Scipedia: Documents published in 2013

Time-Ants: An innovative temporal and spatial ant-based vehicular Routing Mechanism

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 02:01:35 +0100

eer-reviewed Increasing amounts of time is wasted due to traffic congestion in both developed and developing countries. This has severe negative effects, including drivers stress due to increased time pressure, reduced usage efficiency of trucks and other commercial vehicles, and increased gas emissions--responsible for climate change and air pollution affecting population health in densely populated areas. As existing centralized approaches were neither efficient, nor scalable, there is a need for alternative approaches. Social insects provide many solutions for dealing with decentralized problems. For instance ants choose their routes based on pheromones left by previous ants. However, Ant Colony Optimization is not directly applicable to vehicle routing, as routing the vehicles to the same road would cause traffic congestion. Yet, the traffic is broadly similar from work- to work-day. This paper introduces an ant-colony optimization-based algorithm called Time-Ants. Time-Ants considers that an amount of “pheromone” or a traffic rating is assigned to each road at any given time in the day. Using an innovative algorithm the vehicle’s routes are chosen based on these traffic ratings, aggregated in time. After several iterations this results in a global optimum for the traffic system. Bottlenecks are identified and avoided by machine learning. Time-Ants outperforms another leading algorithm by up to 19% in terms of percentage of vehicles to reach the destination within a given time-frame.

Climate Change and its impact on the aviation system

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:54:21 +0100

This presentation first offers a conceptual definition as well as differentiation of the conditions robustness, resilience and vulnerability within the air traffic management (ATM) framework in order to estimate the impact of disruptions. In a second step focus is laid on extreme weather events such as heavy winds, freezing conditions, heat waves or fog with greatest relevance to the aviation system. Based on causal diagrams their impact on the system´s performance and in consequence the operational reaction patterns are elaborated. Findings lead to a roadmap addressing issues such as approaches on how to increase the resilience and robustness of airports, intermodal aspects (especially the use of high speed trains as alternatives to air transport in case of disruptions) and the assistance of travelers in terms of rearranging their journeys.

Development of a sustainable road transport system

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:53:45 +0100

Significant progress has been made recently in reducing the negative impact of vehicles on the environment. The said progress mainly involves the reduction of exhaust emissions through the advancement of powertrains, the use of alternative fuels, preservation of natural resources and waste minimisation through recycling of end-of-life vehicles as well as reduction of noise emission. The greatest progress, however, can be achieved by the appropriate design of transport systems, particularly since most of the vehicles in use are fitted with conventional drive systems. Significant change in the level of environment pollution from automotive sources can be made through the application of traffic organisation solutions such as the design of road infrastructure hubs or traffic flow management in urban areas. In contrast to many other measures, the optimisation of traffic flow organisation has a huge advantage because it does not affect exclusively the selected but all vehicles involved in the traffic flow. This paper describes steps and basic guidelines related to the creation of a sustainable transport systems model. The model may be used to design environmentally-friendly transport systems that reduce negative environmental impact from vehicles and guarantee the efficient use of the road transport network.

A Research of Network Congestion Pricing Mechanism in TCP Connection Based on Utility Model

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:51:35 +0100

Network externality is a vital characteristic of the products in economics of networks. Network congestion will lead to negative network externality when digital products are communicated in the net. It will effectively decrease the negative network externality via developing a suitable pricing mechanism. This paper begins with the utility of a single user and that of the whole network to build a network congestion utility model to analyze it. As TCP connection has an autonomous congestion-detecting mechanism which can increase the utilization of network resources, we regard the TCP connection pricing as the basis of our research.

Instrumentation for safe vehicular flow in intelligent traffic control systems using wireless networks

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:38:08 +0100

This paper describes a ZigBee based wireless system to assists traffic flow on arterial urban roads. Real-time simulation in laboratory environment is conducted to determine the traffic throughput to avoid possible congestions or ease existing congestions. Random numbers are generated to mimic approaching traffic, and this information is shared by a ZigBeebased real-time wirelessly network. Wireless nodes are connected to different PLCs representing different traffic lights in a cluster. Once the information is shared the timing and sequencing decisions are taken collectively in a synchronized manner. In this paper, the information is displayed on SCADA connected to each PLC for viewing the characteristics of continuous vehicular flow. It is found that the topology of the network can play an important role in the throughput of data, which may be critical in safety critical operations such as the control of traffic lights. This paper aims to highlight some of the possible effects of dataflow flow and time-delays faced by modern intelligent control of traffic lights.

Voronoi-based placement of road-side units to improve dynamic resource management in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:36:44 +0100

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) illustrate mobile P2P networks, which hold significant promise in improving traffic safety and alleviating traffic congestion. Reliable VANETbased services require dynamic resource management due to limited and often fluctuating network connectivity of VANETs that stem from the wireless and mobile nature of vehicleto-vehicle (V2V) communications. To address these needs, a collaboration with Road-Side Units (RSU) have been proposed to complement V2V communication by providing event and data brokering capability in the form of Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. Deploying RSUs involves upfront investment and maintenance costs, and hence solutions are needed that maximize the benefit of RSUs by placing them effectively in accordance to existing and projected traffic density, and the types of services planned for VANETs. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Voronoi diagram-based algorithm for the effective placement of RSUs using packet delay and loss as a criteria. This approach has two-fold advantages: a significant reduction in the number of RSUs required to cover a geographic region, and increase in the logical coverage area of each RSU irrespective of the dynamic vehicular traffic conditions thereby improving reliability of communications. This algorithm has been evaluated in the context of a road network and traffic conditions for an urban area. When compared with other baseline placement algorithms, communication reliability stemming from our Voronoi diagram-based placement algorithm results in less packet delay and lesser packet loss both of which are important to realize the different VANET-based services.

The Effectiveness of using Variable Speed Limit on the Performance of an Interrupted Flow

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:10:32 +0100

The urban traffic congestion is getting worse with ever increasing urban population and vehicle ownership. The long queues at intersections and blockage of traffic on urban arterial roads become routine during the peak hours. Interrupted traffic flow through signalised intersections and arterial roads have badly been affected by these occurrences. Thus this paper examines the possibility of employing variable speed limit (VSL) for upstream traffic during the peak period to improve the traffic performance through signalised intersections as well as in urban arterials. The micro simulation software VISSIM was used to examine a hypothetical road network under VSL application. An expected traffic flow near capacity condition was simulated several times to see the effectiveness. Results show that for a reasonable period of time, the VSL application to the upstream traffic improve the traffic performance at immediate downstream intersections in terms of vehicle delay (16%), average queue length (18%) and average number of stops per vehicles (16%), while intersections located far from the VSL application has no or little effect. Similarly, the arterial performances have also been improved for a short period of time on the immediate downstream link in terms of density (13%), space mean speed (10%) and traffic flow (2%), the effective is negligible on the links located far. In addition a slight improvement was noticed to the total journey time on the immediate link

When the cure is worse than the disease: The impact of graceful IGP operations on BGP

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:05:40 +0100

Network upgrades, performance optimizations and traffic engineering activities often force network operators to adapt their IGP configuration. Recently, several techniques have been proposed to change an IGP configuration (e.g., link weights) in a disruption-free manner. Unfortunately, none of these techniques considers the impact of IGP changes on BGP correctness. In this paper, we show that known reconfiguration techniques can trigger various kinds of BGP anomalies. First, we illustrate the relevance of the problem by performing simulations on a Tier-1 network. Our simulations highlight that even a few link weight changes can produce long-lasting BGP anomalies affecting a significant part of the BGP routing table. Then, we study the problem of finding a reconfiguration ordering which maintains both IGP and BGP correctness. Unfortunately, we show examples in which such an ordering does not exist. Furthermore, we prove that deciding if such an ordering exists is NP-hard. Finally, we provide sufficient conditions and configuration guidelines that enable graceful operations for both IGP and BGP.

The Design and Implementation of Traffic Accident Identification System Based On Video

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:36:33 +0100

In recent years, with the rapid development of economic and social progress, the road has been accessible everywhere, the number of cars is increasing, and then traffic problems are increasing, traffic congestion and traffic accidents occur frequently. According to statistical data, the number of national road traffic accidents involving casualties is 210812 in 2011 one year. It’s a current problem to be solved focused by our country and oversea that is how to establish an effective intelligent transportation system (intelligent transportation system, ITS) which can achieve real-time traffic scene monitoring, scheduling and control. In Abstract: With the rapid growth of the count of vehicles, congestion and traffic accidents frequently occur. The situation triggers a series of social problems. The application research on computer vision and digital image processing system is presented in this paper provides a real-time method which identify traffic accident and manage the traffic accident more convenient, accurate and efficient .The system also offer the technologies to analysis the traffic accident management information, traffic accident rescue and responsibility determination.

Experiences with coastal and maritime UAS BLOS operation with phased-array antenna digital payload data link

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:35:44 +0100

This paper describes recent experiences with operating an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in a coastal and maritime environment beyond line of sight (BLOS) in controlled airspace (class D) where separation from other air traffic is provided by the Air Traffic Control (ATC). The UAV operation followed normal ATC procedures with two-way VHF communication between the UAS Operator and ATC in order to provide separation vertically and horizontally by operation within pre-defined areas according to specific operational procedures made by ATC. Tests were conducted using direct 2.4 GHz radio and GPRS mobile network control links at a distance up to 20 km from the ground control station when operating at 1500 ft altitude. A new low-weight and small size experimental phased-array antenna providing a digital high capacity payload data link was tested and found to give stable real-time HD video at a distance of 50 km under line of sight conditions at 2500 ft altitude.

An ITS architecture specification - The FOTsis project experience

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:35:08 +0100

The recent continuous development of Cooperative ITS has resulted in several initiatives which focus on different parts of the Cooperative environment landscape. The FOTsis project focuses on the infrastructure side of the Cooperative environment and will deploy and test 7 services designed to maximise the benefits of the integration of the road operator and infrastructure-based information providers into the ITS environment. This integration can take place in any of the stages of data collection, processing and actuations of the services, but also support and trigger external tasks such as operations of the emergency response entities, etc. This paper describes the current status of the project and focuses on the specification of the supporting architecture to the services tested: references, a brief outline of the requirements’ definition, and the FOTsis architecture proposal, with some conclusions about the architecture tests conducted. The outlook on the project’s next steps is given in the last section of the paper.

Document type: Article

Series-parallel combined constant pressure water supply pipeline design of high-rise building

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:33:59 +0100

The existing parallel type pressurized water supply pipeline of high-rise buildings has been improved to build energy-saving high-rise building water supply systems. Series-parallel combined constant pressure water supply pipeline is designed. Antipollution high water tank is reasonably installed above the middle area of the building to supply water for the middle area high water tank and supply pressurized water by water pumps for high-rise district. And PLC control system is designed to control the work efficiency of the water pumps according to the sensor feedback information. Verified by calculation and simulation, series-parallel combined constant pressure water supply pipeline is better than parallel water supply pipes in saving the energy which is about the middle-Hybrid phase consumption of the latter. PLC control is simulated and the results show that PLC can effectively control the water supply system to ensure stable water pressure so as to save energy. Keywordshigh-rise building; water supply pipelines; series-parallel combined; PLC

A dynamic behaviour analysis on the frequency control capability of electric vehicles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:23:20 +0100

The paper presents results of a study on the dynamic response of Electric Vehicle’s (EV) when participating in frequency control of an islanded system. The following cases were considered: when there is no EV performing frequency control, when the EV participates in primary frequency control and when the EV participates in both primary and secondary frequency control. Different parameters are tested in various combinations, and their influence on frequency deviation as well as power and energy provided by the EV with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capability is shown."br/""br

Simulations on Consumer Tests: A Perspective for Driver Assistance Systems

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:18:14 +0100

This article discusses new challenges for series development regarding the vehicle safety that arise from the recently published AEB test protocol by the consumer-test-organisation EuroNCAP for driver assistance systems [6]. The tests from the test protocol are of great significance for an OEM that sells millions of cars each year, due to the fact that a positive rating of the vehicle-under-test (VUT) in safety relevant aspects is important for the reputation of a car manufacturer. The further intensification and aggravation of the test requirements for those systems is one of the challenges, that has to be mastered in order to continuously make significant contributions to safety for high-volume cars. Therefore, it is to be shown how a simulation approach may support the development process, especially with tolerance analysis. This article discusses the current stage of work, steps that are planned for the future and results that can be expected at the end of such an analysis.

Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure, Proceedings of International Workshop on Engineering Simulations for Cyber-Physical Systems (ES4CPS '14)

Challenges in Achieving Trajectory-Based Operations

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:07:51 +0100

In the past few years much of the global ATM research community has proposed advanced systems based on Trajectory-Based Operations (TBO). The concept of TBO uses four-dimensional aircraft trajectories as the base information for managing safety and capacity. Both the US and European advanced ATM programs call for the sharing of trajectory data across different decision support tools for successful operations. However, the actual integration of TBO systems presents many challenges. Trajectory predictors are built to meet the specific needs of a particular system and are not always compatible with others. Two case studies are presented which examine the challenges of introducing a new concept into two legacy systems in regards to their trajectory prediction software. The first case describes the issues with integrating a new decision support tool with a legacy operational system which overlap in domain space. These tools perform similar functions but are driven by different requirements. The difference in the resulting trajectories can lead to conflicting advisories. The second case looks at integrating this same new tool with a legacy system originally developed as an integrated system, but diverged many years ago. Both cases illustrate how the lack of common architecture concepts for the trajectory predictors added cost and complexity to the integration efforts.

Fiber Optic Sensing for Innovative Oil and Gas Production and Transport Systems

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:50:36 +0100

Fiber optic sensing presents unique features that have no match in conventional sensing techniques. The ability to measure temperatures and strain at thousands of points along a single fiber is particularly interesting for the monitoring of elongated structures such as pipelines, flow lines, oil wells and coiled tubing. Distributed sensing systems based on Brillouin and Raman scattering are used for example to detect pipeline leakages, verify pipeline operational parameters, prevent failure of pipelines installed in landslide areas, optimize oil production from wells and detect hot-spots in high-power cables. Point sensors based on Interferometric and FBG setups are also effective tools to assess the static and dynamic response of structures such as offshore platforms and risers.This contribution presents different applications of distributed and point sensors to innovative oil and gas structures such as composite coiled tubing, high-pressure composite gas pipeline and deepwater risers.

Sensor fault diagnosis of inland navigation system using physical model and pattern recognition approach

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:48:05 +0100

Trabajo presentado al 19th IFAC World Congress celebrado del 24 al 29 de agosto de 2014 en Cape Town (Sudafrica).

In recent years, inland navigation networks benefit from the innovation of the instrumentation and SCADA systems. These data acquisition and control systems lead to a reactive asset-management of inland navigation networks. However, sensors and actuators are subject to faults due to the strong effects of the environment, aging, etc. In this paper, a sensor Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) approach is proposed using an Integrator-Delay-Zero (IDZ) model, interval observers and the dynamic classification algorithm AUDyC. The combined use of these approaches allows the improvement of the sensor fault diagnosis. The proposed approach is introduced through the case study of the Cuinchy-Fontinettes reach in the north of France.

This work is a contribution to the GEPET’Eau project which is granted by the French ministery MEDDE - GICC, the French institution ORNERC and the DGITM

Peer Reviewed

On the way to a multi-modal energy-efficient route

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:47:49 +0100

International audience; Within this paper, we present a flexible and expandable routing framework capable of finding multi-modal and inter-modal energy-efficient routes incorporating, among others, transportation modes such as public transport, electric vehicles, car-sharing, bike-sharing and walking. In contrast to conventional trip planning services, the proposed framework can evaluate routes not only with respect to travel distance or travel time but also with respect to energy used. In addition, range limitation by electric vehicles is incorporated into the routing request such that range-safety can be provided.

On path planning methods for automotive collision avoidance

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:46:21 +0100

There is a strong trend for increasingly sophisticated Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) systems, Lane Keeping Aid (LKA) systems, and indeed autonomous driving. This trend generates a need for online maneuver generation, for which numerous approaches can be found in the large body of work related to path planning and obstacle avoidance. In order to ease the challenge of choosing a method, this paper reports quantitative and qualitative insights about three different path planning methods: a state lattice planner, predictive constraint-based planning, and spline-based search tree. Each method is described, implemented and compared on two specific traffic situations. The paper will not provide a final answer about which method is best. This depends on several factors such as computational constraints and the formulation of maneuver optimality that is appropriate for a given assistance or safety function. Instead, the conclusions will highlight qualitative merits and drawbacks for each method, in order to provide guidance for choosing a method for a specific application.

TIMBER: Time borrowing and error relaying for online timing error resilience

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:45:48 +0100

Increasing dynamic variability with technology scaling has made it essential to incorporate large design-time timing margins to ensure yield and reliable operation. Online techniques for timing error resilience help recover timing margins, improving performance and/or power consumption. This paper presents TIMBER, a technique for online timing error resilience that masks timing errors by borrowing time from successive pipeline stages. TIMBER-based error masking can recover timing margins without instruction replay or roll-back support. Two sequential circuit elements --- TIMBER flip-flop and TIMBER latch --- that implement error masking based on time-borrowing are described. Both circuit elements are validated using corner-case circuit simulations, and the overhead and trade-offs of TIMBER-based error masking are evaluated on an industrial processor.

Smart and Green ACC series: A city and highway specific approach towards a safe and efficient eDAS

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:33:57 +0100

The successful transition of fully electric vehicle into automotive market is plagued with expensive product prices and limited drive range. While manufacturers point to fuel saving benefits, the actual cost savings after the first battery replacement presents negative economics. Hence it is necessary to maximise the fuel saving costs and to prolong the battery life as much as possible. The situation calls for an assistant system which takes into consideration the inherent propulsion system dynamics of electric vehicle in two typical situations – namely city and highway. Here we propose a combination of two systems, first a dynamic programming based acceleration controller for city cycle and second, an eHorizon based ACC system for maximum recuperation on highways. This paper is an extension of papers [1,2] and forms a series which is attributed to the development of a partial or complete “Safe and energy efficient longitudinal vehicle controller”. Such a controller is named “SAGA” - Smart and Green Automated Cruise Control. It is an ecological driver assistance system (eDAS) that adapts the vehicle speed over all its speed range according to a forward vehicle and to road events in a near horizon (legal speed, curves, etc…) with an aim to reduce the energy consumption without compromising on safety.

Document type: Article

Extending the stixel world with online self-supervised color modeling for road-versus-obstacle segmentation

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:32:41 +0100

This work concentrates on vision processing for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and intelligent vehicle applications. The authors propose a color extension to the disparity-based Stixel World method, so that the road can be robustly distinguished from obstacles with respect to erroneous disparity measurements. The authors extension learns color appearance models for road and obstacle classes in an online and self-supervised fashion. The algorithm is tightly integrated within the core of the optimization process of the original Stixel World, allowing for strong fusion of the disparity and color signals. The authors perform an extensive evaluation, including different self-supervised learning strategies and different color models. The authors newly recorded, publicly available data set is intentionally focused on challenging traffic scenes with many low-texture regions, causing numerous disparity artifacts. In this evaluation, the authors increase the F-score of the drivable distance from 0.86 to 0.97, compared to a tuned version of the state-of-the-art baseline method. This clearly shows that the authors color extension increases the robustness of the Stixel World, by reducing the number of falsely detected obstacles while not deteriorating the detection of true obstacles.

The relationship between urban accidents, traffic and geometric design in Tehran

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:16:23 +0100

Considerable research has been carried out in recent years about crash modelling and to establish relationships between crash occurrences in different types of urban and rural roads and traffic flow parameters, geometric infrastructure characteristics, environmental factors and pavement qualifications. In this research crash-prediction models for 3 urban arterial highways in Tehran were set up on the basis of accident data observed during a 3-year monitoring period extending between 2006 and 2008. The candidate set of explanatory parameters were: traffic flow (pick hour volume), geometric infrastructure characteristics (section’s length, curvature, longitudinal slope, number of lanes) and pavement condition of surface wetness. Statistical analysis is done by SPSS on the basis of nonlinear regression modelling and during the analysis, principal components are identified to assist the principal component analysis method and more important variables recognized that could exhibit best description of crash occurrence. After studying variables for curves, it is shown that significant and efficient variables are section’s length (L), pick hour volume (PHV) and longitudinal slope (L.s), whereas for tangent they are section’s length (L), pick hour volume (PHV) and longitudinal slope (L.s) and curvature (1/R). Results indicate that the number of accidents increase with: L, PHV and L.s whereas they decrease with R. In addition, L.s is extremely effective in this research. The relation between speed variations with L.s and consequently traffic congestion, safety reduction and chance of accident occurrence are its efficiency causes. Furthermore, L.s affects driving site distance and driver behaviour such as passing other vehicles too. In addition, the effects of longitudinal surface friction and pavement are increased in plunge slope and they increase the chance of occurrence.

Geodetic Database for Aeronautical Purpose

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:12:21 +0100

Geodetic data and information is used for many applications: land cadastre, topography, civil engineering, scientifically, but lately aeronautical community start to used not only geodetic data (coordinates, height, magnetic variation, distance, bearing), but also information about them – metadata and evidence of integrity. Geodetic data and information in aero navigation is used for further calculation and design of movement for aircraft and safety areas in space, and on the ground. A specialized agency of the United Nations, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was created in 1944 to promote the safe and orderly development of international civil aviation throughout the world. It sets standards and regulations necessary for aviation safety, security, efficiency and regularity, as well as for aviation environmental protection. ICAO set down minimum geodetic data what is needed for aviation to design flight management in sky and on the ground. All data must satisfy quality requirements in accuracy, resolution and integrity. European Union (EU) adopted regulation No 73/2010 of 26 January 2010 laying down requirements on the quality of aeronautical data and aeronautical information for the single European sky. To support EU EUROCONTROL developed specifications to clarified metadata needed. Research focus on development a management system for full life cycle of the geodetic data, specially requirements to geodetic data base and evidence of integrity.

Continuous pose estimation for stereo vision based on UV disparity applied to visual odometry in urban environments

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:11:13 +0100

:This paper presents an autocalibration method to determine the pose of a stereo vision system based on knowing the geometry of the ground in front of the cameras. This pose changes considerably while the vehicle is driven, therefore it is good to know constantly the pose of the camera for several applications based on computer vision, such as advanced driver assistance systems, autonomous vehicles or robotics. These constant changes of the pose make interesting to be able to detect constantly the variations in its extrinsic parameters (height, pitch, roll). The validation of the autocalibration method is accomplished by a visual odometry implementation. A study of the improvement of the results of the visual odometry estimation taking into account the changes of the camera pose is presented, demonstrating the advantages of the autocalibration method. This work was also supported by Spanish Government through the CICYT projects FEDORA (Grant TRA2010-20255-C03-01) and Driver Distraction Detector System (Grant TRA2011-29454-C03-02).

Cooperative mobility systems: The human factor challenges

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:10:39 +0100

This paper presents a vision on cooperative mobility systems from a human factors perspective. To create a common ground for future developments, it’s important to define the common research themes and knowledge gaps. This article presents what steps need to be taken in order to come to proper ex-ante evaluations of cooperative systems. Since the actual effect of these systems on traffic flow, safety and air quality will not only depend on the technological potential of these systems but largely on the actual behavioural effects of using these systems, the Human Factor is crucial in the design and evaluation. This article can make researchers and designers aware of the potential as well as the behavioural pitfalls when designing cooperative systems. By working together with industry, government and knowledge partners, the Dutch Integrated Testsite for Cooperative Mobility and exchanging data and evaluations, cooperative mobility can be taken to the next level.

Application of Intelligent Traffic Control Based on PLC

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 23:08:17 +0100

we know, the transport system is a complex system of ambiguity, randomness and uncertainty . It is very difficult to establishthe mathematical model and sometimes it is impossible to use the existing mathematical methods to describe it. At the current inside the country the traffic lights at crossroads is generally controlled by the timing switch. At present domestic urban transport is commonly used in the timer traffic lights to control the passage of vehicles, with the occurrence of uncertainties and the ground conditions often changing. According to the difference of the vehicles stagnation flow and the traffic lights time lengths of holdup at any each intersection, to use the Siemens S7-200 programmable control system automatically adjusts traffic lights and vehicles circulation. The application of the system will greatly alleviate the traffic congestion, improve the efficiency of road, and make a contribution to energy conservation and emission reduction. In the future we will be living in the era with the smooth traffic flow, the good environment and social sustainable development. Keywords-stagnation flow; PLC; Intelligent control

Flight Rescheduling Problem Induced by Air Traffic Network Capacity Constraints Based on the Binary Decision Diagram Approach

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:53:21 +0100

The exponential growth in air traffic and unplanned events on the day of flight schedules such as adverse weather conditions led to initial flight disruptions. In this paper, we propose a decision support framework for flight rescheduling in air traffic management based on ground delay, changing the initial flight and flight canceling. This approach is based on using Time Petri Nets (TPN) to model air traffic networks. We introduce a Binary Decision Diagram based tool to represent the state space of a class of Time Petri Nets. This tool, called Time Reduced Ordered Binary Decision Diagram (T-ROBDD) is able to represent a large state space of a TPN with a small data structure and enable the efficient manipulation of this set. In what follows, we developed a technique to generate all the rescheduling flights plans taking into account the temporal and spatial constraints.

Traffic engineering of high-rate large-sized flows

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:51:21 +0100

High-rate large-sized (α) flows have adverse effects on delay-sensitive flows. Research-and-education network providers are interested in identifying such flows within their networks, and directing these flows to traffic-engineered QoS-controlled virtual circuits. To achieve this goal, a design is proposed for a hybrid network traffic engineering system (HNTES) that would run on an external server, gather NetFlow reports from routers, analyze these reports to identify α-flow source/destination address prefixes, configure firewall filter rules at ingress routers to extract future flows and redirect them to previously provisioned intra-domain virtual circuits. This paper presents an evaluation of this HNTES design using NetFlow reports collected over a 7-month period from four ESnet routers. Our analysis shows that had HNTES been deployed, it would have been highly effective, e.g., " 90% of α-bytes that arrived at the four routers over the 7-month period would have been redirected to virtual circuits. Design aspects such as whether to use /24 subnet IDs or /32 addresses in firewall filters, and which router interfaces' NetFlow reports to include in the HNTES analysis, are studied.

Sixth sense - air traffic control prediction scenario augmented by sensors

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:47:55 +0100

This paper is focused on the fault tolerance of Human Machine Interfaces in the field of air traffic control (ATC) by accepting the overall user's body language as input. We describe ongoing work in progress in the project called Sixth Sense. Interaction patterns are reasoned from the combination of a recommendation and inference engine, the analysis of several graph database relationships and from multiple sensor raw data aggregations. Altogether, these techniques allow us to judge about different possible meanings of the current user's interaction and cognitive state. The results obtained from applying different machine learning techniques will be used to make recommendations and predictions on the user's actions. They are currently monitored and rated by a human supervisor.

State of development and perspective of the electric vehicles

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:43:24 +0100

First EV has been made in in 1837. This type of motor vehicles has dominated throughout the whole 19th century. In the early 20th century the faster and more robust vehicles with ICE overcame them until late 20th century, when ecological and economic problems of further application of these vehicles have emerged. The interest in EV has risen sharply. Researches are working in several directions in order to reduce the need for oil derivatives considering that the EV's are weak primarily due to inferior "reservoir of energy" to fully meet the current driving habits. Savings can be achieved in two ways, by making more economic motor vehicles or by the use of alternative fuels. Combining an electric propulsion and IC engine drives a hybrid vehicle is obtained, with a greater amount of batteries and "plug in" that is to some extent possible to reduce fossil fuel consumption and exhaust emissions. Intensive research work on exploring new battery is still to come. Today promising results with Li - air batteries, fuel cells and super capacitors, as well as the efforts of major car manufacturers indicate that the EV could soon appear massive in the streets of cities. This paper deals with the development of EV, following the development of powertrain and can conclude the fact that in the near future this type of drive could return.

Multi sensor underwater pipeline tracking with AUVs

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:39:15 +0100

The exploitation of deep-water gas and oilfields is increasing. Pipelines transport the produced oil and gas onshore or transfer these between countries through the water. Underwater communication cables on the seafloor are the backbone of our intercontinental communication infrastructure. Sea cables transfer electrical energy from offshore production facilities or between countries and continents. This infrastructure of our economics and society can corrode or can get damaged. The status of these offshore pipelines and cables needs to be monitored regularly and damages need to be found and repaired quickly. This paper presents a method to guide an autonomous underwater vehicle with the information from different sensors including cameras, multibeam echo sounder (MBES), sub bottom profilers and magnetic sensors. Our online sensor fusion and tracking algorithms for underwater pipeline and cable inspection are based on probability maps which contain the location and the rating of each pipeline detection from every sensor. With these algorithms, we want to improve the regular pipeline inspection. The proposed system will be tested for its performance in simulation with different pipeline layout scenarios. Other applications for this map based fusion algorithm (beside pipeline and cable inspection) can be the mapping of toxic substances in the water column and the search of their sources.

Control agents for autonomous vehicles in urban and highways scenarios

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:38:48 +0100

International audience; In the last years, several intelligent systems have been deployed in mass-produced vehicles. The Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), intelligent infrastructures and au- tonomous driving maneuvers have signi cantly contributed to the implementation of intelligent systems both on the roads and in urban areas. Thanks to the research done by many groups and projects it is possible to nd safer and more comfortable vehicles. Some examples are: Antilock Brake System (ABS), Cruise control (CC), Automatic parking and Electronic Stability Control (ESC), among others. At this time, it is not a utopia to think that, in a close future, autonomous vehicle will coexist with other conventional vehicles, interacting with them. In this work, a control architecture for autonomous vehicles have been tested, both for individual and cooperative maneuvers in urban and highway scenarios. Using previous contributions in the lateral and longitudinal control, di erent experiments have proved the modular control architecture, independently of the vehicle and the scenario used. To carry the validation, di erent platforms have been used: electric and gasoline-propelled vehicles. Straight and curve segments, blocked roads, commucations between infrastructure and vehicles and high speed experiments have been tested. Furthermore, the intelligent control system, based on fuzzy logic, that includes human knowledge, is easy to design and tune, and can be extended to di erent maneuvers.

Energy Efficient Trajectory Designs for Minimizing Climate Impact of Aircraft on Various Timescales

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:35:32 +0100

Future air traffic management systems are developed to enhance safety and efficiency of air traffic operations while accommodating the demand. The impact of aircraft emissions and contrails on the environment adds an additional dimension to aircraft trajectory optimization. This paper describes an optimization module capable of minimizing the climate impact of aircraft emissions and contrails and analyzes the energy efficiency of the trajectory designs and their relationships with the environmental objective. The methodology is used to evaluate the energy efficiency of three designs that each minimizes the total climate impact of aircraft CO 2 emissions and contrails at the end of 25, 50, and 100 years, respectively. Alternatively these designs can be evaluated with respect to how a hypothetical tax on contrail production would influence a stakeholder’s willingness to redefine their respective “optimal” cruise trajectory. The baseline wind-optimal routes and the three designs of climate-optimal trajectories are applied to simulated traffic between 12 city-pairs in the United States. Contrail reduction using both route and altitude changes to aircraft trajectories are more energy efficient than contrail reduction using either route or altitude changes only. Initial results show that climate-optimal trajectories involving lateral changes, which minimize total climate impact at the end of 50 or 100 years, result in smaller amount of contrail formation but have larger temperature reduction per unit fuel burn than that of 25 years. Similar results are obtained for the climate-optimal designs for aircraft trajectories involving altitude changes. The contrail cost that can potentially redefine a stakeholder’s objective to these climate-optimal goals is about 3.7 $/nmi for aircraft trajectories involving altitude changes for a contrail radiative forcing of 30mW/m 2 under current scenario.

Measurement and RANS modelling of large-scale under-expanded CO[sub 2] releases for CCS applications

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:21:58 +0100

The deployment of a complete carbon-capture and storage chain requires a focus upon the hazards posed by the operation of CO2 pipelines, and the consequences of accidental release must be considered as an integral part of the design process. Presented are results from the application of a shock-capturing numerical scheme to the solution of the Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes fluid-flow equations, coupled with a compressibility-corrected turbulence model, and a novel equation of state for CO2. Comparisons are made with a series of as-yet unreported experimental observations of field-scale, high-pressure CO2 releases. The effects of corrections to the solenoidal turbulence energy dissipation are tested, with conclusions drawn, and recommendations made for future developments.

Research on Green Transportation and Transfer System in Urban Areas

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:08:42 +0100

The green transportation of urban is a need of the society, and it also reflects the advance of city. Moreover, it has played foreshadowing function for the development of tourism industry. Public transport and bicycle/electric bicycle transport are regarded as the main component parts of the green transportation of urban. The paper has studied the positive role of the traffic-tools such as bus and bicycle to development of tourism city. The result of this paper show that takes some counter measures in practice will be of momentous current significance and far-reaching historical significance.

Water flow meter measurement uncertainties

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:08:25 +0100

In water supply systems, managers need to get water from a source and supply an entire population. Knowledge regarding the flow of water is a critical parameter within these systems, thus the need for flow meters. When flow meters are placed near pipeline singularities, the velocity profile changes and can cause measurement errors. Due to these potential errors, measurement norms and standards are created to require flow meters to be placed in rectilinear-shaped pipelines for a more accurate measurement. However, managers claim that in field measurement situations, it is not always possible to meet these standards, and consequently, adjusting the error from the acquired data is necessary. Therefore, this study investigates how the error in the flow rate varies with the distance from singularities when using an ultrasonic flow meter, which, as a nonintrusive measurement method, is easily installed on the outside walls of the pipeline. This flow meter was installed at different distances from an elbow and the measurements obtained were compared to those from an electromagnetic flow meter, which accumulate accurate data when installed at standard conditions. Comparing the data from those two flow meters, it was possible to obtain the variation of error as a function of flow and distance from the singularity.

Evaluation of energy efficiency of electric vehicle with different actuator architectures

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 22:03:38 +0100

International audience; In this paper, a distribution vehicle, which can be equipped with many actuators as wheel electric motors and steering wheels and which is supported to follow a given trajectory, is chosen as an application for determining the optimal vehicle configuration and expected energy gains. The different vehicle configurations are formed by the amount and the position of these actuators, defining 16 different architectures. From the total efforts at the gravity center of the vehicle, the control allocation of the nonlinear system under nonlinear constraints is used to determine the torque of the actuated wheels and the angle of steered wheels. The same objective function is used for actuation allocation while different constraints assumed for describing each vehicle architecture. Energy losses in the tire-road contact zone, necessary power for steering system, kinetic energy of the vehicle during the maneuver and the consumption energy are estimated for comparison purposes in the case of lane changing. Along with that, the performance of the vehicle's steering system was also assessed in the case of a different torque of the electric motors.

The Nikola project intelligent electric vehicle integration

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 21:53:48 +0100

The electric vehicle (EV) has certain properties that elevate its relevance to the smart grid. If EV integration is to meet its potential in supporting an economic and secure power system and at the same time lower the operating costs for the owner, it is necessary to thoroughly and systematically investigate the value-adding services that an EV may provide. The Danish Nikola project defines EV services as the act of influencing the timing, rate and direction of the power and energy exchanged between the EV battery and the grid to yield benefits for user, system, and society. This paper describes the services identified by Nikola and shows how the project aims to evaluate and demonstrate them in simulations and field tests. This paper is both meant to give the reader insights and inspiration from the project approach, but it is also meant as an encouragement for cooperation and feedback.

Electric versus conventional vehicles for logistics: A total cost of ownership

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 21:27:13 +0100

Today, different measures are investigated to solve the challenge of a sustainable urban freight transport. Among them, electric vehicles are often viewed as an interesting solution but the purchase cost of these vehicles is commonly seen as a barrier to their adoption. However the different cost structure between electric and conventional vehicles makes an analysis of every cost particularly needed if fleet managers want to assess the real competitiveness of the vehicles. As a result, we developed a total cost of ownership model to assess the competitiveness of light commercial vehicles in the Brussels-Capital Region. This paper presents the results of the total cost of ownership analysis on 8 battery electric vehicles, 5 diesel vehicles and 2 petrol vehicles. The results of a sensitivity analysis of the model are also presented. The electric vehicles were found to be competitive with conventional vehicles in the category of the quadricycles and the light commercial vehicles with a payload lower than 1,000kg: five out of six battery electric vehicles had a cost lower than the conventional vehicles of their category. The situation is inverted for the battery electric vehicles with a payload above 1,000kg where the costs are always higher than the conventional vehicles because of the expensive purchase and battery costs. Since battery electric vehicles are found to be a viable solution for some parts of the logistics, the next challenge should be to convince the fleet managers of the benefits of battery electric vehicles.

Document type: Article

Anonym: A tool for anonymization of the Internet traffic

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 21:11:46 +0100

Collecting network traffic traces from deployed networks is one of the basic steps in understanding communication networks. Traffic traces are used for network management, traffic engineering, packet classification, and analyzing user behavior to ensure adequate quality of service. Monitored traffic traces should be anonymized for privacy and security reasons. The goal of anonymization is to preserve trace properties while enforcing privacy policies. Various tools and techniques have been implemented for trace anonymization. In this paper, we propose and implement an anonymization tool that executes multilevel anonymization and displays analysis results. We describe architecture and features of the tool and discuss analysis of un-anonymized and anonymized datasets.

How to Consider Emotional Reactions of the Driver within the Development of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)?

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 21:08:14 +0100

The paper presents a process of how User Experience tests can be integrated in the validation process of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. Hereby a modular process was developed. This process can be integrated in different phases depending on existing validation methods. It involves the decision maker, developer, experimental designer and the potential users (e.g. customer). It will be shown what is necessary to implement User Experience methods in early phases of the product development process.

Added value services for EV charging management

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 21:06:13 +0100

The deployment of Electrical Vehicles (EV) is not taking place at the expected rate. Consumers’ tendency to value losses higher than gains works against electric vehicles when comparing them to traditional solutions. In this context, added value services may support business models with additional incomes, business differentiation or appealing mobility concepts. In the frame of the Green eMotion FP7 project, added value services will be proposed and their implementation in backend systems studied, in order to permit a widespread and sustainable deployment of EVs. Services and functionalities are delimited by business models defining the overall stakeholder relationship framework. Therefore, the latter will have direct influence, not only at economical level but also in technical aspects of the implementation of added value services. EV services are classified in two main groups: those provided by the EVs to the network and those provided by service providers to end-users. EVs characteristics make them especially suitable for service oriented business, while ICT solutions appear as key enablers of new sustainable mobility concepts. It is very important to decide which services and how these services need to be implemented to allow a wide range of business models to be applied. Interoperability is another essential aspect when dealing with EVs, since all systems involved in service provision should be able to communicate with each other. This will allow EV users to have transparent and efficient driving experiences, together with lower cost solutions. New advances in communication standards definition and in interoperability assessment (COTEVOS FP7 EU project) are currently going on and will tackle this challenge. EC FP7

Pickup and delivery with a solar-recharged vehicle

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:50:02 +0100

We describe two methods for determining good single-vehicle schedules to transport expectant mothers to health facilities. We consider two objectives: maximising the total requested trip distance completed during the day, and minimising the schedule span. One of these methods is both simple and effective-it requires the scheduler to select from a list of precomputed trip patterns each day. Zimbabwe has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world. A key contributing factor is the difficulty that expectant mothers have in getting from rural villages to health care facilities. Specificallydesigned electric vehicles, called African Solar Taxis, are currently being developed for deployment. The vehicles will be charged at solar charging stations located at health care facilities. The limited speed and range means that these vehicles must be efficiently scheduled so that expectant mothers are transported to health facilities in a timely manner. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Creating OD matrix using cordon survey: case study – City of Varaždin

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:44:19 +0100

Nowadays, cities have a problem with transport planning. Transport planning is a time-consuming process and a data-eating process. For the purpose of transport planning, it is necessary to collect up-to-date data, not only transport data (number of vehicles, bus lines, passengers carried, etc.), but also demographic data, urbanization data and economic data. The most frequently changed data are those from transport, which means it is necessary to implement a strategic process to collect these data. This process is not only time-consuming but also money-consuming. Without transport data it is not possible to make smart mobility plans for citizens. The most important function of transport data collection is building of an Origin-Destination Matrix (OD Matrix). There is a wide range of methods for collecting and building of this OD Matrix. This paper explains the building of OD Matrix using innovated cordon survey in road transport. Cordon survey is a field method to collect information about travel preferences of road drivers. Cordon survey has been performed on strategic points entering the City of Varaždin. The cordon survey was carried out during two-hour intervals in early morning, late morning and afternoon.

An Approach for Finding Multiple Area of Specialization Configuration Advisories

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:43:16 +0100

of specialization supervisors dynamically configure a set of air traffic control resources so that air traffic in the area can operate safely and effi ciently. These resources include airspace sectors, air traffic control positions staffed by controllers, and physical air traffic control equipment. In this paper, we motivate and demonstrate an approach for finding multiple advisories that can assist area supervisors as they accomplish this task. The first motivating factor is that a preference for multiple good and also distinct advisories has been documented in similar contexts, including some air traffic management problems. The second factor that motivates our approach is that the model, problem statement, and algorithm used to generate a single advisory are incomplete and do not perfectly represent reality. The third factor, which we speculate is primarily a result of the second factor, is that area supervisors have indicated a preference for multiple (usually two or three) advisories over a single advisory. Area supervisors have further indicated that each proposed advisory should be different from the other proposed advisories. We investigate the set of advisories that perform best according to a particular objective function for some realistic problem instances. The best few advisories are typically not meaningfully different and therefore should not be presented together to supervisors, and this is the fourth and final factor that motivates our approach. Based on these motivating factors, we define a problem statement which requests multiple good advisories that are all sufficiently different from each other. We briefly describe a heuristic algorithm that was developed for this problem. To more concretely illustrate and motivate the proposed approach, we present the advisories provided by this algorithm for a sample problem instance. We also demonstrate that the proposed heuristic can find feasible second advisories for as many realistic problem instances (15 of 18) as a nearly-exhaustive search. When executed on a desktop workstation computer, the proposed heuristic returns advisories for these realistic problem instances in less than one second per problem instance.

Transport demand modelling in Melbourne

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:42:44 +0100

Transport demand models are a systematic representation of the large and complex real-world transport system as it exists, and as it might be. The development and application of such models is fundamental to the transport project and policy development and economic appraisals undertaken within the Victorian Department of Transport (VDOT) and its agencies. Transport demand models provide an analytical framework to understand and assess the performance of the transport system under existing and future demands. Additionally, transport demand models can be used to: assess the impacts of integrated transport and land-use strategies on a systematic basis; provide the background analysis to identify the implications of transport policies and strategies; and identify the quantum and location of congestion. Furthermore, the application of such models enables quantitative measures to be generated that act as key inputs to the project appraisal process. Some of these inputs can only be derived in a sufficiently robust and disaggregate manner by using transport demand models. The VDOT has developed the Victorian Integrated Transport Model (VITM) to undertake multi-modal transport demand modelling of transport project, policy and land use initiatives. The VITM also incorporates a Melbourne Freight Movement Model (MFMM) for the modelling of freight demand across metropolitan Melbourne.

A Study of Wireless Sensor Networks for Urban Traffic Monitoring: Applications and Architectures

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:39:10 +0100

International audience; With the constant increasing of Vehicular traffic around the world, especially in urban areas, existing traffic management solutions become inefficient. This can be clearly seen in our life through persistent traffic jam and rising number of accidents. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) based intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have emerged as a cost effective technology that bear a pivotal potential to overcome these difficulties. This technology enables a new broad range of smart city applications around urban sensing including traffic safety, traffic congestion control, road state monitoring, vehicular warning services, and parking management. This manuscript gives a comprehensive review on WSN based ITS solutions. The main contribution of this paper is to classify current WSNs based ITS projects from the application type point of view with a deep discussion on how the application requirements are fulfilled. This work extends our previous study on traffic lights WSNs based projects[4].

Document type: Conference object

Reputation as a service

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:28:11 +0100

In this research work, we introduce the concept of a reputation service to evaluate user collaboration towards community or system goal. Online reputation mechanisms allow members of a community to submit their opinions (feedback) regarding other community members and their publication activity. Submitted opinions are analyzed, aggregated with feedback posted by other members and made publicly available to the community in the form of member feedback profiles. We propose a conceptual system that can be used in several contexts, namely in our public transportation recommender system developed in the framework of the European Project START.

On the benefit of information centric networks for traffic engineering

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:23:00 +0100

Current Internet performs traffic engineering (TE) by estimating traffic matrices on a regular schedule, and allocating flows based upon weights computed from these matrices. This means the allocation is based upon a guess of the traffic in the network based on its history. Information-Centric Networks on the other hand provide a finer-grained description of the traffic: a content between a client and a server is uniquely identified by its name, and the network can therefore learn the size of different content items, and perform traffic engineering and resource allocation accordingly. We claim that Information-Centric Networks can therefore provide a better handle to perform traffic engineering, resulting in significant performance gain. We present a mechanism to perform such resource allocation. We see that our traffic engineering method only requires knowledge of the flow size (which, in ICN, can be learned from previous data transfers) and outperforms a min-MLU allocation in terms of response time. We also see that our method identifies the traffic allocation patterns similar to that of min-MLU without having access to the traffic matrix ahead of time. We show a very significant gain in response time where min MLU is almost 50% slower than our ICN-based TE method.

Improving leakage management in urban water distribution networks through data analytics and hydraulic simulation

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:09:11 +0100

Worldwide, water utilities are finding it increasingly difficult to meet the growing water demand. The problem, already acute in view of the urbanization trends, is compounded by the age of the infrastructure: one third of water utilities have 20% or more of their pipelines nearing the end of their useful life. This paper outlines an innovative approach for improving leakage management processes through the adoption of data analytics techniques and hydraulic simulation. More in detail, the aim is to provide analytical leaks localization and correspondent severity estimation in order to reduce time and costs for interventions and rehabilitation while improving asset management. The technical solution has been developed as a set of web services able to interoperate with other technological systems usually adopted by urban water distribution utilities, such as Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system, Customer Information System (CIS), Geographical Information System (GIS) and Hydraulic Simulation tools. This paper presents some results obtained by the application of the approach to a real case study and also proves how its effectiveness may be improved in a sectorized water distribution network.

Designing Network Motifs in Connected Vehicle Systems: Delay Effects and Stability

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:05:50 +0100

ng technologies in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication allow vehicles to obtain information about the motion of distant vehicles. Such information can be presented to the driver or incorporated in advanced autonomous cruise control (ACC) systems. In this paper, we investigate the effects of multi-vehicle communication on the dynamics of connected vehicle platoons and propose a motif-based approach that allows systematical analysis and design of such systems. We investigate the dynamics of simple motifs in the presence of communication delays, and show that long-distance communication can stabilize the uniform flow when the flow cannot be stabilized by nearest neighbor interactions. The results can be used for designing driver assist systems and communication-based cruise control systems.Copyright © 2013 by ASME

Parametric study of multiphase flow in potential Barents Sea pipelines from Fedyn Arch to shore

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 20:04:51 +0100

The Arctic region is believed to be one of the most important remaining petroleum provinces. As part of the Arctic potential, the Barents Sea represents an opportunity to develop a new European petroleum province. This paper is focused on the Fedyn Arch in the former disputed area, which potentially is one of the biggest gas fields in the Barents Sea. The paper starts by outlining the Barents Sea geological conditions to make an overall picture of potential hydrocarbon reserves of this area. Hydrocarbon transportation scenarios of the Fedinskiy High field development will be discussed taking into account suitable sites for a potential onshore treatment terminal and potentially an LNG plant. Depending on various factors the question of transport solution becomes significant, and its costs could reach billions of dollars. One of the most costeffective solutions for the development of offshore fields is the use of subsea to shore concept. The objective of the study is to analyze how a flow rate variation in a gas condensate system influences the water accumulation (HOLDUP) along the pipeline as well as on flow regime changes and overall pressure loss. Possible scenarios of arrival facilities are discussed in detail based on existing and planned onshore infrastructures. According to the suggested scenarios multiphase simulation will be carried out by the OLGA simulator. Due to special environmental conditions (potential sub-zero temperatures at the seabed) in the Arctic regions, such as in the Barents Sea, it is important to consider the risk of hydrate formation along the pipeline.

Review of Electric Vehicle Technologies Progress and Development Prospect in China

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:48:41 +0100

Developing electric vehicles (EVs) has been chosen as national strategy as solution to energy security and urban air pollution by China. China has invested much to develop electric vehicle technologies. In past 15 years, the EVs technologies have improved greatly, and in public serving field, the electric vehicle were used in large-scale. The traction battery and electric motor technologies were improved distinguished. By the EVs demonstration programs, the mainstream technology roadmap in line with China’s national conditions is becoming gradually clear. In this paper, the progress of China EVs technologies breakthrough and industrialization, pushing policies (government and local government) were summarized. The progress on EVs demonstration program was reviewed and the effectiveness was evaluated. The technology roadmap of traction battery, fuel cell, and electric motor for EVs in past years was concluded. The different technological roadmaps were evaluated by effects in demonstration program. Based on the review of the progress of China EVs R&

D and demonstration program, the existing problems and future challenges in EV development were put forth. And the future electric transportation in China was proposed, including electric powertrain technologies roadmap, electric car model strategy, EV industrialization strategy.

Document type: Article

Equity of mobility in sustainable transportation

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:47:01 +0100

The paper examines issues of transport equity as they pertain to the efficiency of transport, its cost and people’s mobility levels. It is also concerned with accessibility to transport for the greatest possible number of people, which together with transport equality leads to seeking fairness in mobility and accessibility levels across class, gender and disability. Moreover, the paper addresses aspects of transport equality with the goal of providing equal access to social and economic opportunity by looking into the provision of equal levels of access for all people to all places. Lastly, it delves on current concern in Cyprus about providing equal access to social and economic opportunity and it is centred on the issue of the “spatial mismatch hypothesis” – a term coined by Professor John F. Kain in 1968 (Housing segregation, Negro employment, and metropolitan decentralization) which refers to the disconnection between the locations of housing and jobs suitable for lower-income people and which is examined in this paper in the broader context of urban transport for sustainable urban development.

Monitoring travel behaviour: tools for E-mobility NSR

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:38:58 +0100

Presenting the e-Mobility project, studying the potential of shared electric cars within co-housing communitie

Statistical modelling of delays in a rail freight transportation network

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:37:59 +0100

This study analyzes the transportation network of a major rail freight operator in order to obtain a model of delay propagation of trains connecting intermodal terminals. Operational management of a rail freight operator needs to take into account deviations due to unexpected events such as unplanned maintenance, strikes, railroad works, traffic congestion. The dispatcher makes train assignment decisions based on a number of performance indicators and also on the expectancy that a given train, currently delayed, could recover or limit the amount of delay in the future. We have developed a Markov-chain based model in order to evaluate the evolution of train delays as a train visits successive terminals. Our model is based on the examination of a large set of historical data and we show how we can classify different terminals according to their ability either to absorb or to amplify delays.

Inbound interdomain traffic engineering with LISP

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:36:24 +0100

Stub autonomous systems usually utilize multiple links to single or multiple ISPs. Today, inbound traffic engineering is considered hard, as there is no direct way to influence routing decisions on remote systems with BGP. Current traffic engineering methods built on top of BGP are heuristic and time-consuming. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol (LISP) promises to change that. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of LISP and its built-in traffic engineering methods on a real-world testbed. First, we compare LISP to plain BGP and BGP advertising more specific prefixes. This comparison shows that LISP allows effective load-balancing with an accuracy of approximately 5%, while being easier to configure than BGP and its variants. Further experiments show that these results are independent from the number of concurrent streams.

Improving the Reliability and Availability of Vehicular Communications Using Voronoi Diagram-Based Placement of Road Side Units

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:30:33 +0100

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) form the basis for critical services that improve traffic safety and alleviate traffic congestion. The reliability of VANET-based services and applications that are based solely on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, however, is hindered due primarily to limited and often fluctuating V2V communications. To address this limitation, Road-Side Units (RSU) have been proposed to complement V2V communications by providing stable event and data brokering capability. Effective placement of the RSUs is a key requirement in improving reliability of VANET services. This poster describes a novel Voronoi network-based algorithm for the effective placement of RSUs. The reliability metric considered in placing the RSUs involves bounding both the delay incurred by communication packets and packet loss, which in turn ensure timeliness and correct operation of the VANET services.

Road-line detection and 3D reconstruction using fisheye cameras

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 19:27:19 +0100

In future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), smart monitoring of the vehicle environment is a key issue. Fisheye cameras have become popular as they provide a panoramic view with a few low-cost sensors. However, current ADAS systems have limited use as most of the underlying image processing has been designed for perspective views only. In this article we illustrate how the theoretical work done in omnidirectional vision over the past ten years can help to tackle this issue. To do so, we have evaluated a simple algorithm for road line detection based on the unified sphere model in real conditions. We firstly highlight the interest of using fisheye cameras in a vehicle, then we outline our method, we present our experimental results on the detection of lines on a set of 180 images, and finally, we show how the 3D position of the lines can be recovered by triangulation.

Distributing content simplifies ISP traffic engineering

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:29:23 +0100

Several major Internet service providers (e.g., Level-3, AT&T, Verizon) today also offer content distribution services. The emergence of such "Network-CDNs" (NCDNs) are driven by market forces that place more value on content services than just carrying the bits. NCDNs are also necessitated by the need to reduce the cost of carrying ever-increasing volumes of traffic across their backbones. An NCDN has the flexibility to determine both where content is placed and how traffic is routed within the network. However NCDNs today continue to treat traffic engineering independently from content placement and request redirection decisions. In this paper, we investigate the interplay between content distribution strategies and traffic engineering and ask how an NCDN should engineer traffic in a content-aware manner. Our experimental analysis, based on traces from a large content distribution network and real ISP topologies, shows that effective content placement can significantly simplify traffic engineering and in most cases obviate the need to engineer NCDN traffic all together! Further, we show that simple demand-oblivious schemes for routing and placement such as InverseCap and LRU suffice as they achieve network costs that are close to the best possible.

Comment: 12 pages, 13 Figure

Formal verification of distributed aircraft controllers

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:21:03 +0100

airspace becomes ever more crowded, air traffic management must reduce both space and time between aircraft to increase throughput, making on-board collision avoidance systems ever more important. These safety-critical systems must be extremely reliable, and as such, many resources are invested into ensuring that the protocols they implement are accurate. Still, it is challenging to guarantee that such a controller works properly under every circumstance. In tough scenarios where a large number of aircraft must execute a collision avoidance maneuver, a human pilot under stress is not necessarily able to understand the complexity of the distributed system and may not take the right course, especially if actions must be taken quickly. We consider a class of distributed collision avoidance controllers designed to work even in environments with arbitrarily many aircraft or UAVs. We prove that the controllers never allow the aircraft to get too close to one another, even when new planes approach an in-progress avoidance maneuver that the new plane may not be aware of. Because these safety guarantees always hold, the aircraft are protected against unexpected emergent behavior which simulation and testing may miss. This is an important step in formally verified, flyable, and distributed air traffic control.

The IMOSMID project: increasing energy efficiency by identification, assessment and use of eco-friendly technologies and management plans for public and private transport

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:20:20 +0100

The European Project IMOSMID (Integrated MOdel for Sustainable Management of Mobility in Industrial Districts) is strongly focused on energy efficiency and carbon saving issues, showing new technologies and devices (fuel cells, charging points from RE, etc.) which could facilitate the introduction of electrical vehicles not only for the inner cities, but also for metropolitan areas, improving its features through the increase of autonomy and availability of the vehicle. IMOSMID aims at reducing carbon emissions by identification, assessment and exchange of innovative technologies and management plans for sustainable transport, by strongly focusing on energetic aspects as well as taking into account environmental and sanitary aspects. The identification of optimal management models for people mobility in productive areas will serve to reduce individual and private car usage for the home-work commuting with dedicated measures particularly related to carpooling.

A SUMO Based Evaluation of Road Incidents' Impact on Traffic Congestion Level in Smart Cities

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:18:38 +0100

Recently, the increasing road traffic congestion has attracted a lot of attention from the research community aiming at proposing innovative solutions to reduce the huge economic loss incurred by this problem. In this paper, we first evaluate the impact of random road incidents on the commuters travel time and the overall traffic congestion level under several scenarios, and provide comprehensive analysis of the obtained evaluation results. Then, we propose an extension of the open source traffic simulator SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) to enable real-time vehicles re-routing, to bypass the blocked road due to an incident, by updating their predefined static routes during simulation runtime. The proposed re-routing mechanism has been implemented and the obtained results have proven its high efficiency on reducing the commuters travel time, in case of accident, compared to the basic SUMO.

When paper meets multi-touch : a study of multi-modal interactions in air traffic controls

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:14:35 +0100

International audience; When multiple modes of interaction are available, it is not obvious whether combining these technologies necessarily leads to a better user experience. It can be difficult to determine which modes are most appropriate for each interaction. However, complex activities such as air traffic control require multiple interaction techniques and modalities. As a result, in this paper, we study the technical challenges of adding finger detection to an augmented flight strip board used by air traffic controllers. We use our augmented strip board to evaluate interactions based on touch, digital pen and physical paper objects. From our user study, we find that users are able to quickly adapt to an interface that offers such a wide range of modalities. The availability of different modalities did not overburden the users and they did not find it difficult to determine the appropriate modality to use for each interaction.

Separation-compliant speed control in terminal airspace

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:12:06 +0100

To accommodate the growing air traffic demand, flights will need to be planned and navigated with a much higher level of precision. The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) stands to benefit significantly in safety and efficiency from such movement of aircraft along precisely defined paths. Air Traffic Operations (ATO) relying on such precision–the Precision Air Traffic Operations or PATO–are the foundation of high throughput capacity envisioned for the future airports. In PATO, the preferred method is to manage the air traffic by assigning a speed profile to each aircraft in a given fleet in a given airspace (in practice known as speed control). In this paper, we develop an algorithm, set in the context of a Hybrid Control System (HCS) model, that determines whether a speed control solution exists for a given fleet of aircraft in a given airspace and if so, computes this solution as a collective speed profile that assures separation if executed without deviation. In this paper, uncertainties such as weather are not considered but the algorithm can be modified to include uncertainties. The algorithm first computes all feasible sequences by looking at all pair combinations of aircraft. Then the most likely sequence is determined and the speed control solution is constructed by a backward algorithm starting with the aircraft last out and proceeds to the first out. This computation for all sequences can be done in parallel which helps to reduce the computation time.

Traffic engineering in cloud data centers: A column generation approach

Scipedia content — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 16:07:20 +0100

While many have advocated for the use of Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) as a way to provide scalable traffic management, finding the optimal traffic split (mapping) among VLANs to achieve load balancing has turned out to be a very challenging and combinatorially complex problem to solve. This paper considers the traffic engineering problem in data center networks by studying the joint problem of finding spanning trees for VLANs and optimally selecting the most promising spanning trees to map the traffic flows onto. We mathematically model this problem using Integer Linear Program (ILP) techniques and follow a primal-dual decomposition approach, using column generation, to solve exactly a relaxed mapping version of the problem, as well we present approximate solutions to the original problem. We show through numerical evaluations an outstanding scalability of the decomposed version of the problem and we use our results to study the performance of traffic engineering protocols developed in recent literature for data center networks. NPRP 5-137-2-045 grant from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation). Scopu

Costs of Limiting Route Optimization to Published Waypoints in the Traffic Aware Planner

Scipedia content — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:44:54 +0100

The Traffic Aware Planner (TAP) is an airborne advisory tool that generates optimized, traffic-avoiding routes to support the aircraft crew in making strategic reroute requests to Air Traffic Control (ATC). TAP is derived from a research-prototype self-separation tool, the Autonomous Operations Planner (AOP), in which optimized route modifications that avoid conflicts with traffic and weather, using waypoints at explicit latitudes and longitudes (a technique supported by self-separation concepts), are generated by maneuver patterns applied to the existing route. For use in current-day operations in which trajectory changes must be requested from ATC via voice communication, TAP produces optimized routes described by advisories that use only published waypoints prior to a reconnection waypoint on the existing route. We describe how the relevant algorithms of AOP have been modified to implement this requirement. The modifications include techniques for finding appropriate published waypoints in a maneuver pattern and a method for combining the genetic algorithm of AOP with an exhaustive search of certain types of advisory. We demonstrate methods to investigate the increased computation required by these techniques and to estimate other costs (measured in terms such as time to destination and fuel burned) that may be incurred when only published waypoints are used.

Traffic profiling for modern enterprise networks: A case study

Scipedia content — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:41:17 +0100

While Internet traffic has received a lot of attention, little is known about enterprise traffic. In this paper, we shed light on the basic characteristics of modern enterprise networks using a 24-hour long packet trace captured in a mid-size academic network. Our approach is to contrast the external and internal activities of the enterprise network under study. We demonstrate that these two types of traffic differ along several dimensions of our analysis, especially traffic composition, symmetry level or RTT. Overall, such a study provides valuable insights for traffic engineering in enterprise networks and could pave the way towards the design of specific workload models for enterprise networks.

ES-TMP: Inter-Domain Egress Selection Based on Traffic Migration Prediction

Scipedia content — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:22:03 +0100

Hot-potato routing is commonly used to break tie among multiple equally-good exit points associating with inter-domain BGP routes. However, hot-potato routing only takes the network control plane into consideration, where it provides the routers the possibility of enabling early exit of traffic using barely protocol-related information of IGP distance. In this paper, we argue that egress selection of inter-domain routing should pay more attention to traffic forwarding, because the large traffic migration caused by egress change, although not quite often, can degrade the network performance or even make the network crash. We propose Egress Selection based on Traffic Migration Prediction (ES-TMP). We use traffic demand to predict the traffic migration, which is used as important criteria for egress selection. If the volume of traffic migration is large, ES-TMP keeps the egress unchanged. Otherwise, the small traffic migration enables the routers use the closest egress without apparent influence on network performance. ES-TMP can either be implemented with standard BGP protocol or by dedicated servers to perform global routing optimization.

Exploratory analysis of OpenStreetMap for land use classification

Scipedia content — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:12:28 +0100

In the last years, volunteers have been contributing massively to what we know nowadays as Volunteered Geographic Information. This huge amount of data might be hiding a vast geographical richness and therefore research needs to be conducted to explore their potential and use it in the solution of real world problems. In this study we conduct an exploratory analysis of data from the OpenStreetMap initiative. Using the Corine Land Cover database as reference and continental Portugal as the study area, we establish a possible correspondence between both classification nomenclatures, evaluate the quality of OpenStreetMap polygon features classification against Corine Land Cover classes from level 1 nomenclature, and analyze the spatial distribution of OpenStreetMap classes over continental Portugal. A global classification accuracy around 76% and interesting coverage areas’ values are remarkable and promising results that encourages us for future research on this topic.

Evaluation of the terminal sequencing and spacing system for performance-based navigation arrivals

Scipedia content — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:10:18 +0100

NASA has developed the Terminal Sequencing and Spacing (TSS) system, a suite of advanced arrival management technologies combining time-based scheduling and controller precision spacing tools. TSS is a ground-based controller automation tool that facilitates sequencing and merging arrivals that have both current standard ATC routes and terminal Performance-Based Navigation (PBN) routes, especially during highly congested demand periods. In collaboration with the FAA and MITRE's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD), TSS system performance was evaluated in human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulations with currently active controllers as participants. Traffic scenarios had mixed Area Navigation (RNAV) and Required Navigation Performance (RNP) equipage, where the more advanced RNP-equipped aircraft had preferential treatment with a shorter approach option. Simulation results indicate the TSS system achieved benefits by enabling PBN, while maintaining high throughput rates-10% above baseline demand levels. Flight path predictability improved, where path deviation was reduced by 2 NM on average and variance in the downwind leg length was 75% less. Arrivals flew more fuel-efficient descents for longer, spending an average of 39 seconds less in step-down level altitude segments. Self-reported controller workload was reduced, with statistically significant differences at the p";0.01 level. The RNP-equipped arrivals were also able to more frequently capitalize on the benefits of being “Best-Equipped, Best-Served” (BEBS), where less vectoring was needed and nearly all RNP approaches were conducted without interruption.

Real-time simulations to evaluate the RPAS integration in shared airspace

Scipedia content — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 00:05:23 +0100

This paper presents the work done during the first year in the WP-E project ERAINT (Evaluation of the RPAS-ATM Interaction in Non-Segregated Airspace) that intends to evaluate by means of human-in-the-loop real-time simulations the interaction between a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System (RPAS) and the Air Traffic Management (ATM) when a Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) is being operated in shared airspace. This interaction will be evaluated from three different perspectives. First, the separation management, its results are presented in this paper. Secondly, during the next year, the contingency management, also including loss of link situations and, lastly, the capacity impact of such operations in the overall ATM system. The used simulation infrastructure allows to simulate realistic exercises from both the RPAS Pilot-in-Command (PiC) and the Air Traffic Controller (ATCo) perspectives. Moreover, it permits to analyze the actual workload of the ATC and to evaluate several support tools and different RPAS levels of automation from the PiC and ATC sides. The simulation results and the usefulness of the support tools are presented for each selected concept of operations.

Peer Reviewed

Data Mining Improves Pipeline Risk Assessment

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 23:49:06 +0100

Accidents to pipelines have been recorded and they often result in catastrophic consequences for environment and society with a great deal of economic loss. Standard methods of evaluating pipeline risk have stressed index-based and conditional based data assessment processes. Data mining represents a shift from verification-driven data analysis approaches to discovery-driven methods in risk assessment.

Integra system

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 23:37:30 +0100

The current work deals with the scenario of growing population in the cities and the associated sustainable mobility problems. To address this problem it is developed an system called INTEGRA for a mobile device, based on the integration from different data sources such as multi-modal public transportation systems, car and bike sharing. This system is able to show and give guidance towards points of interests (POI) and promote a social collaborative network for the share of notations towards POI classification. This work is a contribution for the European Project START, where we propose the Integra System. This system’s goal is to make travel easy and sustainable improving information systems integration. This goal is shared by transport operators and authorities associated to the Integra registered brand, promoted by the START consortium, that is already prepared for UK, France, Spain and Portugal.

Designing a bidirectional workflow for OpenStreetMap data integration in an INSPIRE based SDI

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 23:31:14 +0100

More educated people, with more sophisticated devices, are creating new trends: crowded source data and citizen science. Citizens are able to capture data and to reason about it. They are producers and consumers of their own data. Meanwhile, local administration is struggling with less resources and more pressure to become more efficient. In this paper we try to bridge the gap between these two different worlds, apart from each other, proposing a workflow. We discuss the advantages and the technical challenges we might face if crowded source data can be used by the administration. To make this possible, we take advantage of the existing European regulation, the INSPIRE directive, and designed a workflow to implement the rules regarding data specifications to the OpenStreetMap (OSM) data to combine it seamless with official existing datasets. (undefined)

Parallelisation of Sequential Monte Carlo for real-time control in air traffic management

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 23:09:56 +0100

This paper presents the parallelisation of a Sequential Monte Carlo algorithm, and the associated changes required when applied to the problem of conflict resolution and aircraft trajectory control in air traffic management. The target problem is non-linear, constrained, non-convex and multi-agent. The new method is shown to have a 98.5% computational time saving over that of a previous sequential implementation, with no degradation in path quality. The computation saving is enough to allow real-time implementation. This work was supported by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council - UK) Grant No. EP/G066477/1 In proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control 2013

High occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes as a means of transport demand management: the Thessaloniki experience

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 23:03:12 +0100

Transport Demand Management (TDM) measures are used worldwide as a means to reduce traffic and environmental impact in congested areas. These measures affect travel behavior in such a way as to promote sustainable mobility. One of the TDM measures is the High Occupancy Vehicles (HOV) lane. In the framework of this paper an attempt has been made to present three case studies concerning the evaluation of HOV lanes hypothetical scenarios in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece. The evaluation has been made through the use of modeling techniques and the results are expressed in terms of traffic and environmental indicators. HOV lanes have been proved to be, in principal, an efficient tool for managing transport demand but there is need for further examination of the environmental impact.

Designer-driven 3D buildings generated using Variable Neighborhood Search

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 23:01:06 +0100

This paper presents a mechanism to generate virtual buildings considering designer constraints and guidelines. This mechanism is implemented as a pipeline of different Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) optimization processes in which several subproblems are tackled (1) rooms locations, (2) connectivity graph, and (3) element placement. The core VNS algorithm includes some variants to improve its performance, such as, for example constraint handling and biased operator selection. The optimization process uses a toolkit of construction primitives implemented as "smart objects" providing basic elements such as rooms, doors, staircases and other connectors. The paper also shows experimental results of the application of different designer constraints to a wide range of buildings from small houses to a large castle with several underground levels.

Document type: Conference object

Multi-modal identification and tracking of vehicles in partially observed environments

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:59:34 +0100

High-quality positioning is of fundamental importance for an increasing variety of advanced driver assistance systems. GNSS-based systems are predominant outdoors but usually fail in enclosed areas where a direct line-of-sight to satellites is unavailable. For those scenarios, external infrastructure-based positioning systems are a promising alternative. However, external position detections have no identity information as they may belong to any object, i.e. they are anonymous. Moreover, the area covered by external sensors may contain gaps where objects cannot be observed leading to a correspondence problem between multiple detections and actual objects. We present a global tracking-by-identification approach as extension to existing local trackers that uses odometry sensor data of vehicles to find the corresponding subset of external detections. Thus, our approach enables the assignment of anonymous external detections to a specific vehicular endpoint and the estimation of its current position without requiring an initial location. The problem is decomposed resulting in a two step approach. The first algorithm determines possible track segment combinations which are used as track hypotheses. The track hypothesis generation algorithm considers spatio-temporal relationships between track segments, thus avoiding exponentially growing complexity inherent to data association problems. The second algorithm compares track hypotheses to the relative vehicle trajectory using pseudo-distance correlation metrics. In a detailed evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to reliably perform global tracking and identification of camera-observed vehicles in real-time, despite relatively large coverage gaps of the external sensors.

Pipeline Power: A Case Study of Strategic Network Investments

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:58:09 +0100

We analyze the impact of three controversial pipeline projects on the power structure in the Eurasian network for natural gas. Two pipelines, “Nord Stream” and “South Stream,” allow Russian gas to bypass transit countries, Ukraine and Belarus. The third project, “Nabucco,” aims at diversifying Europe’s gas imports by accessing producers in Middle East and Central Asia. If network power is measured with the Shapley Value we obtain a clear ranking of the projects which corresponds to the observed investment patterns. Nord Stream’s strategic value is huge, easily justifying the high investment cost for Germany and Russia. The additional leverage obtained through South Stream is much smaller and Nabucco is not viable. For the nucleolus in contrast, none of the pipelines has any strategic relevance at all, which contradicts the empirical evidence on investment.

OASIcs, Volume 42, ATMOS'14, Complete Volume

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:55:42 +0100

OASIcs, Volume 42, ATMOS'14, Complete Volume

Making smart cities smarter using artificial intelligence techniques for smarter mobility

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:49:55 +0100

The term Smart City is tipically applied to urban and metropolitan areas where Information and Communication Technologies provide ways to enable social, cultural and urban development, improving social and political capacities and/or efficiency. In this paper we will show the potential of Artificial Intelligence techniques for augmenting ICT solutions to both increase the cities competiveness but also the active participation of citizens in those processes, making Smart Cities smarter. As example we will describe the usage of Artificial Intellgence techniques to provide Smart Mobility in the context of the SUPERHUB Project.

An efficient nonlinear model-predictive eco-cruise control for electric vehicles

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:49:10 +0100

International audience; A nonlinear problem formulation of an energy saving model-predictive eco-cruise controller for electric vehicles is presented. With regard to the intended application in real world tests, the model has to include the specific properties of a serial electric vehicle such as energy-recovery and a discontinuous accelerator input giving rise to a binary control variable. These specific features and the nonlinearity of the system dynamics make it a challenging task to formulate the optimisation problem in a way that allows a fast computation in real-time application. The challenges are addressed by using a model of the vehicle dynamics that is formulated in terms of the vehicle position instead of time and by considering the kinetic energy instead of the velocity. Furthermore, various constraints on the input and state variables are introduced for a realistic representation of the vehicle characteristics. A special focus is put on the treatment of a binary input variable in the optimisation. Here, in order to avoid a mixed-integer formulation of the problem, a continuous variable is introduced which is forced to take only discrete values by a penalty term. Finally, first simulation results underline the feasibility of this control approach.

Space Transition Corridors in the National Airspace System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:42:00 +0100

The importance of managing air and space traffic interactions will increase as the frequency of commercial space operations increases in the future. It is desirable that commercial operators of both aircraft and spacecraft receive equitable access to the shared resource of the National Airspace System while maintaining a high level of safety by protecting air traffic from possible spacecraft malfunctions. Current operational practice is conservative, reserving large volumes of airspace over a substantial time window. Space transition corridors are 4-dimensional envelopes, tailored to the trajectories of spacecraft during their launch and reentry flight phases, that provide a safety buffer without imposing excessive re-routing/delay costs on air traffic. Corridors with various spatial and temporal parameters were modeled in a simulation study, using air traffic re-routing distance as a performance metric. It was found that distance penalty contours can provide a basis for conducting tradeoffs within a corridor’s temporal design space (time window duration vs. window midpoint time). A tool based on these contours could be useful for launch and reentry planning to reduce re-routing/delay costs for aircraft flying in the vicinity of spaceports while maintaining safety.

Techno-economic modelling and analysis of CO2 pipelines

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:32:55 +0100

The main focus of this paper is on techno-economic modeling and analysis of CO2 pipelines, as it strives to develop a thorough understanding of the essential fluid-mechanics variables involved in modeling and analysis of such pipelines. The authors investigate and analyze the reasons behind the variations in the techno-economic results generated from seven different techno-economic models which are commonly used for construction and operation of CO2 pipelines. Such variations often translate into tens or, at times, hundreds of millions of dollars in terms of initial financial estimates at the Pre-FEED (Front End Engineering Design) or FEED stages for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects. Variations of this magnitude can easily bring much unwanted uncertainty to the feasibility of a CO2 pipeline project and they can potentially cause a major over or under estimation of the project’s true costs. The summary of a detailed analysis and assessment for these seven existing techno-economic models for CO2 pipeline transport has been presented in this paper. The analysis conducted indicates that some of these models are essentially identical and are rooted in similar fluid mechanics theories and assumptions. This type of analysis assists with explaining and narrowing down the variability of the models’ results. Based on these analyses, a refined and more accurate model was established and the development process was explained. The refined model uses the Reynolds number, Colebrook-White equation using the Darcy friction factor, and the Darcy-Weisbach pressure drop equation to establish the most accurate measure for the pipe’s diameter. To assess the CO2 pipeline’s total capital cost, total annual cost, and the levelized transport cost, a statistical regression analysis approach was suggested and the adjusted-r2 measure was proposed to assess the goodness-of-the-fit of the generated cost function. The accuracy of the new techno-economic model was validated with the figures of a proposed CO2 infrastructure project in the United Kingdom and also through hydraulic modeling.

Adaptive Driving Speed Guiding to Avoid Red Traffic Lights

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:26:01 +0100

This paper proposed anAdaptive Driving Speed Guiding (ADSG) concept, which can assist drivers to avoid red traffic lights and thus improve the driving efficiency. The functional workflow of ADSG is defined and a smartphone based system compositionis designed. In order to figure outa legal, feasible and efficient guidance speed, 2 algorithms are designed, simulated and evaluated in the paper. After the evaluation a control strategy is raised, which combines the advantages of the 2 algorithms.

Validating an Air Traffic Management Concept of Operation using Statistical Modeling

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:13:32 +0100

EV-planning: Electric vehicle itinerary planning

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:04:42 +0100

International audience; In the latest few years, lot of efforts have been done to pave the way to sustainable mobility, in order to solve pollution problems and fuel shortage. The use of electric vehicles (EV) is considered as one of the best ecologic and economic solution. However, autonomy barriers and limitations slow the progress and the deployment of this technology. In this paper, we propose an advanced electric vehicles' fleet management architecture. This architecture considers the most important factors that can affect the traveling mode of electric vehicles, in order to offer different services to fleet management companies for an efficient monitoring and management of their fleets. One of the most important service, considered in this paper, consists on providing economic itineraries planning for electric vehicles. Best routes, in term of electric power consumption, are computed based on the collected information about road topology (elevation variations, source, destination, etc.), weather conditions, vehicle characteristics, driver profile, traffic conditions and electric charging stations positions. In case of battery drop, new routes passing through the nearest available charging stations are recalculated and provided to the driver. To prove the concept, we implemented a lightweight traffic management server that provides this itinerary planning service to an EV fleet company. The server provides a web application to book an EV and plan the trip. All possible itineraries are displayed on a map with electric power consumption, traveled distance and duration details. Then, the server uploads the chosen itinerary into the vehicle's GPS or into the driver's smartphone.

Robust Routing in Urban Public Transportation: How to Find Reliable Journeys Based on Past Observations

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 22:03:46 +0100

International audience; We study the problem of robust routing in urban public transportation networks. In order to propose solutions that are robust for typical delays, we assume that we have past observations of real traffic situations available. In particular, we assume that we have "daily records" containing the observed travel times in the whole network for a few past days. We introduce a new concept to express a solution that is feasible in any record of a given public transportation network. We adapt the method of Buhmann et al. [Buhmann et al., ITCS 2013] for optimization under uncertainty, and develop algorithms that allow its application for finding a robust journey from a given source to a given destination. The performance of the algorithms and the quality of the predicted journey are evaluated in a preliminary experimental study. We furthermore introduce a measure of reliability of a given journey, and develop algorithms for its computation. The robust routing concepts presented in this work are suited specially for public transportation networks of large cities that lack clear hierarchical structure and contain services that run with high frequencies.

A Three-Dimensional Musculoskeletal Driver Model to Study Steering Tasks

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:58:42 +0100

Realistic driver models can play an important role in developing new driver assistance technologies. A realistic driver model can reduce the time-consuming trial and error process of designing and testing products, and thereby reduce the vehicle’s development time and cost. A realistic model should provide both driver path planning and arm motions that are physiologically possible. The interaction between a driver’s hand and steering wheel can influence control performance and steering feel."/jats:p" "jats:p"The aim of this work is to develop a comprehensive yet practical model of the driver and vehicle. Consequently, a neuro-muscular driver model in conjunction with a high-fidelity vehicle model is developed to learn and understand more about the driver’s performance and preferences, and their effect on vehicle control and stability. This driver model can provide insights into task performance and energy consumption of the driver, including fatigue and co-contraction dynamics of a steering task. In addition, this driver model in conjunction with a high-fidelity steering model can be used to develop new steering technologies such as Electric Power Steering.

Trust and exclusion in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: An economic incentive model based approach

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:57:13 +0100

International audience; In this body of work, we are interested in road safety applications such as advanced driver assistance systems, based on Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). One of the particular characteristics of this kind of networks is the continuous sharing of safety information by its nodes. Since this kind of information is time sensitive, a node cannot spend much time to verify its validity with an authority. However, the presence of malicious and selfish nodes in VANETs corrupts exchanged data, and lowers the overall data reception ratio in the network. To tackle this, we propose a new incentive model with exclusion for malicious nodes called VIME. VIME is inspired from the signaling theory from economics. It is based on managing a credit count that each node receives at the initialization of the application. Straightforwardly, VIME is based on two pillars. On the one hand, a node pays an appropriate cost for each sent message, which is seen by the receivers as a guarantee from the source about the truthfulness of the information. On the other hand, nodes get rewarded for cooperating in the network. The proposed economic model allows computing the amounts to be paid and those to be awarded in order to fight selfish and malicious nodes. We validate our approach via simulations. We show that VIME is able to detect and evict gradually all malicious nodes in the network, and decreases the ratio of corrupted and false sent data until reaching zero. Moreover, it has a positive impact on the participation of selfish nodes, as our approach increases the average ratio of sent data as to equal the ideal case's percentage, when no selfish node is present.

A quasi-real-time ground-based trajectory optimization tool for greener operations

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:50:05 +0100

This paper describes the methodology adopted in designing a quasi-real-time ground-based trajectory optimization tool for use by air traffic control officers. The tool is primarily intended for the optimization of aircraft trajectories during the climb and descent phases in which the user can define the trajectory in four dimensions. The optimized trajectories would then contribute to a reduction in fuel burn and emissions. The designed tool takes into account different aircraft types and sub-types through BADA performance and engine coefficients. A simple case study for an approach in Malta International Airport has also been presented to illustrate the use of the tool.

peer-reviewed

Reducing the impact of vibration-caused artifacts in a brain-computer interface using gyroscope data

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:32:07 +0100

We implemented an artifact prediction method for a saline-pad wireless electroencephalograph equipped with two-axis gyroscope used as a basic brain-computer interface (BCI). The BCI unit serves two purposes in the scope of the project Innotruck. Firstly, it enables remote control of vehicles and other systems over a limited set of trained mental activity. Secondly, it is a source of data for the passive analysis of the operator's mental fitness, which is further integrated into the driver assistance systems. The latter aspect has been the focus of our work. Saline-pad electrodes used in consumer grade electronics are prone to errors stemming from vibrations and sudden head movements. The implemented approach successfully preconditions the signal processing pipeline to take such artifacts into account and reduces the later processing overhead.

Observer-based detection and location of partial blockages in pipelines

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:28:10 +0100

International audience; This paper proposes an observer-based approach for partial blockage detection in pipelines. This approach is first of all based on a finite-difference modeling of pipelines dynamics subject to partial blockages. The model is then used for a nonlinear (Extended Kalman-like) observer design, which can be used for direct estimation of blockage magnitude and position. The method is finally illustrated via simulation results.

Vehicle trajectory prediction based on motion model and maneuver recognition

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:17:16 +0100

International audience; Predicting other traffic participants trajectories is a crucial task for an autonomous vehicle, in order to avoid collisions on its planned trajectory. It is also necessary for many Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, where the ego-vehicle's trajectory has to be predicted too. Even if trajectory prediction is not a deterministic task, it is possible to point out the most likely trajectory. This paper presents a new trajectory prediction method which combines a trajectory prediction based on Constant Yaw Rate and Acceleration motion model and a trajectory prediction based on maneuver recognition. It takes benefit on the accuracy of both predictions respectively a short-term and long-term. The defined Maneuver Recognition Module selects the current maneuver from a predefined set by comparing the center lines of the road's lanes to a local curvilinear model of the path of the vehicle. The overall approach was tested on prerecorded human real driving data and results show that the Maneuver Recognition Module has a high success rate and that the final trajectory prediction has a better accuracy.

Optical fiber sensors as the primary element in the protection of critical infrastructure especially in optoelectronic transmission lines

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:09:16 +0100

The security systems of the wide area objects are dominated by fiber optic sensors, used primarily to perimeter protection as well as to the protection of vast objects such as pipelines. Critical infrastructure objects are not only industrial facilities but also the transmission lines. Authors present the sensor systems compared to sensors for extensive object security currently available on the market. The designed systems, such as double interferometer system as well as more and more popular QKD systems are sensors with distributed sensing field. These systems, described by authors in many publications, are excellent solutions for the protection of wide area infrastructural objects. Presented fiber sensors, besides sabotage detection also offer the possibility of locating the disturbance along many kilometers of the zone. The solution presented in this paper was designed to adapt well known solutions to the physical protection of the transmission line without interfering with the transmitted data. According to the knowledge of potential threats of fiber optic telecommunications, the authors present methods of protecting fiber optics telecommunication cable, and present their own solutions and describe their application possibilities.

A new method to recover the correct land use and public transport interaction

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 21:03:16 +0100

In the last years the increasing use of private vehicles in urban areas creates negative impacts on the society particularly for the congestion, implying an increase of travel times, of air and noise pollution, of accidents, and the excessive production of greenhouse gases and land consumption. Public transport could represent a more efficient mode of travel with respect to the car, playing an important role to provide a more sustainable transport system. However, infrastructural actions operated on the public transport system are usually of long term, with respect to actions operated on land use, thus creating a considerable temporal gap between the land use and the transport system development. Starting from these remarks, the present study proposes a new method to overcome this temporal discrepancy, using the residual capacity of the mass transit system (existing or its short term development) as a variable to indicate the location and the magnitude of new residential and activities developments. The method has been applied to the city of Rome (Italy), suggesting how the Local Authority could guide the development of the urban area in a sustainable way for the next years.

Framework for the development of performance measures for sustainable asset management practice in road transportation

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:55:46 +0100

The road transportation sector in many countries is faced with the need to simultaneously address two overarching challenges; the need to undertake effective asset management, with the broader need to develop business processes, while embracing sustainability principles. This paper presents a systematic approach for integrating sustainability principles into road asset management practice using performance measures. The key feature of this approach is that it moves away from the traditional approach of a road asset management perspective concerned with physical assets, and instead promotes a holistic view of all tangible and intangible assets relevant to road transport. Additionally, the sustainability evaluation has been extended to cover six relevant dimensions including economic, financial, technological, social, corporate and environmental. The paper also presents a framework for a sustainability performance measurement that can be used by road agencies to assess and monitor the performance of their asset management practice in a systematic manner. The proposed framework includes a set of goals, relevant to road transport asset management (RTAM), for each of the six sustainability dimensions. Each goal is further defined by a set of objectives, indicators, and performance measures that are relevant to the different aspects of RTAM.

Design and Verification of a Health-Monitoring Driver Assistance System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:39:55 +0100

Health-monitoring driver assistance systems support an independent and self-determined lifestyle enhancing the driver's safety. These systems are health-critical and need to guarantee correct behavior in emergency situations such as heart attacks. Furthermore, they have to be adjustable and extendable with respect to integrated functionalities to fit individual and changing needs. We present a concept for a mobile, service-oriented driver assistance system with dynamic network behavior. Additionally, we introduce a verification approach to ensure correct behavior.