Recently, the government of Ethiopia has been engaged in modernizing the trans-regional Ethio-Djibouti railway infrastructure using the Belt and Road Initiative. This railway corridor has been serving as the main get way for the landlocked Ethiopia to the port. This article creates an insight about the implications of the Ethio-Djibouti railway corridor by exploring the question: what kinds of urban form and morphological changes evolved due to the railway corridor? To examine the impact of this railway corridor, the article employed stratified sampling and multiple criteria intermediate cities selection method. Accordingly, four (Bishoftu, Mojo, Adama, and Dire Dawa) intermediate cities were selected as case study. The article points out that the railway corridor conceived different kinds of linear urban centers around stations. The identified four intermediate cities attract industries and logistic centers. Those industries, logistic centers, and new railway stations often established at the periphery of intermediate cities resulted labour influx from rural and nearby small urban centers and urban expansion that caused a rural-urban continuum of ribbon settlement and strengthen trade gate way for the landlocked Ethiopia that caused trans-regional integration.

Inland Container Depots (ICDs) are inland multi-modal terminals where goods in intermodal loading units can be transferred directly to seaports. The contribution of ICDs to regions’ economic and social growth is undeniable. To achieve the sustainable development of ICDs, evaluating and improving their service quality is critical. This study aims to investigate the factors contributing to the service quality of ICD in a developing country. The data utilized covers some ICDs in the Red River Delta, Vietnam. Regarding analytic methods, descriptive statistics first were run to show the level of aspects of service quality of ICDs. Subsequently, attitudinal statements were analyzed using exploratory factor analysis before linear regression was applied to recognize the factors influencing the service quality of ICDs. Generally, the service quality of ICDs was evaluated at an acceptable level but far from the high one. The results suggested that the four influential service quality factors included location and accessibility, facilities, process and management, and labor. Based on the findings of contributing factors, managerial implications were proposed.

The integration of medical images is the process of registering and fusing them to obtain a greater amount of diagnostic information. In this work an analysis is performed for the integration of images obtained through computed axial tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, for which a tool was developed in the Matlab program, where the registration is implemented through equivalent features; in addition, the pairs of images are compared by several fusion rules, with a view to identify the best algorithm in which the resulting fused image contains the most information from the original representations.

No less than 60% of timber production in Peru’s natural forests is the result of informal or illegal extractive activities that, by definition, are not sustainable. This article aims to demonstrate that even legitimate timber, such as timber harvested in more than 6 million hectares of forest concessions, does not meet the basic requirements of sustainable forest management. Forestry legislation itself, which does not emphasize forest management, institutional weaknesses and the socioeconomic environment are the main causes. In addition, the cutting cycles and the authorized minimum diameters, among other practices, do not allow the renewal of the resource and increase its degradation.

Recent times have seen significant advancements in AI and NLP technologies, poised to revolutionize logistical decision-making across industries. This study investigates integrating ChatGPT, an advanced AI language model, into strategic, tactical, and operational logistics. Examining its applicability, benefits, and limitations, the study delves into ChatGPT's capacity for strategic logistics planning, facilitating nuanced decision-making through natural language interactions. At the tactical level, it explores ChatGPT's role in optimizing route planning and enhancing real-time decision support. The operational aspect scrutinizes ChatGPT's capabilities in micro-level logistics and emergency response. Ethical implications, encompassing data security and human-AI trust dynamics, are also analyzed. This report furnishes valuable insights for the logistics sector, emphasizing AI's potential in reshaping decision-making while underscoring the necessity for foresight, evaluation, and ethical considerations in AI integration. In this publication, it is assumed that ChatGPT is not entirely reliable for decision-making in the logistics field: at the strategic level, it can be effectively used for "brainstormin" in preparing decisions, but at the tactical and operational level, the depth of the knowledge is not sufficient to make appropriate decisions. Therefore, the answers provided by ChatGPT to the defined logistic tasks are compared with real logistic solutions. The article highlights ChatGPT's effectiveness at different levels of logistics and clarifies its potential and limitations in the logistics field.