Technical and Economic Feasibility of the Use of Airships within Two Portuguese Market Niches
Bibliographic record
Abstract
All over the world there are several countries where airships are being used for military and civilian purposes. The rebirth of this mean of transportation, capable of easily overcoming some deficiencies of the conventional ones, brings medium and long term economic benefits. In addition, they offer different services at lower costs, and they also may stimulate new commercial and industrial activities and even new transactional routes. The background of airship technology comes from the XVIII century. Since then, all those years were of scientific and empirical knowledge. Now, they form the basis for a sustainable future in emerging technologies, making the return of airships possible. This revived interest in airship technology brings a multitude of technical concepts resulting from interdisciplinary research. Consequently, the state of art of airships presents new research which paves the way for the reappearance of renewed horizons with regards to the use of airships. Companies are focused on the research, development and testing of new airship concepts and designs too. Nowadays, airships are being studied for commercial transport in different parts of the globe, from Canada, Brazil, Peru, to Australia. India, for example, has studies about the connection to remote areas with poor surface infrastructure which only can be reached by air or walking. This way, it’s expected that airships will become a competitive mean of transport to link areas served by deficient transport infrastructures. Taking the principles of sustainable development of air transport, airships are the most environment-friendly vehicles with lower fuel consumption and with higher endurance. Therefore, as a result, they are paving the way for new markets. This work examines these technological improvements and the economic feasibility of the use of airships in certain market niches. Mainly, this work makes use of a study concerning the viability of the use of airships within Portuguese Tourism and Urban Logistic activity sectors. This paper is organized as follows: firstly, state of the art reviews about airships technological characteristics: operational constraints, operation scenarios, and international and national legislation. Secondly, improvement of two case studies within the Portuguese territory (touristic flights and urban logistic activity): operational parameters evaluation and operating cost estimation. And thirdly, some insights and challenges of research that is still in progress. KeyWords: Airships, Technical and Economic Feasibility, Market Niches, Tourism, Urban Logistics. JEL Codes: L93, O18, R11
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".