It is my great pleasure to present the 48th issue of the Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin. This issue features recent findings from the fields of marine engineering, sea navigation as well as waterborne and land transportation.
The Marine Technology and Innovation studies address fire safety, modelling the work of marine systems such as steam boilers and dynamic positioning systems, the use of liquid fuels and selected methods for constructing an ontology for automatic communication at sea.
The Navigation and Marine Transport section contains articles focussed on the use of integrated marine navigation systems, optimising sea routes, analysing vessel domains and stochastic simulations for the course of search and rescue missions at sea.
The Transportation Engineering section contains studies examining inland waterway shipping, road infrastructure in the European Union as well as optimising parameters of port areas. The article discussing a theoretical framework for controlled pyrotechnical reactions as an energy source constituting a component for transportation from the sea bed deserves particular attention.
I am also very pleased to announce that that our quarterly has been indexed by Global Impact Factor (GIF), an international database of scientific journals. The quality of the Scientific Journals of the Maritime University of Szczecin has been assessed using an in-depth analysis method to provide a Global Impact and Quality Factor. The journal’s scores for the last for years are as follows: 2012 – 0.415; 2013 – 0.528; 2014 – 0.780; 2015 – 0.854. This clearly reflects the increasing quality and standard of the work published by the journal, indeed our scores have increased by 61.7% over the last 2 years.
I strongly invite authors to submit their articles and encourage readers to provide feedback. Access to the online version of this issue and previous issues is available at http://scientific-journals. eu/.
Leszek Chybowski, DSc PhD CRP
Editor-in-Chief
Szczecin, 25.12.2016