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Despite persistent levels of participation in cycling, little research has been undertaken in the context of competitive cycling event management and marketing. This study explored participant preferences using conjoint measurement and plausible market segmentations. Results of the survey conducted at three southeastern US cycling events (N=199) suggest that travel distance has primacy across nearly all segment groups and differences in recreational specialisation in cycling are reflected among other preferred event attributes.

This paper aims to develop an easily reconfigurable assembly cell.

Some functions are implemented to resolve problems associated with physical reconfiguration of an agent‐based robotic assembly cell, such as position calibration and workspace allocation.

The implemented prototype assembly cell is composed of industrial manipulators and a belt conveyor. Installation of a new manipulator and assembly execution are successfully demonstrated on the prototype cell.

In the developed assembly system, installation and removal of assembly devices are easily performed so that it can adapt to changes in the manufacturing environment quickly.

The developed system does not use specially designed hardware. Easy reconfiguration is enabled using conventional devices such as manipulators and belt conveyors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the constraints to attend salsa events and festivals across salsa dancing specialization segments.

In‐depth interviews with salsa dancers from three salsa specialization levels were carried out.

Specialization level acted as a predictor of salsa event attendance and there appears to be an event career associated to progress in salsa dancing specialisation, which eventually branched out to a tourist career. Moreover, there was a relationship between the types of constraints and recreation specialisation level, with participants negotiating constraints frequently in order to ensure event attendance.

The interviews were carried out on participants in a mid‐size town in southern England, where the range of competing leisure activities is limited. In addition, the study focused on one recreational activity and one type of event.

Several implications for the marketing of events and festivals can be drawn. First, marketers of salsa events should tie closely with providers of salsa classes and marketers of salsa classes need to provide opportunities for salsa dancers to attend events. Second, marketing strategies aiming at helping recreationists overcome constraints should be different according to the level of specialization. Third, given the nature of constraints faced by the less experienced recreationists, efforts to attract individuals earlier in the specialization path may be fruitless.

This paper is one of the first to explicitly examine the relationship between specialization and constraints to perform behaviors associated to a recreational activity.

Contact problems are among the most difficult ones in mechanics. Due to its practical importance, the problem has been receiving extensive research work over the years. The finite element method has been widely used to solve contact problems with various grades of complexity. Great progress has been made on both theoretical studies and engineering applications. This paper reviews some of the main developments in contact theories and finite element solution techniques for static contact problems. Classical and variational formulations of the problem are first given and then finite element solution techniques are reviewed. Available constraint methods, friction laws and contact searching algorithms are also briefly described. At the end of the paper, a bibliography is included, listing about seven hundred papers which are related to static contact problems and have been published in various journals and conference proceedings from 1976.

This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of online brainspotting (BSP) therapy in reducing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and influencing brain metabolism in a survivor of intimate partner sexual violence.

A quasi-experimental single-case study using a pretest–posttest design was conducted with clinical assessments and neuroimaging techniques (Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy or H-MRS). The PTSD participant underwent 15 online BSP sessions, with a healthy control included for comparison. PTSD symptoms and neural activity, specifically the N-acetyl aspartate/creatine ratio, were evaluated before and after the intervention.

The results indicated significant reductions in PTSD symptoms and improvements in neural activity, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus and amygdala. Reductions in anxiety and depression levels were also observed through clinical assessments. Follow-up sessions confirmed sustained symptom improvement.

The small sample size and lack of randomization limit generalizability, and reliance on self-reporting could introduce bias. Future research should involve larger samples, randomized trials and longer follow-up periods.

This study offers preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of online BSP therapy in treating PTSD, highlighting its potential as an accessible treatment option and demonstrating the value of neuroimaging in tracking therapy outcomes.

The study provides novel insights into online BSP’s impact on brain regions associated with trauma and emphasizes the need for culturally sensitive PTSD treatment in Indonesia.

This paper gives a review of the finite element techniques (FE) applied in the area of material processing. The latest trends in metal forming, non‐metal forming, powder metallurgy and composite material processing are briefly discussed. The range of applications of finite elements on these subjects is extremely wide and cannot be presented in a single paper; therefore the aim of the paper is to give FE researchers/users only an encyclopaedic view of the different possibilities that exist today in the various fields mentioned above. An appendix included at the end of the paper presents a bibliography on finite element applications in material processing for 1994‐1996, where 1,370 references are listed. This bibliography is an updating of the paper written by Brannberg and Mackerle which has been published in Engineering Computations, Vol. 11 No. 5, 1994, pp. 413‐55.

How an individual makes a travel decision under uncertain conditions has been one of the critical issues in designing the information that is delivered by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). This has been a difficult problem because a suitable mathematical framework that deals with the interaction among uncertainty, information, and traveler's attitude toward uncertainty is not available. This paper introduces a possibility theory framework, and demonstrates how this framework represents the uncertainty perceived by the traveler, and calculates the feasibility of achieving the travel objective under different degrees of specificity of information. We present this framework in the setting of selecting the time of departure in the face of a not well-defined desired arrival time and estimated travel time. Feasibility of arrival is measured by the possibility and necessity measures; these measures represent two views, optimistic or conservative, respectively. Anxiety that is associated with the departure time, whether to leave now or not is modeled by Yager's anxiety measures. The anxiety measure considers the conflict of impelling forces between “to leave now” and “not to leave yet”; possibility and necessity measures for these outcomes represent these forces. Thus, along the time axis of possible departure time, possibility and necessity measures of arrival and non-arrival are computed and accordingly, the anxiety measure associated with each departure time. The range of time within which a traveler decides to leave is indicated by the anxiety measure. The size of the range is sensitive to the specificity of information. The more specific the information, the smaller the range of time. While the purpose of this paper is to introduce the mathematical framework useful for the analysis of a traveler's decision under uncertainty, the analysis raises an interesting issue of the paradoxical effects of information accuracy also.

Application of the engineering design optimization methods and tools to the design of automotive body‐in‐white (BIW) structural components made of polymer metal hybrid (PMH) materials is considered. Specifically, the use of topology optimization in identifying the optimal initial designs and the use of size and shape optimization techniques in defining the final designs is discussed. The optimization analyses employed were required to account for the fact that the BIW structural PMH component in question may be subjected to different in‐service loads be designed for stiffness, strength or buckling resistance and that it must be manufacturable using conventional injection over‐molding. The paper demonstrates the use of various engineering tools, i.e. a CAD program to create the solid model of the PMH component, a meshing program to ensure mesh matching across the polymer/metal interfaces, a linear‐static analysis based topology optimization tool to generate an initial design, a nonlinear statics‐based size and shape optimization program to obtained the final design and a mold‐filling simulation tool to validate manufacturability of the PMH component.

The importance of the adverse impacts of network degradation has stimulated substantial international research interest in transport network reliability, that is, the ability of degraded transport networks to cope with travel demand. Most of the recent research effort has focused on the reliability of urban passenger transport networks, in terms of the probability that the network will deliver a required standard of performance. This situation is characterised by high levels of congestion, a dense road network, and quantifiable probability of degradation of the network. Outside major urban centres, the situation is very different. The main dominant consideration in transport network infrastructure provision is accessibility - linking urban centres, providing regional coverage, and basic levels of accessibility for the non-urban community and economy. The network is sparse, congestion is not a significant issue, and access to essential community services and to markets is the major driving force underlying network development. In this context, the vulnerability of the network is perhaps more important than ‘reliability’. This paper develops the concept of network vulnerability. It begins by reviewing the current state of research into network reliability, then proposes extensions and adaptations to the reliability concepts that are more appropriate for strategic-level multi-modal transport systems. Several alternative definitions for vulnerability are proposed. The paper also discusses the development of algorithmic and visualisation tools that may be used to identify specific ‘weak spots’ in a network, where failure of some part of the transport infrastructure would have the most serious effects on access to specific locations and on overall system performance. Finally, the paper describes potential applications of network vulnerability concepts, and proposes directions for further research.

Travel behaviour depends on the travellers' perception of the trip characteristics. The uncertainty of the journey time is one of the determinants of the choice. Studies of decision behaviour in uncertain conditions show the limited validity of the common assumptions in traffic models. Decision making under uncertainty has to be considered as a contingent process, depending on the objectives and conditions with which the choice is made. Expected utility is one of the many possible criteria used by people to decide. There is a discrepancy between the objective and subjective value of this concept. This is due to the bias with respect to the perception of very likely and very unlikely events. In many cases the expected utility is a less applicable objective, e.g. because people want to arrive before a certain deadline and maximize the probability to achieve that. The fact that probabilities of travel times have to be learned from experiences introduces a dynamic character of choice behaviour.

Most of the reported properties of decision-making under uncertainty still have to be verified for travel behaviour.