China has been one of the most aggressive countries in electric vehicle (EV) promotion. However, private EV sales fail to achieve the government’s target. In particular, cutting purchase subsidies poses great uncertainty in relation to EV diffusion. In this research, a system dynamics model aims to investigate the influence of government policies, infrastructure development plans, the duration of policies, and the phase out strategy of policies. Parameters relating to consumers’ preferences are drawn from a questionnaire survey, which is conducted in Shenzhen, the pioneer city in China’s EV promotion. The result of a scenario analysis shows that purchase subsidies, purchase restrictions and driving restrictions are the most effective policies for EV promotion. Driving restrictions are more effective but less easy to enforce than purchase restrictions. The number and location of charging piles are much more important than large charging stations. Moreover, EV diffusion can be self-sufficient after current policies have been maintained for 11 years. We find that the gradual removal of subsidies will cause a four-year delay in EV sales entering rapid growth in Shenzhen. However, cutting subsidies in cities without purchase restrictions will cause the failure of EV promotion.

This paper explores the optimal storage rack design for a multi-deep compact Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS) considering the acceleration and deceleration of storage and retrieval (S/R) machine. The expected travel time under the single-command cycle and dual-command cycle for a random storage strategy is derived. Based on the travel time, the general models we propose calculate the optimal ratio between three dimensions that minimises the travel time under different speed profile scenarios. From the result, it is proven that the optimal storage rack design model in the constant speed situation can be treated as a special case of the model considering the acceleration and deceleration of S/R machine. Finally, this study investigates the effect of speed profile of S/R machine and fixing dimensions by various numerical experiments.

This paper examines the local container drayage problem under a special operation mode in which tractors and trailers can be separated; that is, tractors can be assigned to a new task at another location while trailers with containers are waiting for packing or unpacking. Meanwhile, the strategy of sharing empty containers between different customers is also considered to improve the efficiency and lower the operation cost. The problem is formulated as a vehicle routing and scheduling problem with temporal constraints. We adopt combinatorial benders’ cuts algorithm to solve this problem. Numerical experiments are performed on a group of randomly generated instances to test the performance of the proposed algorithm.