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With the deep integration of shipping companies and the stable operation of the three alliances (2 M, THE, Ocean), the previous situation of port monopoly has changed. In view of this situation, this paper tries to study the influence of government subsidies on the choice of shore power or lower sulfur fuel oil strategy of shipping company and the entire maritime supply chain under different power structures (Port Stackelberg (PS), Nash Game (N), Shipping company Stackelberg (CS)). Results show that when carbon price is very low or very high, the governmental subsidy will not affect the shipping company's choice of shore power or lower sulfur fuel oil, but when carbon price is moderate, government subsidy will encourage shipping company to adopt shore power (SP). For the shipping company, using LSFO when the carbon price is low or adopting SP when the carbon price is high can bring the highest profit. For the government, if the government cares more about the supply chain's profit, then the government should try to promote the power structure of PS or CS, and if the government pays more attention to social welfare, the power structure of N should be promoted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The shipping industry plays an important role in international trade and world economic development. In particular, the rapid growth of the shipping industry since 2020 has become an important factor in supporting and stimulating the rapid recovery of the global economy in the post epidemic era. However, under the background that climate warming has increasingly become the theme of common concern for all mankind, greenhouse gas emission reduction has increasingly attracted the attention of governments of all countries, and has also become the requirement for production and operation of all industries, the green, environmental protection and sustainable development of the shipping industry have also become the focus of participants in all sectors. As environmental problems put forward requirements of a green shipping industry, some policies aimed at reducing pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, such as carbon tax, have brought considerations to the strategies of ports and enterprises, especially concerning their competition and cooperation. This study established a shipping supply chain system composed of two ports and one shipping company in order to analyse the impact of carbon tax on the shipping supply chain, and to optimize the decision‐making of government, ports and shipping companies. Through three‐level Stackelberg game of four models including ports cooperating or not cooperating with each other, and carbon tax levied on ports or the shipping company, the study finds that the collection of carbon tax will reduce the container handling volume of ports thus reducing the profits of both ports and the shipping company, but the handling volume when the government puts carbon tax on ports is lower than that when it puts carbon tax on the shipping company, and the handling volume under the port cooperation mode is lower than that under the port non‐cooperation mode. As the collector of carbon tax, the government's income when taxing ports is higher than that when taxing shipping companies, and when ports cooperate, the government's income is lower than that when ports do not cooperate. Moreover, no matter the ports cooperate with each other or not, the impact of carbon tax on port container handling volume under the mode of carbon tax levied by the government on ports is more significant than that when carbon tax is levied on the shipping company, leaving the former mode a lower container handling volume and lower profit. The findings of this study have the following significance and suggestions for the participants of shipping supply industry: In order to maximize the government's target value, the government should give priority to taxing shipping companies rather than ports; Under the background of carbon tax, ports should choose limited non‐cooperation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing the increasing demand for ocean transportation, transport participants are seeking new ways of cooperation to improve overall productivity. In this study, we suppose a terminal operator would propose an agreement, in which carriers who choose to sign the agreement with the terminal operator could be a privileged carrier, otherwise they can only be an ordinary one. The berth requirements of privileged carriers will be satisfied in priority, resulting in certain operation efficiency improvements. A non-cooperative model is proposed to investigate two competing carriers of two transportation chains about whether to be the privileged carrier. It is noticed that the equilibrium strategies for two carriers are always the same. The operation efficiency and intensity of competition are the two key factors influencing the optimal strategy. When the efficiency improvement is at an appropriate level, it is more profitable for carriers to sign the agreement with the terminal operator. When the operation efficiency is at a high level and intensity of competition between two carriers is comparatively greater, the Pareto-optimal strategy will be selected to be the ordinary carrier. Furthermore, we discuss some extensions to prove the robustness of our main insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bacterial communities inhabiting the soil of mountain ecosystems perform critical ecological functions. Although several studies have reported the altitudinal distribution patterns of bacterial communities in warm-temperate mountain forests, our understanding of typical zonal vegetation dominated by Larix principis-rupprechtii Mayr (abbreviated as larch hereafter) and the understory elevation distribution patterns of soil bacterial communities is still limited. In this study, the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 sequencing platform was used to investigate the changes of surface and subsurface soil bacterial communities along an altitudinal gradient (from 1720 m to 2250 m) in larch forests in northern China. Altitude significantly affected the relative abundance of Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Acidobacteria, and Chloroflexi (bacterial dominant phylum) and Alphaproteobacteria, Gammaproteobacteria, and Actinobacteria (bacterial dominant classes). The diversity of bacterial communities showed a concomitant increase with altitude. The variations in available nitrogen and soil temperature content at different altitudes were the main factors explaining the bacterial community structures in pure stands and mixed stands, respectively. Altitude and the contents of soil organic carbon and soil organic matter were the main factors explaining the dominant phylum (taxonomy). Our results suggest that stand type has a greater effect on the structure and composition of soil bacterial communities than elevation and soil depth, and bacterial communities show divergent patterns along the altitudes, stand types, and soil profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the background of the green maritime transportation, green investment and vertical alliances between port and shipping enterprises are effective ways to reduce maritime emissions. In this paper, we consider a maritime supply chain consisting of a port, a shipping company, and a forwarder. The port and shipping company determine individual green investment to reduce emission pollution. There are three vertical alliance strategies for the shipping company under green investment: no alliance, alliance with the port, and alliance with the forwarder. We obtain the optimal alliance strategy under the same green investment entity and the optimal choice for the investment entity under the same alliance strategy. In addition, we analyze the impacts of different alliance strategies and investment entities on consumer surplus and social welfare. The results show that whether the port implements the green investment or the shipping company implements green investment, when all three alliance strategies are feasible, there is always a higher green investment level, a higher demand, and a lower shipping service charge, and alliance strategies lead to greater profits for the maritime supply chain. Under the same alliance strategy, the choice of investment entity is affected by the green investment cost coefficient. If the green investment cost coefficient of the investor is too high, then the enterprise's green investment cannot improve the maritime supply chain profit. Therefore, port and shipping enterprises should reasonably set green input according to their own conditions to maximize the profit of maritime supply chain. Vertical alliances can improve environmental performance as well as increase consumer surplus and social welfare. In particular, under the shipping company green investment, alliance between the shipping company and downstream forwarder can precisely grasp the market demand and achieve the optimal social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since dual channel supply chain has become one of the main modes of supply chain, its research has acquired great significance. This paper constructs a low-carbon dual channel supply chain composed of one manufacturer and one retailer. The manufacturer produces low-carbon product and high carbon product with substitution relationship. The retailer sells high carbon product in traditional channel. The manufacturer also sells low-carbon product in direct channel. The government, manufacturer and retailer conduct a three-level Stackelberg game. This paper studies the optimal decisions of the government, manufacturer and retailer under the three modes of carbon tax + subsidy, carbon tax only and subsidy only. It has been found that for social welfare, the carbon tax + subsidy model is higher than the subsidy model and carbon tax model. For manufacturer profit, the subsidy mode is the highest, followed by the carbon tax + subsidy mode. For retailer profit, the carbon tax + subsidy model is equal to the carbon tax model. The increase in the proportion of consumers who prefer high carbon product in the total market or product cost of low-carbon product, will increase the profit of traditional channel and reduce the profit of direct channel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Port operations in an uncertain environment and compete with nearby ports in a same region to incentive carriers. In this paper, we consider a game-theoretical model to analyze the co-opetition between two ports with capacity sharing. Three competitive game interactions are discussed, namely, benchmark model, passive sharing, and proactive sharing to maximize the payoff by determining optimal berth quantity and service price. The observations show that when faced with a strengthened rival with sufficient capacity, the optimal ports' decision for the capacity sharing mode is determined by the tradeoff between the benefit that is gained from the sharing capacity and the losses that are caused by port competition. Moreover, our research comprehensively examines how the port operation cost and the difference between the potential capacity demand of two terminals affect ports' optimal strategy selection and presents a broad set of decision outcomes, which provides new insights for port coopetition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the restriction of sulfur content in fuel oil in the Emission Control Areas (ECAs), ships passing through ECAs have to adopt low-sulfur fuel oil (LSFO), and government will provide appropriate subsidies to shipping companies using LSFO. However, due to the different bargaining power between ports and shipping companies, it is necessary to study how the governmental subsidies affect the carriers' choices of using LSFO under different power structures. In this paper, a game model considering one terminal and two carriers is developed to study the equilibrium solutions of two carriers under different power structures (terminal-dominated game, carriers-dominated game, Nash game), and then we analyze the impacts of government subsidies on maritime supply chain. The results show that whether for terminal or carriers, being leader in the game can always bring them higher profits. With the increase of the government subsidy, the demand of the carrier using LSFO will increase while the demand of the carrier who doesn't use LSFO will decrease. High government subsidy not only reduces the profits of carriers not using LSFO but also puts the carriers more likely into the prisoner's dilemma. The total demands and social welfare are maximized under Nash game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of carbon tax-subsidy policy, our paper develops the models of the tripartite evolutionary game between consumers, manufacturers and local governments and analyzes the impacts of carbon tax-subsidy policy on the strategies of consumers, manufacturers and local governments. Through the construction of replicated dynamic equations, we get the evolutionary stable strategy. Then, the numerical analysis is performed with system dynamics simulation. The results show that (i) the local governments should strengthen the consumers' awareness of environmental protection through higher financial subsidies, (ii) the taxation intensity coefficient accelerates the dynamic system to evolve into a stable state and (iii) an appropriate punishment by the government accelerates the dynamic system to evolve into a stable state. Our research is expected to provide a reference for local governments to implement effective carbon tax-subsidy policy on manufacturers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two-branch real-time semantic segmentation network can quickly acquire low-level details and high-level semantics. However, the large contextual gap between them results in adverse impact on their fusion, and limits the further improvement of real-time segmentation accuracy. This paper proposes a tripartite real-time semantic segmentation network with scene commonality (TriSCNet) to address this problem. First, we add a parallel scene commonality branch based on the current two-branch architecture to learn intrinsic common features in similar street scene images, such as the spatial location distribution of various objects and the internal connections between them at the semantic level. Further, with the guidance of commonality, we propose an external branch attention module to enrich and enhance the feature information of traditional two branches. Finally, we utilize an alignment and selective fusion module to correct the misaligned context in the semantic branch and highlight the essential spatial information in the detailed branch. Our proposed TriSCNet achieves an excellent trade-off between accuracy and speed, yielding 77.9% mIOU at 67.2 FPS on Cityscapes test set and 75.8% mIOU at 127.4 FPS on CamVid test set, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]