence drawn from the knowledge on which the document is based provides useful critical interpretations of existing studies to progress the current understanding on hydrological performance and environment impacts in terms of conventional pollutant removal efficiency and the current permeable pavement systems.

Nowadays, transport systems efficiency plays a key role for communities’ liveability and economy, being in addition an important factor in the economic integration of countries. The purpose of the article is to develop multi-stage models of tourist activities for optimizing the development of operating companies. For the implementation of models, the authors evolved the relevant system of organizational-functional support for the development of railway tourism. The research will enable us to take into consideration risks when planning tourist routes by railway, determine the order of construction or start of routes, and assess their profitability. This will provide to earn the expected incomes of all interested parties in tourist activities for the specified period. The authors created economic-mathematical models of the discrete optimal planning of the railway tourism operations. This takes into account conditions of risks and cooperation, and allows to determine which sets of effective routes are the most profitable ones. The results of the realization of the developed models include the task of the succession of the tourist route introduction according to the present and future infrastructure, availability of the rolling stock, etc. In this, consideration is given to obtaining maximum profit from tourism businesses for every participant during an established period.

Asphalt pavements are subject to regular inspection and maintenance activities over time. Many techniques have been suggested to evaluate pavement surface conditions, but most of these are either labour-intensive tasks or require costly instruments. This article describes a robust intelligent pavement distress inspection system that uses cost-effective equipment and the ‘you only look once’ detection algorithm (YOLOv3). A dataset for flexible pavement distress detection with around 13,135 images and 30,989 bounding boxes of damage was used during the neural network training, calibration, and validation phases. During the testing phase, the model achieved a mean average precision of up to 80%, depending on the type of pavement distress. The performance metrics (loss, precision, recall, and RMSE) that were applied to estimate the object detection accuracy demonstrate that the technique can distinguish between different types of asphalt pavement damage with remarkable accuracy and precision. Moreover, the confusion matrix obtained in the validation process shows a distress classification sensitivity of up to 98.7%. The suggested technique was successfully implemented in an inspection car. Measurements conducted on urban roads crossed by tramway lines in the city of Palermo proved the real-time ability and great efficacy of the detection system, with potentially remarkable advances in asphalt pavement examination efficacy due to the high rates of correct distress detection.

The importance of simulation calculations in developing railway vehicles and their subsystems is consistently growing compared to physical experiments and track tests