Scipedia: Documents published in 2015

An open source procedure to assess the quality of the OpenStreetMap road network

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:57:45 +0100

The Value of Value Engineering—Functionality without Breaking the Bank on a Raw Water Transmission Project in Texas

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:57:00 +0100

The Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD) with the City of Dallas Water Utilities (DWU), are currently engaged in the planning, design and implementation of a 350 MGD raw water transmission system, which will run across north central Texas from Lake Palestine to Lake Benbrook, with connections to Cedar Creek Reservoir, Richland Chambers Reservoir and a Dallas delivery point. Collectively, the system consists of approximately 145 miles of 84-inch to 108-inch pipeline, a 5-mile 120-inch diameter tunnel, three 150 to 275 MGD lake intake pump stations, three 200 to 350 MGD pump stations two of which include 80 MG suction reservoirs, one 450 MG balancing reservoir and ancillary facilities. The program developed by TRWD and DWU to accomplish these improvements is called the Integrated Pipeline Project (IPL). At the onset of the IPL, the project teams were given the mission to deliver this complex program in a sustainable manner by balancing the triple bottom line of “people, planet and profit” or “social, environmental and economic”. As part of the efforts to optimize design functionality against the “profit” component a series of value engineering studies were conducted at key milestones along the project delivery schedule. Formal value engineering workshops were held at the end of the program’s conceptual study to help guide further definition of project components and design scopes. The project was considered in three major areas: pipeline, booster pump stations and balancing reservoir facilities, and lake intake pump station facilities. Value engineering workshops for each of the components of design were conducted at preliminary design and progress design stages. Informal value engineering for each sub-project was collaboratively conducted through component concept reviews and milestone design reviews. The paper discusses the use and results of Value Engineering for a cross country water transmission line project with particular attention to the balancing reservoir sub-components of this system which through “VE” realized a range of savings of 30% to 50% of project budget on a delivered unit basis. Pipelines 2015 1711

Innovative Materials and Design for Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:55:52 +0100

Selected papers presented at the International Symposium on Systematic Approaches to Environmental Sustainability in Transportation held in Fairbanks, Alaska, August 2-5, 2015. Sponsored by the Construction Institute of ASCE.

Frequency-model-based obstruction detection and location in a pipeline by output error minimization

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:52:59 +0100

International audience; In this paper, the problem of obstruction detection and location in pipelines is considered. On the basis of a frequency modeling of pipeline dynamics together with the obstruction effect, a new algorithm is proposed: it basically amounts to obstruction directidentification, by some output error minimization technique. The proposed method is shown to be pretty efficient via simulation results.

ANFIS Traffic Signal Controller for an Isolated Intersection

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:49:22 +0100

Traffic signal controlling is one of the solutions to reduce the traffic congestion in cities. To set appropriate green times for traffic signal lights, we have applied Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) method in traffic signal controllers. ANFIS traffic signal controller is used for controlling traffic congestion of a single intersection with the purpose of minimizing travel delay time. The ANFIS traffic controller is an intelligent controller that learns to set an appropriate green time for each phase of traffic signal lights at the start of the phase and based on the traffic information. The controller uses genetic algorithm to tune ANFIS parameters during learning time. The results of the experiments show higher performance of the ANFIS traffic signal controller compared to three other traffic controllers that are developed as benchmarks. One of the benchmarks is GA-FLC (Araghi et al., 2014), next one is a fixed-FLC, and a fixed-time controller with three different values for green phase. Results show the higher performance of ANFIS controller.

Intensification and forecasting of low-pour-point diesel fuel production via modelling reactor and stabilizer column at industrial unit

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:46:29 +0100

In this work forecast calculation of stabilizer column in the technology of low-pour- point diesel fuel production was modelled. The results of forecast calculation were proved by full-scale experiment at diesel fuel catalytic dewaxing unit. The forecast calculation and full- scale experiment made it possible to determine the ways of mass transfer intensification, as well as to increase the degree of hydrogen sulphide removal in the column, and thereby to decrease corrosiveness of the product stream. It was found out that maintenance of the reflux rate in the range of 80-90 m3/h and injection of additional vapourizing streams, such as stable naphtha from distillation unit (in the volume of 10-22 m{3}/h) and hydrogen-containing gas (in the volume of 100-300 m{3}/h), ensure complete elimination of corrosive hydrogen sulphide from the product stream. Reduction of stream corrosive activity due to suggested solutions extends service life of equipment and pipelines at industrial catalytic dewaxing unit.

Technical Innovations in Cruise Tourism and Results of Sustainability

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:46:00 +0100

Tourism industry is one of the biggest economic sectors of the world with extraordinary development rates. There are negative and positive ecological, economic and social effects which derive from international tourism. The most important negative effects are mostly on environmental quality and sustainable development perspectives of destinations. Positive effects mostly cover employment and income related issues not only in destination regions but also on the side of tourism product suppliers which are related with neighboring worldwide economies. Tourism regions and industries base on solid ecology but also on positive economic and social environment of touristic supplies. Based on growing environmental conscience, it is only possible to reach desired positive effects of tourism if negative ecological, economical and socio-cultural effects minimized and by this way innovation wins stronger meaning with the help of sustainable transport. This paper will evaluate innovation methods within cruise sector which has strong growth numbers of tourism and prepare recommendations for the future of cruise tourism in Turkey. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

A Pathway for Development of Air Traffic Control through Civil-military Integration

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:44:49 +0100

Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:41:06 +0100

Traffic congestion in big cities has been proven to be a difficult problem with adverse effects in terms of driver delay and frustration, cost and impact to the environment. Motivated by the approaches used in air-traffic control, this work investigates a method for controlling traffic congestion using time-dependent route reservation. The advances in information, communication and computation technologies has made such a reservation strategy feasible. This paper illustrates that the new reservation strategy is scalable and can be applied even to large metropolitan areas. To do so, we decompose the road network spatially and temporarily and propose a vehicle scheduling and routing algorithm which completely eliminate congestion. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is very promising. © 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, in-cluding reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to serv-ers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. C. Menelaou, P. Kolios, S. Timotheou and C. G. Panayiotou, "Congestion Free Vehicle Scheduling Using a Route Reservation Strategy," 2015 IEEE 18th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Las Palmas, 2015, pp. 2103-2108. doi: 10.1109/ITSC.2015.340 https://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/rights_policies.html

Document type: Conference object

A Design for the 178-MHz WXGA 30-fps Optical Flow Processor Based on the HOE Algorithm

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:37:26 +0100

We propose an optical flow processor, which allows real-Time processing of WXGA 30-fps at 178.3 MHz. By introducing the SOR method and a pipeline operation for the Gauss-Seidel method to the iterative flow calculation, computational complexity can be reduced to 14.5% when compared to the previous HOE processor. We decreased the area of the embedded memory by using the image division method, applying line memory, and optimizing the computation word length. The core size of the designed processor is 16.82 mm2 in 90 nm process technology, which is approximately 5% of the previous HOE processor. The processor can operate completely in parallel, which ensures high-resolution scalability. © 2015 IEEE.

18th IEEE International Symposium on Design and Diagnostics of Electronic Circuits and Systems, DDECS 2015; Belgrade; Serbia; 22 April 2015 through 24 April 2015; Category numberE5519; Code 116884

A Novel Method of Traffic Lights Adaptive Control on the Urban Road Intersections

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:29:44 +0100

he traffic lights on urban road intersections is one of important methods to control the traffic flow, it can valuably improve the jammed traffic situation. In this paper, an adaptive traffic lights control method on urban road intersections is designed in, it can actively adjust the control time of the traffic lights based on the concrete traffic distribution in real time, so it can realize the dynamic balance between the traffic lights control time and the time that the waiting vehicle pass through the road intersections, so it can avoid taking place the jammed situation, and increase the road utilization.

A dynamically reconfigurable architecture for emergency and disaster management in ITS

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:28:48 +0100

Current transportation infrastructures are not designed to handle unexpected and undesired events or disasters. Emergency Vehicles (EV) such as ambulances, malfunctioning or broken cars, and accidents may appear at any time at any spot in the traffic. Less likely but not inevitably, there might be fires, terrorist attacks, earthquakes which will cause panic behaviour and unexpected traffic congestion. The challenge in our framework is the proposition of a range of innovative solutions for intelligent and efficient traffic management in Emergency and Disaster Management (EDM). In this paper, we propose a multilevel infrastructure which is dynamically reconfigured and thus allows a trade-off between total cost, energy consumption and quality of service in EDM.

Impact of peak electricity demand in distribution grids: a stress test

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:24:46 +0100

The number of (hybrid) electric vehicles is growing, leading to a higher demand for electricity in distribution grids. To investigate the effects of the expected peak demand on distribution grids, a stress test with 15 electric vehicles in a single street is conducted and described in this paper. The test is conducted in a neighbourhood where both transformers and households are equipped with measurement devices. A significant maximum power consumption increase (more than double) is observed at one transformer when both the electric vehicles and domestic loads stress the network. The observed voltage drop in the network is 17V. Analysis further shows that the hosting capacity is around 15%–20% for the investigated networks and that under voltage is unlikely to occur. The measurements are compared to a simulation and the results show that the simulations predict the actual measurement accurately.

BEM simulation model for coupled heat, moisture and air transport through a multilayered porous wall

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:23:26 +0100

Unsteady coupled air, moisture and heat energy flow through a porous solid is simulated numerically using a boundary element model (BEM). The governing transport equations are written and solved for the continuous driving potentials, i.e. relative humidity, temperature and air pressure. The moisture redistribution inside a wall with capillary active interior insulation is analysed to illustrate the applicability and accuracy of the proposed numerical model.

Future Passenger Air Traffic Modelling: Trend Analysis of the Passenger Air Travel Demand Network

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:22:52 +0100

A dynamic partial reconfiguration design for camera systems

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:22:39 +0100

The image-processing pipeline is the core part of any camera system including digital still cameras, camcorders, camera phones and video surveillance equipments. The image-processing pipeline consists of a number of processing stages that enhance the image or remove any effects that are caused by surrounding conditions. These stages are computationally intensive and need special requirements to meet the real time processing. This paper discusses the pipeline parts and presents a high-performance and cost-effective implementation of the pipeline on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) using Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) feature to exploit the FPGA resources over time and space. The paper shows that the implemented system adds much of flexibility to camera systems by using a reconfigurable region. The system can use an unlimited number of image processing pipeline stages to process the images without the need of huge number of logic resources to fit all the stages. Moreover, the stages are not fixed in this system, they can be changed upon the user's decision. The architecture is designed to process still images of size 1920×1080. Each stage could process a full frame within 7.25 ms. A fast configuration engine is designed and deployed in the system. The engine shows that it can outperform the engine provided with zynq SoC by three times. The overall throughput of the system reaches 250 Megapixel/s.

When cycle paths are not enough: Seville’s bicycle-PT project

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:15:52 +0100

The city of Seville (Spain) has been named the fourth most “bicycle-friendly city” in the world, mainly due to the building of a segregated network of bicycle paths which, in a few years, substantially increased utilitarian cycling in the city. However, recent bicycle counts along the network have shown that the volume of cycling is now levelling off at around 6% of the city’s mobility (9% of all mechanised trips); a meaningful level but still far from the figures that are usual in leading cycling cities. This stagnation suggests that new actions are needed in order to further develop urban cycling and overcome bottlenecks that prevent its growth, perhaps by integrating cycling policies into wider sustainable mobility and traffic calming policies. Among these actions, improving links between bicycles and public transport (PT) could play a significant role. This is the subject of the Bicycle-PT research project that is currently being developed by the authors at the University of Seville and founded by the Regional Government. The main aim of this project is to diagnose present links and to evaluate the potential market for bicycle-PT intermodality in the entire metropolitan area, as well as to make specific proposals for its development. For this purpose, the authors use a geographic information system (GIS) based methodology, combined with information provided by mobility and opinion surveys.

Neuroscience based design: Fundamentals and applications

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:15:10 +0100

Neuroscience-based or neuroscience-informed design is a new application area of Brain-Computer Interaction (BCI). It takes its roots in study of human well-being in architecture, human factors study in engineering and manufacturing including neuroergonomics. In traditional human factors studies and/or well-being study, mental workload, stress, and emotion are obtained through questionnaires that are administered upon completion of some task and/or the whole experiment. Recent advances in BCI research allow for using Electroencephalogram (EEG) based brain state recognition algorithms to assess the interaction between brain and human performance. We propose and develop an EEG-based system CogniMeter to monitor and analyze human factors measurements of newly designed software/hardware systems and/or working places. Machine learning techniques are applied to the EEG data to recognize levels of mental workload, stress and emotions during each task. The EEG is used as a tool to monitor and record the brain states of subjects during human factors study experiments. We describe two applications of CogniMeter system: human performance assessment in maritime simulator and EEG-based human factors evaluation in Air Traffic Control (ATC) workplace. By utilizing the proposed EEG-based system, true understanding of subjects working patterns can be obtained. Based on the analyses of the objective real time EEG-based data together with the subjective feedback from the subjects, we are able to reliably evaluate current systems/hardware and/or working place design and refine new concepts and design of future systems.

Car that Knows Before You Do: Anticipating Maneuvers via Learning Temporal Driving Models

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:58:24 +0100

dvanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have made driving safer over the last decade. They prepare vehicles for unsafe road conditions and alert drivers if they perform a dangerous maneuver. However, many accidents are unavoidable because by the time drivers are alerted, it is already too late. Anticipating maneuvers beforehand can alert drivers before they perform the maneuver and also give ADAS more time to avoid or prepare for the danger. In this work we anticipate driving maneuvers a few seconds before they occur. For this purpose we equip a car with cameras and a computing device to capture the driving context from both inside and outside of the car. We propose an Autoregressive Input-Output HMM to model the contextual information alongwith the maneuvers. We evaluate our approach on a diverse data set with 1180 miles of natural freeway and city driving and show that we can anticipate maneuvers 3.5 seconds before they occur with over 80\\% F1-score in real-time.

Comment: ICCV 2015, http://brain4cars.com

Achieving TASAR Operational Readiness

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:53:57 +0100

NASA has been developing and testing the Traffic Aware Strategic Aircrew Requests (TASAR) concept for aircraft operations featuring a NASA-developed cockpit automation tool, the Traffic Aware Planner (TAP), which computes traffic/hazard-compatible route changes to improve flight efficiency. The TAP technology is anticipated to save fuel and flight time and thereby provide immediate and pervasive benefits to the aircraft operator, as well as improving flight schedule compliance, passenger comfort, and pilot and controller workload. Previous work has indicated the potential for significant benefits for TASAR-equipped aircraft, and a flight trial of the TAP software application in the National Airspace System has demonstrated its technical viability. This paper reviews previous and ongoing activities to prepare TASAR for operational use.

Spanish Initiative for Fully Automated Stowage on Roll-on/roll-off Operations

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:50:52 +0100

In the past decades, social development has motivated a notable growth on transportation necessities. In 2020, higher tendencies are expected, so transportation demand will grow about a 20%. Besides, one of the foundations of the UE's Green Policy initiative for freight is the transportation sea-to-ground through the so-called “Short sea shipping” or “Motorways of the sea”. Facing this scenario, it is needed the development of technologies and solutions which contribute to raise the profitability, flexibility and efficiency of marine transportation. This will lead to more competitive freight, so investing on such technologies is a guarantee of success. On this basis, within the framework of the Innterconecta 2013 programme, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the Centre for Industrial Technological Development (CDTI), the project AUTOPORT is being developed, which objectives are here detailed. The main objective of the project is to develop the technologies needed for a fully automated stowage on roll-on/roll-off ships in order to improve the logistic flow, reduce stowage times and maximize the efficiency of the space occupation in hold. This will be accomplished by both the automation of logistic processes and terminal trucks. Automation of processes aims for obtaining a stowage plan which reduces to the minimum the obstructions between cargo and trucks in the process and also the imbalance of the hold, in order to allow easy and smooth load operations even in rough sea conditions. Automation of terminal trucks consist in the efficient use of localization, path planning and control for taking a specifically designated roll trailer and stowing it on the exact hold location pointed by the stowage plan, all without human intervention. CDTI - Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (AUTOPORT)

Pressure Fluctuations in Natural Gas Networks Caused by Gas-Electric Coupling

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:47:18 +0100

The development of hydraulic fracturing technology has dramatically increased the supply and lowered the cost of natural gas in the United States, driving an expansion of natural gas-fired generation capacity in several electrical inter-connections. Gas-fired generators have the capability to ramp quickly and are often utilized by grid operators to balance intermittency caused by wind generation. The time-varying output of these generators results in time-varying natural gas consumption rates that impact the pressure and line-pack of the gas network. As gas system operators assume nearly constant gas consumption when estimating pipeline transfer capacity and for planning operations, such fluctuations are a source of risk to their system. Here, we develop a new method to assess this risk. We consider a model of gas networks with consumption modeled through two components: forecasted consumption and small spatio-temporarily varying consumption due to the gas-fired generators being used to balance wind. While the forecasted consumption is globally balanced over longer time scales, the fluctuating consumption causes pressure fluctuations in the gas system to grow diffusively in time with a diffusion rate sensitive to the steady but spatially-inhomogeneous forecasted distribution of mass flow. To motivate our approach, we analyze the effect of fluctuating gas consumption on a model of the Transco gas pipeline that extends from the Gulf of Mexico to the Northeast of the United States.

Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Seismic response characteristics of buried pipelines subjected to large ground movements during huge earthquakes

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:42:40 +0100

This paper aims to investigate seismic response behavior of buried pipelines subjected to large ground displacements during huge earthquakes and evaluate the response characteristics of them for various conditions of ground and pipelines. The seismic response analysis method for surface ground layers uses 2-dimensional effective stress analysis based on Biot’s two phase mixture theory and Iai’s constitutive equation. The pipeline analysis is based on a beam theory on an elastic foundation and modified transfer matrix method. Numerical computations are performed for various models with changing conditions of ground and pipes. As a result, axial and lateral response characteristics of pipelines are shown and evaluated by relating with earthquakes, ground and pipelines conditions.

Virtual network functions placement and routing optimization

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:38:44 +0100

International audience; Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is incrementally deployed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in their carrier networks, by means of Virtual Network Function (VNF) chains, to address customers' demands. The motivation is the increasing manageability, reliability and performance of NFV systems, the gains in energy and space granted by virtualization, at a cost that becomes competitive with respect to legacy physical network function nodes.From a network optimization perspective, the routing of VNF chains across a carrier network implies key novelties making the VNF chain routing problem unique with respect to the state of the art: the bitrate of each demand flow can change along a VNF chain, the VNF processing latency and computing load can be a function of the demands traffic, VNFs can be shared among demands, etc. In this paper, we provide an NFV network model suitable for ISP operations. We define the generic VNF chain routing optimization problem and devise a mixed integer linear programming formulation. By extensive simulation on realistic ISP topologies, we draw conclusions on the trade-offs achievable between legacy Traffic Engineering (TE) ISP goals and novel combined TE-NFV goals.

Cycling Attitudes and Beliefs: The North-South Diffusion of A "Cycling Mindset"

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:35:29 +0100

Many Southern European cities are now working to encourage bicycle use for commuting. In search of effective strategies, they often study best practices from elsewhere. Dutch cities are a prime example of bike use in Europe. However, in order to assess the likely success of transferring measures, an accurate comparison of the bicycling context is needed. This study explores the similarities and differences in attitudes and beliefs about the decisions to commute by bicycle to work in three small, cycling-oriented cities: Gouda (The Netherlands), Shkodra (Albania), and Peja (Kosovo). As almost everywhere in the Netherlands, cycling conditions are good in Gouda. Shkodra has one of the highest levels of cycling in the Balkan region and Peja is striving to improve its urban amenities for sustainable transport modes. The analysis is based on 45 in-depth interviews with volunteers in the selected cities (15 in each city).

REPAIR: Hard-Error Recovery via Re-Execution

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:30:44 +0100

Processor reliability at upcoming technology nodes presents significant challenges to designers from increased manufacturing variability, parametric variation and transistor wear-out leading to permanent faults. We present a design to tolerate this impact at the microarchitectural level—a chip with n cores together with one or more shared instruction re-execution units (IRUs). Instructions using a faulty component are identified and re-executed on an IRU. This design incurs no slowdown in the absence of errors and allows continued operation of all n cores after multiple hard errors on one or all cores in the structures protected by our scheme. Experiments show that a single-core chip experiences only a 23% slowdown with 1 error, rising to 43% in the presence of 5 errors. In a 4-core scenario with 4 errors on every core and a shared IRU, REPAIR enables performance of 0.68× of a fully functioning system. This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) through grants EP/K026399/1 and EP/J016284/1. Experiments used the Darwin Supercomputer of the University of Cambridge High Performance Computing Service (http://www.hpc.cam.ac.uk/) funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and the Science and Technology Facilities Council. This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/DFT.2015.7315139

Symbiot: Congestion-Driven Multi-resource Fairness for Multi-user Sensor Networks

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:29:36 +0100

© 2015 IEEE.In this paper, we study the problem of multi-resource fairness in multi-user sensor networks with heterogeneous and time-varying resources. Particularly we focus on data gathering applications run on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) or Internet of Things (IoT) in which users require to run a serious of sensing operations with various resource requirements. We consider both the resource demands of sensing tasks, and data forwarding tasks needed to establish multi-hop relay communications. By exploiting graph theory, queueing theory and the notion of dominant resource shares, we develop Symbiot, a light-weight, distributed algorithm that ensures multi-resource fairness between these users. With Symbiot, nodes can independently schedule its resources while maintaining network-level resource fairness through observing traffic congestion levels. Large-scale simulations based Contiki OS and Cooja network emulator show the effectiveness of Symbiot in adaptively utilizing available resources and reducing average completion times.

Longitudinal Jerk Estimation for Identification of Driver Intention

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:42:33 +0100

International audience; We address the problem of estimating online the longitudinal jerk desired by a human driver piloting a car. This estimation is relevant in the context of suitable identification of driver intentions within modern Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) such as the co-driver scheme proposed by some of the authors. The proposed architecture is based on suitably combining a Kalman filter with a scaling technique peculiar of the context of "high-gain" observers. The scaling is appealing because it allows for an easy tuning of the trade-off between phase lag and sensitivity to noise of the resulting estimate. Additionally, we show that using engine-related experimental measurements available in the CAN bus, it is possible to provide a more reliable estimate of the driver-intended jerk, especially in the presence of gear changes. The proposed scheme shows very desirable results on experimental data from a track test, also when compared to a brute force approach based on a mere kinematic model.

Integration of Uncertain Ramp Area Aircraft Trajectories and Generation of Optimal Taxiway Schedules at Charlotte Douglas (CLT) Airport

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:34:47 +0100

User diverse privacy requirements for V2X-technology: Quantitative research on context-based privacy aspects

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:31:54 +0100

The paper will show, how different types of users are evaluating privacy and data security differently according to contextual differentiating traffic situations. The focus is hereby on an analysis of user types to see, if general attributes towards data capture can be identified. User requirements are investigated in age, gender, experience with driver assistance systems and technical affinity. Several significant effects like the influence of prior experience increasing the willingness to share data in an traffic optimizing scenario could be revealed. But results show also an undeniable reluctance towards sharing private data with other traffic participants or companies. Traffic management such as police or the infrastructure itself are however entrusted with various personal information and data.

Robust scale estimation for monocular visual odometry using structure from motion and vanishing points

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:28:43 +0100

While monocular visual odometry has been widely investigated, one of its key issues restrains its broad appliance: the scale drift. To tackle it, we leverage scene inherent information about the ground plane to estimate the scale for usage on Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. The algorithm is conceived so that it is independent of the unscaled ego-motion estimation, augmenting its adaptability to other frameworks. A ground plane estimation using Structure From Motion techniques is complemented by a vanishing point estimation to render our algorithm robust in urban scenarios. The method is evaluated on the KITTI dataset, outperforming state of the art algorithms in areas where urban scenery is dominant.

Wide-body Aircraft Trip Direct Operating Cost Model Based on Trans-log Function

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:28:21 +0100

In order to better instruction airlines to analysis of the civil aircraft economy, this paper proposal an wide- body aircraft trip direct operating cost model from the perspective of macroscopic based on statistical analysis of airlines fleet operation cost data. Firstly, the correlation analysis be used to determine the cost model variables. Secondly, building the aircraft trip direct operation cost model based on trans-log production function, and the ordinary least squares method is used to estimate the function's coefficients. Finally, the model test using 9 aircraft direct operating cost data from 2014 indicate that the average relative error is 0.0711, and an numerical example show that the cost model can be apply to route capacity allocation. So, the model is practical and feasible.

Parameter impact on sharing studies between UAS CNPC satellite transmitters and terrestrial systems

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:14:54 +0100

In order to provide a control and non-payload communication (CNPC) link for civil-use unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) when operating in beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) conditions, satellite communication links are generally required. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has determined that the CNPC link must operate over protected aviation safety spectrum allocations. Although a suitable allocation exists in the 5030–5091 MHz band, no satellites provide operations in this band and none are currently planned. In order to avoid a very lengthy delay in the deployment of UAS in BLOS conditions, it has been proposed to use existing satellites operating in the Fixed Satellite Service (FSS), of which many operate in several spectrum bands. Regulatory actions by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) are needed to enable such a use on an international basis, and indeed Agenda Item (AI) 1.5 for the 2015 World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) was established to decide on the enactment of possible regulatory provisions. As part of the preparation for AI 1.5, studies on the sharing FSS bands between existing services and CNPC for UAS are being contributed by NASA and others. These studies evaluate the potential impact of satellite CNPC transmitters operating from UAS on other in-band services, and on the potential impact of other in-band services on satellite CNPC receivers operating on UAS platforms. Such studies are made more complex by the inclusion of what are essentially moving FSS earth stations, compared to typical sharing studies between fixed elements. Hence, the process of determining the appropriate technical parameters for the studies meets with difficulty. In order to enable a sharing study to be completed in a less-than-infinite amount of time, the number of parameters exercised must be greatly limited. Therefore, understanding the impact of various parameter choices is accomplished through selectivity analyses. In the case of sharing studies for AI 1.5, identification of worst-case parameters allows the studies to be focused on worst-case scenarios with assurance that other parameter combinations will yield comparatively better results and therefore do not need to be fully analyzed. In this paper, the results of such sensitivity analyses are presented for the case of sharing between UAS CNPC satellite transmitters and terrestrial receivers using the Fixed Service (FS) operating in the same bands, and the implications of these analyses on sharing study results.

Cost-effective medium-power charging station for public transport vehicles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:13:21 +0100

Charging stations are becoming an important part of the modern urban infrastructure. This paper describes a concept of a standalone cost-effective medium power charging station dedicated for electric bus charging. It is based on a voltage-source active rectifier operating in both current and voltage mode supplied by low voltage power grid. Appropriate model and simulation of the station at the power level of 300kW are provided.

Wormhole networks properties and their use for optimizing worst case delay analysis of many-cores

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:11:52 +0100

Conference of 10th IEEE International Symposium on Industrial Embedded Systems, SIES 2015 ; Conference Date: 8 June 2015 Through 10 June 2015; Conference Code:116797; International audience; Many-core architectures are promising hardware to design hard real-time systems as they are based on simpler and thus more predictable processors than multi-core systems. However, the worst-case behavior of the Network-on-Chip (NoC) for both inter-core and core to external memories or peripherals communications must be established. Several NoCs targeting hard real-time systems, made of specific hardware extensions, have been designed. However, none of these extensions are currently available in commercially existing NoC-based many-core architectures, that instead rely on wormhole switching with round-robin arbitration. In this paper, we thus demonstrate three properties of such NoC-based wormhole networks to identify worst-case scenarios and reduce the pessimism when modeling flows in contentions. We then describe and evaluate an algorithm to compute Worst-Case Traversal Time (WCTT) of flows that uses these properties. In particular, our results show that the pessimism can be reduced up to 50% compared to current state-of-the-art real-time packet schedulability analysis.

The Influence of Traffic Structure on Airspace Capacity

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:11:07 +0100

ce structure can be used as a procedural mechanism for a priori separation and organization of en-route air traffic. Although many studies have explored novel structuring methods to increase en-route airspace capacity, the relationship between the level of structuring of traffic and airspace capacity is not well established. To better understand the influence of traffic structure on airspace capacity, in this research, four airspace concepts, representing discrete points along the dimension of structure, were compared using large-scale simulation experiments. By subjecting the concepts to multiple traffic demand scenarios, the structure-capacity relationship was inferred from the effect of traffic demand variations on safety, efficiency and stability metrics. These simulations were performed within the context of a future personal aerial transportation system, and considered both nominal and non-nominal conditions. Simulation results suggest that the structuring of traffic must take into account the expected traffic demand pattern to be beneficial in terms of capacity. Furthermore, for the heterogeneous, or uniformly distributed, traffic demand patterns considered in this work, a decentralized layered airspace concept, in which each altitude band limited horizontal travel to within a predefined heading range, led to the best balance of all the metrics considered.

A Solution Framework in Traffic Congestion Management Using RFID Technology

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:08:32 +0100

RFID is a technology which is used to identify remote objects equipped with RFID tags by wireless scanning without manual intervention; it can be used in traffic congestion management. In this paper, we propose a framework of traffic congestion management using RFID technology; a RFID tag management process for every vehicle subsequently.

ASTERICS – Advanced Simulation Models and Accelerated Testing for the Development of Electric Vehicles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:03:03 +0100

The development of Electric Vehicles (EV's), either fully electric (BEV…battery electric vehicle) or different hybrids (like HEV… hybrid electric vehicles or PHEV…plug-in hybrids), is an undeniable prerequisite to fulfill the worldwide emission targets for transport even within the next 10-15 years. The conventional development methods and tools on the other hand, are so far only optimized for the development of vehicles with ICE engines only and not well designed to develop EV's at all. To close this gap, the research in ASTERICS is focused on simulation and testing methods as well as tools that enable the optimal, cost efficient and safe development of EV's. Realistic driving cycles for e-vehicles, models for e-components, test procedures, test equipment and tools as well as system simulation and evaluation have been investigated in, which lasted 3 years (Oct. 2012 – Sept. 2015) and involved 10 partners (OEM: CRV, Volvo; Supplier: AVL, Siemens SAS/SISW, Thien eDrives, GustavKlein; Research: see above).

Modelling Cavity Ventilation Behind Brick Veneer Cladding: How Reliable are the Common Assumptions?

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:02:37 +0100

Throughout the years, different numerical HAM-simulation tools have been developed to assess and predict the heat, air and moisture response of building components. But, though commercially available and commonly applied in building practice, still, several simplifications and shortcomings exist in the common models. Probably the most important one, is the fact that most tools neglect or strongly simplify air transport, focusing only on heat and moisture transport. Especially for the analysis of wood frame constructions, these simplified models may cause a large discrepancy between simulation results and real performance. This study aims at a comparison of the outcomes of numerical HAM-simulations for wood frame constructions with experimental data of real test cases. In particular, the focus of this paper is on cavity ventilation behind brick veneer. Therefore, a simplified version of a wood frame wall with brick veneer cladding is studied in this paper. Different common modelling assumptions are compared. Furthermore, a detailed measuring campaign has been conducted at the VLIET test building of the KU Leuven to validate the different modelling approaches. By verifying the results of the numerical simulations by the data of real test cases, the reliability of the modelling assumptions can be analysed. The results of this study clearly show that simplified assumptions on cavity ventilation in HAM-models might cause large discrepancies between simulation results and in-situ measurements.

The Effect of Demand Response in the Minimum Available Reserve of Energy Management

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:01:41 +0100

This paper presents a multi-objective energy scheduling for the daily operation of a Smart Grid (SG) considering maximization of the minimum available reserve in addition to the cost minimization, to take into account the reliability requirements of critical and vulnerable loads. A Virtual Power Player (VPP) manages the day-ahead energy resource scheduling in the smart grid, considering Distributed Generation (DG) and Vehicle-To-Grid (V2G), while maintaining a highly reliable power for the critical loads. This work considers high penetration of critical loads, e.g. industrial processes that require high power quality, high reliability and few interruptions. A mathematical formulation is described and a deterministic technique based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is used to solve the multi-objective problem. The effect of some customers with DR in this context is analyzed to assess the benefits in the energy scheduling problem. A case study using a 180-bus Portuguese distribution network with 90 load points, several DG units and a large fleet of Electric Vehicles (EVs) with V2G is used to illustrate the performance of the proposed method. info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

High performance computing simulator for the performance assessment of trajectory based operations

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:52:59 +0100

High performance computing (HPC), both at hardware and software level, has demonstrated significant improve- ments in processing large datasets in a timely manner. However, HPC in the field of air traffic management (ATM) can be much more than only a time reducing tool. It could also be used to build an ATM simulator in which distributed scenarios where decentralized elements (airspace users) interact through a centralized manager in order to generate a trajectory-optimized conflict-free scenario. In this work, we introduce an early prototype of an ATM simulator, focusing on air traffic flow management at strategic, pre-tactical and tactical levels, which allows the calculation of safety and efficiency indicators for optimized trajectories, both at individual and network level. The software architecture of the simulator, relying on a HPC cluster of computers, has been preliminary tested with a set of flights whose trajectory vertical profiles have been optimized according to two different concepts of operations: conventional cruise operations (i.e. flying at constant altitudes and according to the flight levels scheme rules) and continuous climb cruise operations (i.e., optimizing the trajectories with no vertical constraints). The novel ATM simulator has been tested to show preliminary benchmarking results between these two concepts of operations. The simulator here presented can contribute as a testbed to evaluate the potential benefits of future Trajectory Based Operations and to understand the complex relationships among the different ATM key performance areas

Peer Reviewed

SPADAS: a high-speed 3D single-photon camera for advanced driver assistance systems

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:52:34 +0100

dvanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are the most advanced technologies to fight road accidents. Within ADAS, an important role is played by radar- and lidar-based sensors, which are mostly employed for collision avoidance and adaptive cruise control. Nonetheless, they have a narrow field-of-view and a limited ability to detect and differentiate objects. Standard camera-based technologies (e.g. stereovision) could balance these weaknesses, but they are currently not able to fulfill all automotive requirements (distance range, accuracy, acquisition speed, and frame-rate). To this purpose, we developed an automotive-oriented CMOS single-photon camera for optical 3D ranging based on indirect time-of-flight (iTOF) measurements. Imagers based on Single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) arrays offer higher sensitivity with respect to CCD/CMOS rangefinders, have inherent better time resolution, higher accuracy and better linearity. Moreover, iTOF requires neither high bandwidth electronics nor short-pulsed lasers, hence allowing the development of cost-effective systems. The CMOS SPAD sensor is based on 64 × 32 pixels, each able to process both 2D intensity-data and 3D depth-ranging information, with background suppression. Pixel-level memories allow fully parallel imaging and prevents motion artefacts (skew, wobble, motion blur) and partial exposure effects, which otherwise would hinder the detection of fast moving objects. The camera is housed in an aluminum case supporting a 12 mm F/1.4 C-mount imaging lens, with a 40°×20° field-of-view. The whole system is very rugged and compact and a perfect solution for vehicle’s cockpit, with dimensions of 80 mm × 45 mm × 70 mm, and less that 1 W consumption. To provide the required optical power (1.5 W, eye safe) and to allow fast (up to 25 MHz) modulation of the active illumination, we developed a modular laser source, based on five laser driver cards, with three 808 nm lasers each. We present the full characterization of the 3D automotive system, operated both at night and during daytime, in both indoor and outdoor, in real traffic, scenario. The achieved long-range (up to 45m), high dynamic-range (118 dB), highspeed (over 200 fps) 3D depth measurement, and high precision (better than 90 cm at 45 m), highlight the excellent performance of this CMOS SPAD camera for automotive applications.

Assessing people travel behavior using GPS and open data to validate neighbourhoods characteristics

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:49:58 +0100

With the help of technologies such as GPS tracks, GIS and open data is now possible to study people travel behaviour in a new way. Nowadays, large datasets can be easily handled thanks to databases and better visualized using GIS. Moreover, the availability of GPS data, open data and VGI makes accessible a lot of new information, which was not obtainable before. This research is about the analysis of mobility patterns in different neighbourhoods in three cities in the Netherlands. The study is based on the validation of mobility theoretical performances by the actual performances measured through the analysis of GPS logs of households, who live in the neighbourhoods. A series of spatial indicators based on proximity, density and accessibility are computed in order to assess the theoretical performances of the neighbourhoods. To achieve this task, information about built environment characteristics and infrastructure networks is retrieved from OpenStreetMap, and other datasets. In the end the neighbourhoods are classified into five classes, according to the different levels of performances in terms of sustainable mobility. In such a way, it is possible to better understand the key factors that influence actual people travel patterns, providing policy makers with accurate information about the real movement of people.

A Formally Verified Conflict Detection Algorithm for Polynomial Trajectories

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:48:22 +0100

In air traffic management, conflict detection algorithms are used to determine whether or not aircraft are predicted to lose horizontal and vertical separation minima within a time interval assuming a trajectory model. In the case of linear trajectories, conflict detection algorithms have been proposed that are both complete, i.e., they detect all conflicts, and sound, i.e., they do not present false alarms. In general, for arbitrary nonlinear trajectory models, it is possible to define detection algorithms that are either sound or complete, but not both. This paper considers the case of nonlinear aircraft trajectory models based on polynomial functions. In particular, it proposes a conflict detection algorithm that precisely determines whether, given a lookahead time, two aircraft flying polynomial trajectories are in conflict. That is, it has been formally verified that, assuming that the aircraft trajectories are modeled as polynomial functions, the proposed algorithm is both sound and complete.

Revisitation analysis of smartphone app use

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:43:38 +0100

We present a revisitation analysis of smartphone use to investigate the question: do smartphones induce usage habits? We analysed three months of application launch logs from 165 users in naturalistic settings. Our analysis reveals distinct clusters of applications and users which share similar revisitation patterns. However, we show that much of smartphone usage on a macro-level is very similar to web browsing on desktops, and thus argue that smartphone usage is driven by innate service needs rather than technology characteristics. On the other hand, on a micro-level we identify unique characteristics in smartphone usage, and we present a rudimentary model that accounts for 92% in the variability of our smartphone use.

Naphthenic Acid Corrosion of 20G under High Flow Rate Flushing

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:39:56 +0100

nalysis of turbulence on the naphthenic acid corrosion specimens under scouring of 90m/s high flow rate fluid by Fluent indicated that maximum turbulence existed at the center of specimen, the turbulence in other zones decreased nonlinearly with the distance from the center. The average corrosion rate of 20G under the scouring of high flow rate corrosive media mainly depended on the corrosion temperature, the maximum average corrosion rate existed at the temperature of 320C was 2.5 times of the minimum average corrosion rate at temperature of 240C. The influence of turbulence on naphthenic acid corrosion was shown in the local corrosion depth in different turbulence areas, experiments indicated that the ratio between maximum corrosion depth in high turbulence areas and average corrosion depth could reach 4 times or more at all experiment temperatures, so high turbulence could significantly increase local corrosion depth and lead to rapid thinning or perforation of pipelines.

Stress-strain analysis of pipelines laid in permafrost

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:37:19 +0100

Increasing reliability of pipelines becomes a real challenge at all stages: design, construction and operation of pipeline systems. It is very important to determine the behaviour of the constructed pipeline under the operational and environmental loads using the design model in accordance with that one adopted in the rules and regulations. This article presents the simulation of pipeline in permafrost. The evaluation of the stress-strain state is given herein and the areas of the stress concentration are detected with the account for different loads occurred during the pipeline operation. Information obtained from the assessment of the stress-strain state of the pipeline allows determining sections in pre-emergency state (even before damages) and take all the necessary measures for eliminating them, thus increasing the pipeline system reliability. It is shown that the most critical pipeline cross-section is observed at the point of transition from one environment to another. The maximum strains decrease the level of the pipeline reliability. The finite element model is presented to determine the pipeline sections in pre-emergency state.

Model-driven estimation of operators' workload for usage centred design of interactive systems

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:36:38 +0100

International audience; The measurement of the operators' workload is an important aspect of usage-oriented design of professional systems. In domains such as avionics, air traffic management or mission systems, being able to quantify the operators' workload under stress, and in potentially demanding physical and mental conditions, is mandatory to anticipate overload and prevent human errors. Current approaches to workload estimation rely mainly on experimentation in simulation as an approach that has proven its efficiency for the identification of bad system and/or user interface design. Even if one cannot expect to totally avoid experimenting, given the complexity of the issue of workload computation, a priori estimation of workload might be an interesting tool to pre-validate a design in order to save some time in the experimentation phase and facilitate the analysis of overload situations that appear during experimentation. Various approaches to the a priori measurement of workload have been proposed: performance-based, physiological and subjective measures. Although performance and physiological measures of workload may be more precise, subjective measures are more practical, easier and less costly to use. For these reasons, they have been applied to many complex domains. The experience, the skills and the level of training of the operator have been identified in the literature as being important human factors. Nevertheless, these parameters have not been deeply analyzed in the context of workload estimation. In this paper, we develop a predictive workload model based on the analysis of the tasks assigned to a human operator. We propose to use mental representations of tasks, human actors, human roles, knowledge and abilities. We then propose to estimate the operator's workload with reference to his experience and training, the load over time and the task complexity. Our approach is illustrated on an airborne maritime surveillance use-case, in the context of the French Medusa project.

Nondestructive characterization of pipeline materials

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:30:56 +0100

There is a growing need to quantitatively and nondestructively evaluate the strength and toughness properties of pipeline steels, particularly in aging pipeline infrastructure. These strength and toughness properties, namely yield strength, tensile strength, transition temperature, and toughness, are essential for determining the safe operating pressure of the pipelines. For some older pipelines crucial information can be unknown, which makes determining the pressure rating difficult. Current inspection techniques address some of these issues, but they are not comprehensive. This paper will briefly discuss current inspection techniques and relevant literature for relating nondestructive measurements to key strength and toughness properties. A project is in progress to provide new in-trench tools that will give strength properties without the need for sample removal and destructive testing. Preliminary experimental ultrasonic methods and measurements will be presented, including velocity, attenuation, and ...

Robust Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Design for Connected Vehicles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:15:34 +0100

In this paper, we design and validate a robust H∞ controller for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) in connected vehicles. CACC systems take advantage of onboard sensors and wireless technologies working together in order to achieve smaller inter-vehicle following distances, with the overall goal of increasing vehicle throughput on busy highways, and hence serving as a viable approach to reduce traffic congestion. A group of connected vehicles equipped with CACC technology must also ensure what is known as string stability. This requirement effectively dictates that disturbances should be attenuated as they propagate along the platoon of following vehicles. In order to guarantee string stability and to cope with the uncertainties seen in the vehicle model used for a model-based CACC, we propose to design and implement a robust H∞ controller. Loop shaping design methodology is used in this paper to achieve desired tracking characteristics in the presence of competing string stability, robustness and performance requirements. We then employ model reduction techniques to reduce the order of the controller and finally implement the reduced-order controller on a simulation model demonstrating the robust properties of the closed-loop system.Copyright © 2015 by ASME

Examining the willingness, reasons, features and for people to “escape” from Beijing

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:12:06 +0100

Based on an investigation analysis, this work examines the willingness, reasons and group features for people to "escape" from Beijing. The results show that, the actual behaviors for people to "escape" from Beijing are not as popular as its voice, only a few percentage of the population really want to leave Beijing. The main reasons driving those people to leave are identified the bad air quality, high housing price and traffic congestion and high working prressure. Most of them want to move to other developed regions. Those people who planned to or want to leave Beijing is characterized by middle level educated, younger age, freer job transformation, longer living in Beijing, being born in other places except Beijing, without hukou and relative higher house living densities. This may imply the transformation of Beijing's economic function to more politics intensive aspects.

Stage of Historical Evolution of Private Vehicle Ownership in the City of Barcelona

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:54:36 +0100

Transport demand and private motor vehicle ownership (cars and motorcycles) are generally related to the socio-economic development, increasing urbanization, public policies and rising per capita income. Private motor vehicle ownership varies between countries and geographical regions. However, it tends to have some common patterns in its historical evolution. So that during the early stages of development, the rate of motorization increased mainly by acquisitions of PTWs (mopeds and motorcycles). As the economy grows, the increase in per capita income stimulates a shift from PTWs to cars, which are preferred for their safety, versatility, comfort and social status. The increasing use of cars contributes to raising travel costs (congestion, parking constraints, accidents, pollution), that coupled with public policies to discourage car use, tends to favor modal shifts from cars to public transport and in some regions also to PTWs. This study analyze the historical evolution of private motor vehicle ownership in Spain (cars and motorcycles), and identify the stage in which is the city of Barcelona, characterized by the high use of PTWs. The increase use of PTWs is a common phenomenon in some major European cities and suggests a continuous future growth in developed countries and congested urban areas, that is not in line with the assumptions of some models, which predict that in the long-run there will be a decrease in use of PTWs in areas with high income per capita levels.

Peer Reviewed

Filling Accuracy Analysis of the Rocket Propellant based on the Flowmeter Measuring Model

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:47:45 +0100

The high filling accuracy of rocket propellant is an important guarantee for the success of the rocket launch. In view of the factors that affect filling accuracy of the rocket propellant in the filling system of the spaceflight launch site, the algorithm of propellant filling accuracy calculation based on the flowmeter measuring model is proposed in this paper. It respectively carries through mathematical analyses for the different factors affecting the filling accuracy. Through the proposed algorithm, numerical calculation has been carried on the comprehensive filling accuracy of rocket propellant under the existing filling process. It can provide theoretical basis and data support for optimizing filling control process and improving filling accuracy in the launch site, so as to further improving the success rate of rocket launch.

Segmentation of Crack and Open Joint in Sewer Pipelines Based on CCTV Inspection Images

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:26:35 +0100

New Genetic Optimization Strategies In Efficient Off-Line Traffic Engineering For Simulating Multi-Service UMTS Cellular Networks

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:25:52 +0100

This paper presents new strategies for offline traffic engineering, when designing multi-service UMTS networks, based on an efficient modification of basic genetic optimization techniques. More specifically, the problem setup includes Mobile Internet access as the most emergent trade in the telecommunications industry due to the advancement of cellular smartphones, tablets, notebooks and netbooks based computing and communicating technologies. In this real world set-up, the integration of deployed wireless networks with the Internet and the transparent interworking among different wireless technologies, namely EDGE/GPRS/CDMA2000 cellular and Wireless LAN (WLAN), appears to be a demanding objective for mobile communications service providers. The mixture and convergence of mobile and fixed infrastructures related services make it urgent to tackle quality of service and traffic engineering for mobile networks at the fundamental transport level with regards to OSI network analysis. A good solution to address such issues is the Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology providing a fused control instrument with connectionless multiprotocol capabilities, functioning over different communication media while supporting traffic engineering and quality of service (QoS) offering smooth traffic over the complex network of mobile and fixed communication infrastructures. Therefore, the MPLS architecture offers the required capacity to integrate different services over wired and wireless infrastructures in a unified convergent approach. Based on these concepts, this research proposal investigates traffic engineering solutions in MPLS involved wireless cellular networks. In this paper, two new methods for the solution of the off-line Traffic Engineering (TE) problem in multi-service wireless networks based on a certain efficient modification of basic genetic optimisation are presented. In the first method the off-line TE problem is formulated as an optimisation model with linear constraints and then solved using a new modified version of the Genetic Algorithm for Numerical Optimisation for Constraint Problems (GENOCOP). Besides, a hybrid method for the solution of the aforementioned problem involving modified GENOCOP and a heuristic TE algorithm is also provided. The performance of the above methods against a standard LP-based optimisation method is examined in terms of two different network topologies mixing both wireless and wired links and numerical test results are provided.

Modelling in-pipe acoustic signal propagation for condition assessment of multi-layer water pipelines

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:24:06 +0100

solution to the condition assessment of fluid-filled conduits based on the analysis of in-pipe acoustic signal propagation is presented in this paper. The sensor arrangement consists of an acoustic emitter from which a known sonic pulse is generated, and a collocated hydrophone receiver that records the arrival acoustic wave at a high sampling rate. The proposed method exploits the influence of the surrounding environment on the propagation of an acoustic wave to estimate the condition of the pipeline. Specifically, the propagation speed of an acoustic wave is influenced by the hoop stiffness of the surrounding materials, a fact that has been exploited in the analysis of boreholes in the literature. In this work, this finding is extended to validate the analytical expression derived to infer the condition of uniform, axis-symmetric lined waterworks, a first step to ultimately be able to predict the remaining active life (time-to-failure) of pipelines with arbitrary geometries through finite element analysis (FEA). An investigation of the various aspects of the proposed methodology with typical pipe material and structures is presented to appreciate the advantages of modelling acoustic waves behaviours in fluid-filled cylindrical cavities for condition assessment of water pipelines.

Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environmental Engineering

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:11:56 +0100

The present paper aims at monitoring the behavior of the high density polyethylene pipe when pressed by an external force in order to shut it off so that the natural gas can no longer pass through the distribution pipelines. The behavior of the polyethylene pipe will be observed by means of fast shutter cameras, and the mechanical tests will be conducted by using the squeeze-off tool. Keywords-mechanical test; polyethylene pipe; rapid photography

Structure parameter optimization of a variable geometry tracked robot for structured environment

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:09:33 +0100

This paper presents an optimization design method of a variable geometry tracked robot for structured environment. The types and sizes of the obstacles in the structured environment are known. Based on the kinematics analysis of climbing stairs, surmounting pipelines and crossing gullies, the performance functions which display the relationship between structure parameters of the robot and the sizes of obstacles are obtained. Then according to the requirements of overcoming the obstacles in the structured environment, the performance functions are turned into the objective functions, and the goal programming model is obtained. Furthermore, considering the nonlinearity of the model, the pattern search method is applied to obtain the optimization result. Finally, a dynamics simulation platform is set up to verify the performance of the robot, and the feasibility of the parameter optimization method of the robot designed for structured environment is proved.

VSP: building a virtual Service Provider with off-the-shelf cloud services

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:08:01 +0100

International audience; Multihoming, connecting through several service providers, is becoming common in both residential and Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) with a high potential to enabling rich cloud-based network services for all. However, Traffic Engineering (TE) in such context remains a challenge as having different service providers means as well having different, independent, provider-specific policies that seldom work together, while often being conflicting.In order to overcome the hassle of trying to have a coherent TE based on independent ISPs that would truly enable rich cloud-based network services, we propose to create an over- the-top virtual Service Provider – vSP. We show that based on existing cloud services and off-the-shelf technology it is possible to easily deploy its own vSP, including an easy to use management framework allowing full policies control so to have a coherent TE while fully exploiting the underlying ISPs and thus benefit from network services offloaded to the cloud.

Wireless sensor networks in oil pipeline systems using electromagnetic waves

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:04:08 +0100

The realization of WUSNs (Wireless Underground Sensor Networks) will lead to many emerging applications, such as intelligent agriculture, underground pipelines, oil reservoir monitoring, concealed border patrol, earthquake and landslide forecasting, underground mine disaster prevention and rescue etc. The hostile underground environments prevent the direct use of most, if not all, existing wireless communication and networking solutions, due to the extremely high path loss, small communication range, and high dynamics of electromagnetic (EM) waves when penetrating the soil, sand, rock, water, crude oil medium in the underground environment and in pipelines. The objective of the paper is to address these unique and important challenges for the realization of wireless sensor networks in Oil Pipeline Systems. Research also focuses on developing a general framework using wireless sensor networks to provide continuous monitoring. © 2015 Chamber of Electrical Engineers of Turkey.

Acceptance of Automated Road Transport Systems (ARTS): An Adaptation of the UTAUT Model

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:03:45 +0100

research into innovative forms of automated transportation systems gains momentum, it is important that we develop an understanding of the factors that will impact the adoption of these systems. In an effort to address this issue, the European project CityMobil2 is collecting data around large-scale demonstrations of Automated Road Transport Systems (ARTS) in a number of cities across Europe. For these systems to be successful, user acceptance is vital. The current study used the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) to investigate the factors which might influence acceptance of ARTS vehicles, which were operational in two locations in Europe. The results indicate that the UTAUT constructs of performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social influence were all useful predictors of behavioural intentions to use ARTS, with performance expectancy having the strongest impact. However, it would appear that other factors are also needed in order for the model to strongly predict behavioural intentions in an automated transport context. Based on these findings, a number of implications for developers and ideas for future research are suggested.

Hybrid shipping for inland navigation : loss analysis of an aluminum direct-drive high performance 11,OOONm permanent magnet machine

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:56:50 +0100

Hybrid electric ship propulsions are becoming a leading/emerging area of research, prompting investigation in hybrid propulsion system design and demonstration of concept vessels. With respect to ship design and operation, minimizing costs associated with fuel consumption and maintenance are key objectives. As such, new, and existing, ships are subject to regulatory requirements, especially regarding emissions and energy efficiency. Hybrid electric propulsion is a promising approach in addressing these concerns. Particularly for inland vessels that require a high degree of manoeuvrability and are continuously travelling upstream and downstream. In this work, a Permanent Magnet propulsion motor with 350kW at 300rpm, hence around 11,000Nm, will be discussed. With this motor a quiet mode is available with reduced emission during electric cruising and dynamic positioning.

An Agent-Based Model to Study Effects of Team Processes on Compliance with Safety Regulations at an Airline Ground Service Organization

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:52:03 +0100

Maintaining high levels of safety under conditions of ever increasing air traffic is a challenging task. Failures to comply with safety-related regulations are often considered to be important contributors to safety occurrences. To address the issue of compliance, approaches based on external regulation of the employees’ behavior were proposed. Unfortunately, an externally imposed control is often not internalized by employees and has a short-term effect on their performance. To achieve a long-term effect, employees need to be internally motivated to adhere to regulations. Theories from social sciences propose that team processes play an important role in the dynamics of individual motivation. In this paper an agent-based model is proposed, by which the impact of social interaction and coordination in teams of platform employees on their individual motivation and compliance with safety regulations at an airline ground service organization are explored. The model was simulated and partially validated by a case study performed at a real airline ground service organization. The model was able to reproduce behavioral patterns of compliance of the platform employees in this study.

Analytical simulation and experimental comparison of the losses in resonant DC/DC converter with Si and SiC switches

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:50:50 +0100

High efficiency is among the most important targets in power electronic converters. A possible approach to obtain this goal is the usage of better switches. This paper is focused at the study and comparison of SiC and Si power MOSFETS in soft switching resonant DC/DC converter. The latter converter being a part of light battery charger used in ultra-light electric vehicles is realized and investigated. The losses in the power switches are compared mathematically, with simulations and experimental verification. Two types of transistors are considered. First traditional state of the art Si-technology using a FREDFET (fast recovery diode MOSFET) and it is compared with what the SiC technology offers, using a fast Schottky antiparallel diode. As an example a 1500 W series resonance converter with input voltage of 400 V and output voltage of 100 V is used. The latter voltage permitting the use of Schottky diodes at the secondary side. The losses in both converters are compared via calorimetric measurements to avoid accuracy problems as in loss measurements with an oscilloscope for example.

The Design of Traffic Warning Platform Based on IoT Technology

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:48:37 +0100

With the rapid development of China's economy, the number of vehicles has a sharp increase. It led to the traffic problem becoming more and more serious, with the problems of traffic congestion, easy to cause accidents, solving the accident no in time and so on. For the current traffic congestion problem, the paper designs a traffic warning and monitoring platform based on IoT technology. It takes advantage of computer technology, communication technology, sensor technology and so on, connecting together vehicles with the side of road infrastructures over wireless network, and finally we can know the status of the entire cars' on the monitoring platform which is at road junction. It can shorten the time of finding and dealing with accidents, improve the overall efficiency, reduce operating costs and facilitate people's life.

Does ATM Need Centralized Coordination? Autonomous Conflict Resolution Analysis in a Constrained Speed Environment

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:42:42 +0100

International audience; The concept of Free-Flight, introduced in the 90s, opened a debate on the efficiency of letting aircraft deal with conflicts without any centralized control. Many models have been proposed for autonomous aircraft solvers but their efficiency is not well-known. In this paper, we experiment powerful algorithm derived from robotics which is able to deal with thousands of robots in very small spaces, and show how its performance plummets when speeds are constrained. We also compare this autonomous algorithm with a centralized approach using evolutionary computation on a complex example to point out their relative performance in a speed constrained environment. This comparison provides scientific arguments for the necessity of centralized air traffic control.

Growing the charging station network for electric vehicles with trajectory data analytics

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:39:25 +0100

Electric vehicles (EVs) have undergone an explosive increase over recent years, due to the unparalleled advantages over gasoline cars in green transportation and cost efficiency. Such a drastic increase drives a growing need for widely deployed publicly accessible charging stations. Thus, how to strategically deploy the charging stations and charging points becomes an emerging and challenging question to urban planners and electric utility companies. In this paper, by analyzing a large scale electric taxi trajectory data, we make the first attempt to investigate this problem. We develop an optimal charging station deployment (OCSD) framework that takes the historical EV taxi trajectory data, road map data, and existing charging station information as input, and performs optimal charging station placement (OCSP) and optimal charging point assignment (OCPA). The OCSP and OCPA optimization components are designed to minimize the average time to the nearest charging station, and the average waiting time for an available charging point, respectively. To evaluate the performance of our OCSD framework, we conduct experiments on one-month real EV taxi trajectory data. The evaluation results demonstrate that our OCSD framework can achieve a 26%–94% reduction rate on average time to find a charging station, and up to two orders of magnitude reduction on waiting time before charging, over baseline methods. Moreover, our results reveal interesting insights in answering the question: “Super or small stations?”: When the number of deployable charging points is sufficiently large, more small stations are preferred; and when there are relatively few charging points to deploy, super stations is a wiser choice.

Testing advanced driver assistance systems using multi-objective search and neural networks

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:38:54 +0100

Recent years have seen a proliferation of complex Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), in particular, for use in autonomous cars. These systems consist of sensors and cameras as well as image processing and decision support software components. They are meant to help drivers by providing proper warnings or by preventing dangerous situations. In this paper, we focus on the problem of design time testing of ADAS in a simulated environment. We provide a testing approach for ADAS by combining multi- objective search with surrogate models developed based on neural networks. We use multi-objective search to guide testing towards the most critical behaviors of ADAS. Surrogate modeling enables our testing approach to explore a larger part of the input search space within limited computational resources. We characterize the condition under which the multi-objective search algorithm behaves the same with and without surrogate modeling, thus showing the accuracy of our approach. We evaluate our approach by applying it to an industrial ADAS system. Our experiment shows that our approach automatically identifies test cases indicating critical ADAS behaviors. Further, we show that combining our search algorithm with surrogate modeling improves the quality of the generated test cases, especially under tight and realistic computational resources.

Managing high penetration of renewable energy in MV grid by electric vehicle storage

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:28:43 +0100

This paper proposes an intelligent algorithm for dealing with high penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs) in the medium voltage by intelligently managing electric vehicles (EVs), as one of the grid flexible loads. The MV grid used in this work is a CIGRE benchmark grid. Different residential and industrial loads are considered in this grid. The connection of medium voltage wind turbines to the grid is investigated. The solar panels in this study are residential panels. Also, EVs are located among the buses with residential demand. The study is done for different winter and summer scenarios, considering typical load profiles in Denmark. Different scenarios have been studied with different penetration level of RESs in the grid. The results show the capability of the proposed algorithm to reduce voltage deviations among the grid buses, as well as to increase the RES penetration in the grid by intelligent management of EVs.

How to solve the fronthaul traffic congestion problem in H-CRAN?

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:20:39 +0100

The design of efficient wireless fronthaul connections for future heterogeneous networks incorporating emerging paradigms such as heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN) has become a challenging task that requires the most effective utilization of fronthaul network resources. In this paper, we propose and analyze possible solutions to facilitate the fronthaul traffic congestion in the scenario of Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) for 5G cellular traffic which is expected to reach ZetaByte by 2017. In particular, we propose to use distributed compression to reduce the fronthaul traffic for H-CRAN. Unlike the conventional approach where each coordinating point quantizes and forwards its own observation to the processing centre, these observations are compressed before forwarding. At the processing centre, the decompression of the observations and the decoding of the user messages are conducted in a joint manner. Our results reveal that, in both dense and ultra-dense urban small cell deployment scenarios, the usage of distributed compression can efficiently reduce the required fronthaul rate by more than 50% via joint operation.

Two-stage Stochastic Model for Petroleum Supply Chain from the Perspective of Carbon Emission

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:11:41 +0100

With the strengthening of environmental protection awareness, carbon emission has become an important factor in the study of petroleum supply chain. This paper studies the petroleum supply chain from the view of carbon emission by combining with the choice of facilities location selection, production, transportation arrangement, and carbon tax policy. Researchers divide the source of crude oil into domestic crude oil and imported crude oil, and also establish a two-stage stochastic model, which is based on the volatility of the price of imported crude oil. Preliminary numerical result reveals that with the emphasis on the carbon factor, the petroleum supply chain prefers to pipeline transportation and imported cru de oil, so that the carbon emissions may be controlled effectively.

Theory Research and Practice of Structure Safety Measures and Deformation Prediction in Goaf

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:09:46 +0100

Recently, coal mining in Jining has extended to the crowded cities and villages, bringing out the deformation of the rock in these areas, which leads to the damage of the civil and industrial buildings. Therefore, the ground surface deformation and the damage characteristics of the buildings have been studied, and appropriate safety measures have been taken according to different damage characteristics to reduce or even to avoid the damage of the buildings. The effect of different mining schemes on the ground has been analyzed, and the effects on important buildings have been studied. Safety measures have been taken on the space truss, oil tanks and pipelines of gas station and tensile stress of soil have been released by pressure releasing groove around the station. Some conclusions have reference significance for other relevant projects.

Strength characteristics of sealer devices at design stage

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:08:41 +0100

The paper deals with strength characteristics of several sealer devices used to seal the inner cavity of an oil pipeline during the replacement of a pipeline section. Construction calculations revealed the stresses related to the pressurized rubber-cord sealing element rupture resulted from an emergency situation. It was concluded that it is necessary to test the operating parameters before applying the sealers. Estimation of the safety factor of existing sealer devices designs was conducted and recommendations for its increase were proposed.

A PHM System Approach: Application to a Simplified Aircraft Bleed System

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:06:06 +0100

Regarding Prognostics and Health Management (PHM), the stakes lie in system-level prognostics or even the prognostics of systems of systems, as decisions are usually made at system or platform level. In this paper, a method, which takes into account both the system redundancy and the adaptation of operational modes in degraded functioning, is proposed and formalized. This method makes the system-level prognostics more relevant. The main feature of the method is to re-compute the components Remaining Useful Life (RUL) using the degradation rate associated to the future operating mode(s) due to system reconfiguration. This results in an improvement of both the System RUL (SRUL) and the components RUL. The proposed method is applied on a simplified aircraft bleed valve system to illustrate its effectiveness. This method is primarily destined to aeronautic systems, which are usually resilient. It has not been tested whether or not it could be useful in other fields.

Partial and Local Knowledge for Global Efficiency of Urban Vehicular Traffic

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:05:30 +0100

International audience; Intelligent transportation systems that distribute information between roadside infrastructures and vehicles are one of the most promising solutions to the problem of traffic congestion. When most existing ITS solutions are centralized and information-complete, we propose PDLAIS-a Partial, Decentralized and Locally Autonomous Strategy, tested with an application called Smooth Way, allowing drivers to customize and improve their travel time and/or fuel consumption when traveling. Our study shows that, with only 2% of independently equipped intersections, a global improvement in the fuel consumption induces a reduction of 10% of the total travel time and 25% of the global waiting time. Local decisions with pertinent partial knowledge of the network are still 5 − 7% close to the performance of a centralized solution.

A physical design study of fabscalar-generated superscalar cores

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:04:02 +0100

FabScalar is a recently published tool for automatically generating superscalar cores, of different pipeline widths, depths and sizes. The output of FabScalar is a synthesizable register-transfer-level (RTL) description of the desired core. While this capability makes sophisticated cores more accessible to designers and researchers, meaningful applications require reducing RTL descriptions to physical designs. This paper presents the first systematic physical design study of FabScalar-generated superscalar cores.

Sales pipeline win propensity prediction: A regression approach

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:02:17 +0100

Sales pipeline analysis is fundamental to proactive management of an enterprize's sales pipeline and critical for business success. In particular, win propensity prediction, which involves quantitatively estimating the likelihood that on-going sales opportunities will be won within a specified time window, is a fundamental building block for sales management and lays the foundation for many applications such as resource optimization and sales gap analysis. With the proliferation of big data, the use of data-driven predictive models as a means to drive better sales performance is increasingly widespread, both in business-to-client (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets. However, the relatively small number of B2B transactions (compared with the volume of B2C transactions), noisy data, and the fast-changing market environment pose challenges to effective predictive modeling. This paper proposes a machine learning-based unified framework for sales opportunity win propensity prediction, aimed at addressing these challenges. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed system using data from a top-500 enterprize in the business-to-business market.

Comment: accepted by IM2015 as short paper

Rethinking Data-Intensive Science Using Scalable Analytics Systems

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:56:50 +0100

"Next generation" data acquisition technologies are allowing scientists to collect exponentially more data at a lower cost. These trends are broadly impacting many scientific fields, including genomics, astronomy, and neuroscience. We can attack the problem caused by exponential data growth by applying horizontally scalable techniques from current analytics systems to accelerate scientific processing pipelines. In this paper, we describe ADAM, an example genomics pipeline that leverages the open-source Apache Spark and Parquet systems to achieve a 28x speedup over current genomics pipelines, while reducing cost by 63%. From building this system, we were able to distill a set of techniques for implementing scientific analyses efficiently using commodity "big data" systems. To demonstrate the generality of our architecture, we then implement a scalable astronomy image processing system which achieves a 2.8--8.9x improvement over the state-of-the-art MPI-based system.

Numerical Modeling of Geological Environment Impact on the Pipelines

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:37:26 +0100

The general technique of assessment of the stress-strain state of the system “geological environment-pipeline” that is subject to hazardous geological processes has been proposed. It is based on the numerical-analytical algorithms of stresses and displace

Modeling of Complex and Diverse Aircraft Trajectories with the Trajectory Synthesizer Generalized Profile Interface

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:37:08 +0100

flexible interface for prescribing complex and diverse aircraft trajectories called GenProf was developed and tested on the Center TRACON Automation System (CTAS) software research platform. This interface models various pilot procedures, supports common flight constraints imposed by air traffic control, and allows the building of trajectories in accordance with new flight procedures. In addition to serving trajectory generation for air traffic management decision support tools and concepts, the GenProf methodology has enabled a variety of research and validation tasks to be performed. This paper describes the interface and details these applications.

Algorithm and data support of traffic congestion forecasting in the controlled transport

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:30:45 +0100

© Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. The topicality of problem of the traffic congestion forecasting in the logistic systems of product movement highways is considered. The concepts: the controlled territory, the highway occupancy by vehicles, the parking and the controlled territory are introduced. Technical realizabilityof organizing the necessary flow of information on the state of the transport system for its regulation has been marked. Sequence of practical implementation of the solution is given. An algorithm for predicting traffic congestion in the controlled transport system is suggested.

A concept of forecasting origin-destination air passenger demand between global city pairs using future socio-economic scenarios

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:30:21 +0100

This study introduces a concept of a new method of forecasting air passenger flows on a global level using socio-economic scenarios. The method has two steps: forecasting the topology of origin-destination demand network and predicting the number of passengers on existing and new connections. Network theory is applied to simulate demand connections between cities utilizing weighted similarity based algorithms. The number of passengers on a connection is defined using quantitative analogies. Preliminary calculations show promising results. This concept of the global passenger demand prediction will be applied in a modular environment modeling the future air transport system.

Study on the problems and Countermeasures of Oil and Gas Storage and Transportation Systems in China

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:27:22 +0100

With the rapid development of Chinese economy, the using amount of both the oil, as an important pillar of industry construction and natural gas, as the energy needed in people's daily lives has been an increasing trend. With the increasing use of oil and gas resources, there are still many problems to be solved in oil and gas storage and transportation processes, for example, oil and gas storage and transportation pipelines are easily corroded, how to prevent fire hazards in oil and gas storage and transportation process, how to reduce evaporation losses by effective means because of its easily evaporating feature in oil gas storage and transportation process, which are the key issues that existing in oil and gas storage and transportation systems needed to attract enough attention. Through in-depth analysis and research to the practical issues, appropriate solutions should be made to ensure the security and environmental protection of oil and gas storage and transportation systems in the oil and gas storage and transportation process.

Model Reduction and Optimization of Natural Gas Pipeline Dynamics

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:24:05 +0100

We derive a reduced control system model for the dynamics of compressible gas flow through a pipeline subject to distributed time-varying injections, withdrawals, and control actions of compressors. The gas dynamics PDE equations are simplified using lumped elements to a nonlinear ODE system with matrix coefficients. We verify that low-order integration of this ODE system with adaptive time-stepping is computationally consistent with solution of the PDE system using a split-step characteristic scheme on a regular space-time grid for a realistic pipeline model. Furthermore, the reduced model is tractable for use as the dynamic constraints of the optimal control problem of minimizing compression costs given transient withdrawals and gas pressure constraints. We discretize this problem as a finite nonlinear program using a pseudospectral collocation scheme, which we solve to obtain a polynomial approximation of the optimal transient compression controls. The method is applied to an example involving the Williams-Transco pipeline.Copyright © 2015 by ASME

Up in the air: Barriers to greener air traffic control and infrastructure lock-in in a complex socio-technical system

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:19:58 +0100

Greater automation of air traffic control (ATC) could reduce aviation's climate change impacts, but improvements predicted long ago have been slow to happen. This resistance to ATC modernisation is framed as an issue of lock-in, and the detailed case study described here enables an analysis of the factors involved in slowing change. Although the classic lock-in effects of ‘increasing returns’ and ‘network externalities’ are important, a major barrier to modernisation is due to the political and organisational challenges of coordinating change across a large, complex socio-technical system. However, lock-in effects are crucial with respect to the perceived increasing returns accrued from experience with manual ATC operations, and the difficulty of quantifying the risks of automation (particularly as regard the use of complex software) is a major barrier to further improvements. Overcoming this obstacle to further automation depends on finding ways to test and operate new ATC software and procedures without compromising safety.

Document type: Article

Experiment Study on Yield Stress Using Curve Extension Method and Vane Method

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:14:15 +0100

The yield stress is a key rheological parameter of thick paste and critical design parameter of the high pressure pipeline system. Take coal slurry as an example, whether using vane method or curve extension method, the yield stress both exponentially increase with concentration increasing, but the data of yield stress in two methods is different. For pipes with different diameters, the yield stress showed in pipeline transportation varies during the extension of rheology curves. By contrasting the results of curve extension method and vane method using pipelines with different diameters, it comes that with a certain concentration and a certain range of diameter, yield stress with vane is bigger than that with curve extension, due to the effect of wall slip in pipe flow test.

The implementation of the electric taxi fleet in the city of Poznan, Poland

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:12:01 +0100

Transport is an essential element of socio-economic growth, however, its development, besides the obvious benefits, generates a number of external costs such as congestion, noise, emission of harmful substances into the environment, depletion of non-renewable resources and energy consumption. One of the factors affecting the reduction of the environmental burden from road transport is the replacement of the conventionally-fueled vehicles by other types of powertrains, including the electric drives. The introduction of electric vehicles may become the key element in the sustainable transport strategy development in urban areas, but due to the fact that electric vehicles are still unpopular, the demand for these vehicles should be boosted by the vehicle fleet owners, especially by the companies providing transport services. The introduction of electric taxis requires the construction of an appropriate charging infrastructure, i.e. the selection of the charging station type and the determination of the number and locations of the stations. The paper outlines the progress in the introduction of electric taxi fleets in several cities. The main section relates to the possibility of the implementation of electric taxicabs in the city of Poznan, an agglomeration of 600 thousand inhabitants, located in the western part of Poland. The choice of vehicle and the calculation of the operating costs of a taxicab, as well as the calculation of the charging infrastructure costs have been also presented.

Emissions in real urban traffic conditions as a determinant of shaping sustainable urban development

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:11:22 +0100

The paper presents an approach to analyse the impact of emissions in real urban traffic conditions on the shaping of a sustainable transport system. The authors show that developing a sustainable transport system will permit a wide range of research, experimentation and simulation of apportioning traffic streams on the transport network. Some aspects of estimating the level of harmful emissions generated by the transport network users across the country or the particular areas are presented. The paper presents the part of research in the “EMITRANSYS” project implemented by the Faculty of Transport in Warsaw University of Technology and the Poznan University of Technology.

Autonomous driving at intersections: combining theoretical analysis with practical considerations

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:04:11 +0100

International audience; The move towards automated driving is gaining impetus recently. This paper follows the approach of combining theoretical analysis with practical issues. It gives an insight of some practical problems that are encountered when running automated vehicles in real environments, using intersection crossing as a major example. The aim is not to try to be exhaustive but to show some criteria (safety, efficiency, reactivity, resilience, scalability…) for decision making in automated driving that have to be balanced before any mass deployment. In a second part we introduce mathematical tools that can help define algorithms and systems that improve current state of the art. We will also show some perspective for accommodating the hypotheses of these mathematical tools with real life constraints.

Modeling and simulation of function allocation concepts for separation assurance

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:58:37 +0100

This paper introduces a fast-time simulation testbed for conducting parametric studies to support the study of function allocation for separation assurance in the National Airspace System. The allocation of separation assurance functions between ground-based and airborne systems remains a topic of considerable interest in the air traffic management research community. The testbed, built on NASA's Airspace Concepts Evaluation System, provides a robust, fast-time simulation platform with the flexibility and modularity to represent a wide range of function allocation concepts and architectures. Candidate concepts, algorithms and other models (e.g., aircraft performance, weather, communications, surveillance, sources of uncertainty, etc.) can be rapidly prototyped and studied in the testbed. Accordingly, the testbed is uniquely equipped to address specific foundational research questions that may inform the continued exploration of air/ground function allocation for separation assurance. This paper introduces the design and architecture of the testbed, and presents an example case to demonstrate the application of the simulation platform to a function allocation research question.

Location Privacy of ADS-B for General Aviation

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:57:39 +0100

utomatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B) is a satellite-based system that makes an aircraft equipped with it periodically generates ADS-B broadcasts including the aircraft’s identifier, position, velocity, etc. Since the broadcasts can enhance navigation capability remarkably, it has replaced radar and becomes the backbone of the air traffic management (ATM) of next generation. However, the leak of identity and location privacy allows adversaries to track flights easily. Especially in general aviation, people’s travel destination may be related to personal privacy, commercial secrets and other important information that need to be protected. In this paper, the author studies a well-known location privacy protection scheme named random silent period which enhances the uncertainty by mix the target plane with other planes in the anonymity set and entropy is used to evaluate the uncertainty. Furthermore, we proposes a new correlation tracking method to improve the uncertainty. The evaluation of location privacy demonstrates that the method is more practical and accurate than the simple tracking method. Keywords— ADS-B; location privacy; random silent period; entropy; tracking

Fog Computing Architecture to Enable Consumer Centric Internet of Things Services

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:55:39 +0100

International audience; Fog Computing is a recent computing paradigm that is extending cloud computing towards the edge of network. Due to its proximity to end-users, dense geographical distribution, open platform and support for high mobility, Fog Computing platforms can provide services with reduced latency and improved QoS. Thus it is becoming an important enabler for consumer centric Internet of Things based applications and services that require real time operations e.g. connected vehicles, smart road intersection management and smart grid. The paper discusses one such architecture for connected vehicles with Road Side Units (RSUs) and M2M gateways including the Fog Computing Platform. M2M data processing with semantics, discovery and management of connected vehicles are briefly discussed as consumer centric IoT services enabled by the distinct characteristics of Fog Computing.

Effects of product usage scenarios on environmental performance for road transport refrigeration units

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:51:41 +0100

significant issue for the transport refrigeration industry is its high use of non-renewable energy for both motion and refrigeration. With the goal of reducing the environmental footprint, this study is focused on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Truck Refrigeration Units (TRU). Contrary to most studies about TRU, this study considers alternative impact categories, including energy consumption, refrigerant fluids and their associated impacts. The LCA reveals that the operation phase is a significant source of environmental impact, while the usage-scenario also has a high influence on the impact. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the weight of the transported product profile (frozen or fresh), type of transport (distribution or long haul) and the operating mode (continuous run, start/stop) on the environmental footprint of transport refrigeration. Finally, the LCA results highlight the necessity to consider the role of customer behavior on the environmental performance of transport refrigeration units.

Probabilistic Assessment of Innovative Mitigating Measures for Buried Steel Pipeline–Fault Crossing

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:51:24 +0100

methodology is presented on assessing the effectiveness of flexible joints in mitigating the consequences of faulting on buried steel pipelines through a comprehensive analysis that incorporates the uncertainty of fault displacement magnitude and the response of the pipeline itself. The proposed methodology is a two-step process. In the first step the probabilistic nature of the fault displacement magnitude is evaluated by applying the Probabilistic Fault Displacement Hazard Analysis, considering also all pertinent uncertainties. The second step is the “transition” from seismological data to the pipeline structural response through the fault displacement components as the adopted vector intensity measure. To mitigate the consequences of faulting on pipelines, flexible joints between pipeline parts are proposed as innovative measure for reducing the deformation of pipeline walls. Thus, the mechanical behavior of continuous pipelines and pipelines with flexible joints is numerically assessed and strains are extracted in order to develop the corresponding strain hazard curves. The latter are a useful engineering tool for pipeline – fault crossing risk assessment and for the effectiveness evaluation of flexible joints as innovative mitigating measures against the consequences of faulting on pipelines.Copyright © 2015 by ASME

Optimal Performance Prediction of ADAS Algorithms on Embedded Parallel Architectures

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:42:26 +0100

International audience; ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) algorithms increasingly use heavy image processing operations. To embed this type of algorithms, semiconductor companies offer many heterogeneous architectures. These SoCs (System on Chip) are composed of different processing units, with different capabilities, and often with massively parallel computing unit. Due to the complexity of these SoCs, predicting if a given algorithm can be executed in real time on a given architecture is not trivial. In fact it is not a simple task for automotive industry actors to choose the most suited heterogeneous SoC for a given application. Moreover, embedding complex algorithms on these systems remains a difficult task due to heterogeneity, it is not easy to decide how to allocate parts of a given algorithm on the different computing units of a given SoC. In order to help automotive industry in embedding algorithms on heterogeneous architectures, we propose a novel approach to predict performances of image processing algorithms applicable on different types of computing units. Our methodology is able to predict a more or less wide interval of execution time with a degree of confidence using only high level description of algorithms, and a few characteristics of computing units.

Enhancement of Hydrodynamic Processes in Oil Pipelines Considering Rheologically Complex High-Viscosity Oils

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:36:22 +0100

This paper describes a mathematical model of flow-related hydrodynamic processes for rheologically complex high-viscosity bitumen oil and oil-water suspensions and presents methods to improve the design and performance of oil pipelines.

Simple Tool for Aircraft Noise-Reduction Route Design

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:26:59 +0100

The design of arrival and departure routes from an airport has to balance the conflicting requirements of fuel efficiency, airport capacity utilization and community emission and noise considerations. The commonly used tools for aircraft noise assessment are the FAA’s Integrated Noise Model (INM) and Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT). These tools are suitable to generate precise noise contours. However, they are harder to use with other tools for route design optimization involving evaluation of a large number of aircraft trajectories. A simplified aircraft noise computation tool, named AIRNOISE, is developed for preliminary aircraft noise-reduction route design in this paper. AIRNOISE computes aircraft noise based on the same SAE-AIR-1845 procedures used by INM and AEDT. AIRNOISE does not consider components related to terrain and atmosphere adjustments. As a result, it is not only computationally efficient but also flexible to use for customized aircraft profiles. The aircraft noise results are compared with the FAA’s AEDT2b and show that the level of accuracy achieved by AIRNOISE can be used to reduce the number of route design options to a small number from a large pool for subsequent accurate analysis by INM.

Viability of Implementing Smart Mobility Tool in the Case of Tunis City

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:20:45 +0100

Part 5: Modelling and Optimization; International audience; Nowadays, different changes from the economical, societal and environmental contexts are happen in cities. In fact, cities are generally the best place to endorse and enhance various experience in order to improve the quality of life of its citizens. In this context, the new vision of Smart Mobility fill into this context. The concept of Smart Mobility as a means to enhance the mobility experience of citizen has been gaining increasing importance in the agendas of cities stakeholder. It represents the best balance the economic, environmental and societal aspect of current transportation tools. The implementation of the smart mobility concept in the case of Tunis city is the subject matter of the paper. In fact, we focus on considering the Personal Rapid Transit system as an effective and efficient tool to bring smart mobility experience to Tunis city. This paper also presents and study the viability of implementing PRT in our specific context. An extensive simulation and economic feasibility study is conducted to validate our proposal. Computational results prove the different advantages of our proposal in the studied context.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

The analysis of repeated failures of pipelines in Kal'chinskoe oil field

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:20:22 +0100

The paper presents the chemical analysis of oilfield water and hydraulic analysis of the liquid flow in Kal'chinskoe oil field pipeline that allow detecting the causes of the internal corrosion processes. The inhibitor protection is suggested to reduce the corrosion rate in the pipelines of Kal'chinskoe oil field. Based on the analysis of the pipeline failures, it is suggested to replace steel pipes by fiberglass pipes.

Renewable Energy in Islands. An Integrated Proposal for Electricity Generation and Transports

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 02:57:37 +0100

The purpose of this article is to analyse and evaluate the economical, energetic and environmental impacts of the increasing penetration of renewable energies an d electrical vehicles in isolated systems, such as Terceira Island in Azores and Madeira Island . Given the fact that the islands are extremely depen dent on the importation of fossil fuels - not only for the prod uction of energy, but also for the transportation's sector - it's int ended to analyse how it is possible to reduce that dependency and de termine the resultant reduction of pollutant gas emissions. Different settings have been analysed - with and wi thout the penetration of EVs. The Terceira Island is an interesting case study, where EVs charging during off-peak hours could allow an increase in geothermal power, limited by the valley of power demand. The percentage of renewable energy in the electric power mix could reach the 74% in 2030 while at the same time, it is possible to reduce the emissions of pollutant ga ses in 45% and the purchase of fossil fuels in 44%. In Madeira , apart from wind, solar and small hydro power, there are not so many endogenous resources and the Island's emission factor cannot be so reduced as in Terceira . Although, it is possible to reduce fossil fuels imports and emissions in 1.8% in 2030 when compared with a BAU scenario with a 14% of the LD fleet composed by EVs.