Abstract

Rear-end collisions are one of the most common types of accidents on roads. Global Satellite Navigation Systems (GNSS) have recently become sufficiently flexible and cost-effective in order to have great potential for use in rear-end collision avoidance systems (CAS). Nevertheless, there are two main issues associated with current vehicle rear-end CAS: "mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"""mml:mo stretchy="false""("/mml:mo""mml:mn fontstyle="italic""1"/mml:mn""mml:mo stretchy="false"")"/mml:mo""/mml:math" achieving relative vehicle positioning and dynamic parameters with sufficiently high accuracy and "mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M2"""mml:mo stretchy="false""("/mml:mo""mml:mn fontstyle="italic""2"/mml:mn""mml:mo stretchy="false"")"/mml:mo""/mml:math" a reliable method to extract the car-following status from such information. This paper introduces a novel integrated algorithm for rear-end collision detection. Access to high accuracy positioning is enabled by GNSS, electronic compass, and lane information fusion with Cubature Kalman Filter (CKF). The judgment of the car-following status is based on the application of the Adaptive Neurofuzzy Inference System (ANFIS). The field test results show that the designed algorithm could effectively detect rear-end collisions with an accuracy of 99.61% and a false alarm rate of 5.26% in the 10 Hz output rate. Document type: Article

Abstract

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13437-018-0143-6 This contribution investigates the economic benefits of using weather ship routing on Short Sea Shipping (SSS) activities. The investigation is supported with the development of a ship routing system based on pathfinding algorithm, the parametrization of the wave effect on navigation, and the use of high-resolution meteo-oceanographic predictions. The optimal ship routing analysis is investigated in a European SSS system: the link between Spanish and Italian ports. The results show the economic benefits using ship routing in SSS during energetic wave episodes. The rate of cost savings may reach 18% of the total costs under particular bad weather conditions in the navigation area. The work establishes the basis of further developments in optimal route applied in relatively short distances and its systematic use in the SSS maritime industry. Peer Reviewed Document type: Article

Abstract

The impact of Automated Vehicles (AVs) on urban geography has been widely speculated, though there is little quantitative evidence in the literature to establish the magnitude of such effects. To quantify the impact of the greater precision of automated driving on the spatial efficiency of off-street parking facilities, we develop a mixed integer nonlinear model (solved via a branch-and-cut approach) and present comparisons against industry-standard requirements for human-driving operation. We demonstrate that gains on the order of 40–50% in spatial efficiency (parking spaces per unit area) are in principle achievable while ensuring that each parked vehicle is independently accessible. We further show that the large majority of these efficiency gains can be obtained under current automotive engineering practice in which only the front two wheels pivot. There is a need for standardized methods that take the parking supply of a city as an input and calculate both the aggregate (citywide) efficiency impacts of automated driving and the spatial distribution of the effects. This study is intended as an initial step towards this objective. Document type: Article

Abstract

Consequences of submarine landslides include both their direct impact on offshore infrastructure, such as subsea electric cables and gas/oil pipelines, and their indirect impact via the generated tsunami. The simulation of submarine landslides and their consequences has been a long-standing challenge majorly due to the strong coupling among sliding sediments, seawater and infrastructure as well as the induced extreme material deformation during the complete process. In this paper, we propose a unified finite element formulation for solid and fluid dynamics based on a generalised Hellinger–Reissner variational principle so that the coupling of fluid and solid can be achieved naturally in a monolithic fashion. In order to tackle extreme deformation problems, the resulting formulation is implemented within the framework of the particle finite element method. The correctness and robustness of the proposed unified formulation for single-phase problems (e.g. fluid dynamics problems involving Newtonian/Non-Newtonian flows and solid dynamics problems) as well as for multi-phase problems (e.g. two-phase flows) are verified against benchmarks. Comparisons are carried out against numerical and analytical solutions or experimental data that are available in the literature. Last but not least, the possibility of the proposed approach for modelling submarine landslides and their consequences is demonstrated via a numerical experiment of an underwater slope stability problem. It is shown that the failure and post-failure processes of the underwater slope can be predicted in a single simulation with its direct threat to a nearby pipeline and indirect threat by generating tsunami being estimated as well. The authors wish to acknowledge the support of European Commission H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions individual fellowship (Reference 744281; Proposal title “Towards Submarine Landslides and Their Consequences”). Peer Reviewed Document type: Article