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The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the structure and antecedents of cruise passengers' loyalty. Specifically, the study examined the dimensionality of the loyalty construct. Moreover, the study investigated the utility of applying the Investment Model (Rusbult 1980, 1983) to reveal the psychological processes underlying loyalty formation. The study also attempted to, guided by the Investment Model, integrate the seemingly segregated findings of loyalty antecedents from marketing and leisure/tourism literature. Based on the Investment Model and other marketing and leisure/tourism studies on loyalty, a conceptual framework was established for this study. An online panel survey was conducted to examine this model. Subjects (N = 554) were online panelists who were repeat cruisers and who have cruised at least once in the past 12 months. In this study, loyalty was conceptualized as a four-dimensional construct: cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty, and behavioral loyalty. Further, the first three components were postulated as three subdimensions of a higher order construct, attitudinal loyalty. However, this conceptualization was not supported by the data. Alternatively, post-hoc analyses revealed that attitudinal loyalty was a first-order one-dimensional construct, containing cognitve, affective, and conative components. Moreover, behavioral loyalty was positively and significantly influenced by attitudinal loyalty. In sum, this study supported the traditional two-dimensional conceptualization of loyalty, which argues that loyalty has an attitudinal and a behavioral component. Following the Investment Model, this dissertation suggested that satisfaction, quality of alternatives, and investment size were three critical antecedents of consumers' attitudinal loyalty. These theoretical relationships were supported by the present study, and collectively, the three predictors accounted for over 74 percent of the variance in attitudinal loyalty. Finally, this dissertation hypothesized that quality and value, two constructs related to loyalty, served as antecedents of satisfaction, with quality also leading to value. Results of the study supported all these hypotheses, and satisfaction was found to partially mediate the quality-attitudinal loyalty, and value-attitudinal loyalty relationships. Results of the present study provide important direction for the development of a holistic theoretical framework to explain the formation and structure of customers' brand loyalty.

In this research, an autonomous vehicle function management methodology is studied. In accordance with the traffic situation, the decision making level chooses the optimal function that guarantees safety and minimizes fuel consumption while the control level is implemented via neuromorphic strategy based on the brain limbic system. To realize the decision making strategy, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used by considering driving safety, driving speed, and fuel efficiency as the objectives. According to the traffic situation and predefined driving mode, Lane Change Maneuver (LCM) and Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) are chosen as the alternative functions in the AHP framework. The adaptive AHP is utilized to cope with dynamically changing traffic environment. The proposed adaptive AHP algorithm provides an optimal relative importance matrix that is essential to make decisions under a varying traffic situation and driving modes. The simulation results show that proposed autonomous vehicle function management structure produces optimal decisions that satisfy the driving preference. The stability of BLS based control is also investigated via Cell-to-Cell Mapping. In this research, autonomous vehicle functions such as Lane change maneuver and Adaptive cruise control are developed by means of BLS based control. The simulation results considered various traffic situations that an autonomous vehicle can encounter. To demonstrate the suggested control method Cell-to-Cell Mapping is utilized. Subsequently, the autonomous vehicle function management strategy is developed by Applying AHP and an adaptive AHP strategy is developed to cope with various traffic situations and driving modes. The suggested method is verified numerical simulations.

Cruise missile mission planning is a key activity of cruise missile operations. Ground planning activities aim at low observable missions that have high probability of success. These activities include end game planning, route planning and launch planning. While end game planning tries to optimize end game parameters for maximum effectiveness, route planning tries to maximize survivability and enable navigational supports by determining the waypoints to from launch zone to target through a defended area. And lastly, planner tries to find the appropriate launch parameters that will prohibit platform to contact enemy agents. Mission rehearsal is the execution of the planned mission in a virtual environment that will be constructed with the data that drives the planning process. Mission rehearsal will support planners by providing possible results of the planned mission. Stochastic processes of the execution of the planned mission will be incorporated in the simulation of the combat. Along with platform, cruise missile and target, other players like SAM Sites or Search Radars (Early Warning Radars) will be incorporated in the rehearsal process.

<p>A cruise, meaning a travel on a ship where one visit a number of places is a form of holiday alternative that has grown rapidly the last decade.</p><p>Royal Caribbean International (RCI) is the largest actor on the Swedish market and is now changing its target market strategy. The company is transitioning its focus from the old traditional more affluent clientele, to target a wider span of customers where the people between 30 and 50 years of age are in focus and have become the main target group. Therefore activities aboard are added to suit these customers specifically.</p><p>What the authors of this thesis want to find out by using both interviews and questionnaires is whether the general opinion about cruising is coherent with the message that Royal Caribbean International is trying to convey. The authors also want to know if the targeting efforts are optimal when trying to alter people’s mindset and attract a new type of younger customers.</p><p>According to the performed survey, the brand awareness of RCI was best within the main target group. The most efficient media vehicle in communicating RCI’s brand has been brochures followed by newspapers and word of mouth. Somewhat surprisingly neither TV nor Internet was among top three of the most awareness creating media vehicles.</p><p>Through these media vehicles RCI tries to convey that younger people are now more in focus. However, people older than 50 are the most positive towards going on a cruise themselves. At the same time the whole population seem to think that cruising is best suited for people older than 50. No matter how old the respondents to the questionnaire were they believed that cruising was better suited for people older than themselves.</p><p>The population is getting older and the proportion of people over 50 years will increase dramatically compared to younger people within the next decades. Still RCI is focusing on adding activities and market themselves towards a younger group. Family behavior is changing and people tend to start a family later. RCI is therefore targeting families to a greater extent in order to attract the young but at the same time retain the older and proportionally growing customers groups.</p><p>Cruise prices have decreased and RCI is now more than ever not only targeting more affluent people. It is supposed to be afforded by a wide span. Even so, people tend to think that cruising is better suited for high-income takers. At the same time it is widely associated with luxury, not affordability.</p><p>Associations to cruising are overall positive but they are not necessarily exactly the ones that RCI is trying to communicate the most. Some perceptions are in line with the message RCI are trying to convey while others are based on the established prejudices that surrounds the cruise line industry and that are hard to erase. Even though people typically see cruising as something positive, they are still according to this study not to any great extent considering going on a cruise.</p>

Thesis--School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., 1993-94. / Title from title screen (viewed Nov. 5, 2003). "October 1995." Includes bibliographical references.

This study was conceptualized from my own experience working on board cruise ships and from the lack of studies of relationships on board cruise ships. This thesis examines the question: how does globalization in the form of accelerated capitalism and inter- connectedness through the sharing of food and drink across national identities that takes place in the space of cruise ships affect intimate relationships of cruise employees? Through the examinations of narratives of nine ex-crewmembers, developed through qualitative interviews, by using both the phenomenological and narrative methodology a couple of prominent themes appeared. The interviewees described working on a cruise ship as “intense” and the passage of time appears faster on board ship. It appears throughout the narratives, the nature of accelerated capitalism in the cruise ship industry affects the way the majority conduct their relationships.

Driving can provide independent and efficient mobility. However, according to the driving license directive (91/439/EEC) are persons with locomotor impairments are only allowed drive if their disabilities can be compensated. Compensation can be realised by vehicle adaptations. The directive provides meagre guidance on how vehicles should be adapted or how to verify that the compensatory requirements are fulfilled. This is a gap in the current process for licensing drivers with physical disabilities. Furthermore, the Swedish process from driver assessment to driver licensing and adaptation approval is complex, fragmented, and suffer from lack of communication between involved authorities. The objective of this thesis was to contribute to the development of a method to evaluate vehicle adaptations for driver with physical disabilities. The focus was on the evaluation of adaptations for steering, accelerating and braking. Three driving simulator experiments and one manoeuvre test with adapted vehicles were conducted. A group of drivers with tetraplegia driving with hand controls were compared to able-bodied drivers in the first experiment. Even if the drivers with tetraplegia had a longer brake reaction time they performed comparable to the able-bodied drivers. However, they spent more effort and were more tired in order to perform as well as the able-bodied drivers. It was concluded that the adaptation was not sufficient. An Adaptive Cruise Controller (ACC) was tested in the second experiment in order to find out if it could alleviate the load on drivers using hand controls. It was found that the ACC decreased the workload on the drivers. However, ACC systems need to be adjustable and better integrated. The results from the first two experiments were used to provide some guidelines for ACCsystems to be used by drivers with disabilities. The third experiment was preceded by a manoeuvre test with joystick controlled cars. The test revealed some problems, which were attributed to time lags, control interference, and lack of feedback. Four joystick designs were tested with a group of drivers with tetraplegia in the third experiment. It was concluded that time lags should be made similar to what is found in standard cars. Lateral and longitudinal control should be separated. Active feedback can improve vehicle control but should be individually adjusted. The experiments revealed that drivers with the same diagnose can be functionally very diverse. Thus, an adaptation evaluation should be made individually. Furthermore, the evaluation should include a manoeuvre test. Finally, it was concluded that the evaluation approach applied in the experiments was relevant but needs to be further developed.

This thesis considers the cooperation and coordination of multi vehicle systems cohesively in order to keep the formation geometry and provide the string stability. We first present the modeling of aerial and road vehicles representing different motion characteristics suitable for cooperative operations. Then, a set of three dimensional cohesive motion coordination and formation control schemes for teams of autonomous vehicles is proposed. The two main components of these schemes are i) platform free high level online trajectory generation algorithms and ii) individual trajectory tracking controllers. High level algorithms generate the desired trajectories for three dimensional leader-follower structured tight formations, and then distributed controllers provide the individual control of each agent for tracking the desired trajectories. The generic goal of the control scheme is to move the agents while maintaining the formation geometry. We propose a distributed control scheme to solve this problem utilizing the notions of graph rigidity and persistence as well as techniques of virtual target tracking and smooth switching. The distributed control scheme is developed by modeling the agent kinematics as a single-velocity integrator; nevertheless, extension to the cases with simplified kinematic and dynamic models of fixed-wing autonomous aerial vehicles and quadrotors is discussed. The cohesive cooperation in three dimensions is so beneficial for surveillance and reconnaissance activities with optimal geometries, operation security in military activities, more viable with autonomous flying, and future aeronautics aspects, such as fractionated spacecraft and tethered formation flying. We then focus on motion control task modeling for three dimensional agent kinematics and considering parametric uncertainties originated from inertial measurement noise. We design an adaptive controller to perform the three dimensional motion control task, paying attention to the parametric uncertainties, and employing a recently developed immersion and invariance based scheme. Next, the cooperative driving of road vehicles in a platoon and string stability concepts in one-dimensional traffic are discussed. Collaborative driving of commercial vehicles has significant advantages while platooning on highways, including increased road-capacity and reduced traffic congestion in daily traffic. Several companies in the automotive sector have started implementing driver assistance systems and adaptive cruise control (ACC) support, which enables implementation of high level cooperative algorithms with additional softwares and simple electronic modifications. In this context, the cooperative adaptive cruise control approach are discussed for specific urban and highway platooning missions. In addition, we provide details of vehicle parameters, mathematical models of control structures, and experimental tests for the validation of our models. Moreover, the impact of vehicle to vehicle communication in the existence of static road-side units are given. Finally, we propose a set of stability guaranteed controllers for highway platooning missions. Formal problem definition of highway platooning considering constant and velocity dependent spacing strategies, and formal string stability analysis are included. Additionally, we provide the design of novel intervehicle distance based priority coefficient of feed-forward filter for robust platooning. In conclusion, the importance of increasing level of autonomy of single agents and platoon topology is discussed in performing cohesive coordination and collaborative driving missions and in mitigating sensory errors. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the performance of our cohesive motion and string stable controllers, in addition we discuss application in formation control of autonomous multi-agent systems.

This study was conceptualized from my own experience working on board cruise ships and from the lack of studies of relationships on board cruise ships. This thesis examines the question: how does globalization in the form of accelerated capitalism and inter- connectedness through the sharing of food and drink across national identities that takes place in the space of cruise ships affect intimate relationships of cruise employees? Through the examinations of narratives of nine ex-crewmembers, developed through qualitative interviews, by using both the phenomenological and narrative methodology a couple of prominent themes appeared. The interviewees described working on a cruise ship as “intense” and the passage of time appears faster on board ship. It appears throughout the narratives, the nature of accelerated capitalism in the cruise ship industry affects the way the majority conduct their relationships.