Vocational education is an important part of the overall education system. The development of higher vocational education is one of the guiding principles of education in China. The development of teachers is an important support for the development of vocational education. Teachers who can teach theoretically and guide students in practical work are known as “double-qualified” teachers. Building a highly qualified and professional double-qualified teaching team is the fundamental task in modernizing vocational education. Firstly, this paper discusses the importance of “double-qualified” teachers by describing the relevant policies of the Ministry of Education in China. Secondly, it reviews the research works of early scholars. Thirdly, it analyzes the main problems of teacher training in higher education institutions. Fourthly, it proposes five suggestions for the development of a “double-qualified” teaching team in higher education institutions. A high level and professional teaching team is an important support for the high-quality development of vocational institutions. School leaders must attach great importance to the construction of a “double-qualified” teaching team and increase the support in terms of policies, institutional protection, and financial investment.

This study investigates a critical hazard identification method for railway accident prevention. A new accident causation network is proposed to model the interaction between hazards and accidents. To realize consistency between the most likely and shortest causation paths in terms of hazards to accidents, a method for measuring the length between adjacent nodes is proposed, and the most-likely causation path problem is first transformed to the shortest causation path problem. To identify critical hazard factors that should be alleviated for accident prevention, a novel critical hazard identification model is proposed based on a controllability analysis of hazards. Five critical hazard identification methods are proposed to select critical hazard nodes in an accident causality network. A comparison of results shows that the combination of an integer programming-based critical hazard identification method and the proposed weighted direction accident causality network considering length has the best performance in terms of accident prevention.

Skills competition is an important part of the vocational education system and a booster of teaching quality in vocational colleges. This study explores the role of skills competition in advancing the comprehensive ability of students in vocational colleges from specific cases. Firstly, this paper elaborates on relevant educational policy issue papers. Secondly, the studies of relevant scholars are discussed. Thirdly, the students’ work in the Capital Challenge Cup Skills Competition is presented. Fourthly, the preparation process of the competition is used as a case study to explore the improvement of students’ abilities in four dimensions. Finally, the main conclusions are summarized. The skills competition is of great significance for vocational institutions to improve teaching quality and talent training mode. Vocational institutions should invest more financial resources and create more policies to support the development of skills competitions.

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The driver scheduling problem at Chinese electric multiple-unit train depots becomes more and more difficult in practice and is studied in very little research. This paper focuses on defining, modeling, and solving the depot driver scheduling problem which can determine driver size and driver schedule simultaneously. To solve this problem, we first construct a time-space network based on which we formulate the problem as a minimum-cost multi-commodity network flow problem. We then develop a Lagrangian relaxation heuristic to solve this network flow problem, where the upper bound heuristic is a two-phase method consisting of a greedy heuristic and a local search method. We conduct a computational study to test the effectiveness of our Lagrangian relaxation heuristic. The computational results also report the significance of the ratio of driver size to task size in the depot.