Scipedia: Documents published in 2015

Towards a Federated Infrastructure for the Global Data Pipeline

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:33:37 +0100

Interoperability in logistics is a prerequisite for realizing data pipelines and the Physical Internet. Forecasting data, real time data, and actual positions of shipments, containers, and transport means shared via events have to be harmonized and are expected to improve all types of processes, support synchromodal planning, and improve risk analysis from a compliance and resilience perspective. Technically, several solutions are implemented by organizations and innovations have been validated in so-called Living Labs or demonstrators in various projects. These solutions do not yet provide open systems required for a (global) data pipeline. A federation of solutions is required to construct data pipelines and to support sustainable development of applications on smart devices allowing Small and Medium sized Enterprises to collaborate. This paper proposes a set of platform services and so-called platform protocols to allow interoperability of different platforms for constructing a data pipeline. The proposed services and protocols further extend existing interoperability solutions and services for supply and logistics. Â© IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2015.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Proposed Practice for Alternative Bidding of Highway Drainage Systems

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:29:00 +0100

This research investigated the use of a performance-based process for selection of drainage pipe systems. Such a selection process is based on satisfying performance criteria for the drainage system while considering the full range of suitable pipe materials. This approach has the potential to foster competition among various pipe types judged to be of satisfactory quality and equally acceptable on the basis of engineering and cost analyses. Giving contractors the ability to choose from among alternative drainage pipe systems during the bidding process on the basis of performance and cost can help agencies promote competition that will lower agency costs while achieving satisfactory performance. The objective of NCHRP Project 10-86 was to develop a proposed practice suitable for adoption by AASHTO to guide owner-agencies and industry in implementing a performance-based process for contractor selection and delivery of drainage pipe systems on highway construction projects. The key product of the research is the proposed practice presented in Appendix A of the report. The practice applies rational, performance-based criteria to the selection, installation and post-construction acceptance of highway drainage pipe systems. It specifically addresses the selection of pipe solutions by evaluating the hydraulic capacity, structural capacity, and durability of pipe systems in distinct stages. Since durability is predicted in terms of estimated service life, the practice emphasizes proper characterization of the site conditions and comprehensive post-installation inspection to confirm construction quality. The practice was tested and refined through comparisons in nine states to standard agency procedures for pipe specification and was shown to satisfactorily consider the wide variety of factors required to successfully bid alternative pipe systems. This report fully documents the research and includes the following two appendixes: Appendix A: AASHTO Recommended Practice for Alternative Bidding of Highway Drainage System and Appendix C: Summary of Durability Evaluation Methods and Software Applications.

Evaluating the Implementation of a Fuzzy Logic System for Hybrid Vehicles as Alternative to Combustion Engine Buses in Big Cities

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:21:50 +0100

Part 3: Knowledge Based Production Management; International audience; The public transportation in urban centers involve many challenges related to environment. One of these challenges is reduce air and noise pollution in big cities. In SÃ£o Paulo, for instance, it is estimated that 98Â % of the transport are made using buses with combustion engine, which are responsible for greatest part of air and noise pollution. Therefore, it is necessary to develop studies that help change the public transport policies in major cities, favoring the use of electric and hybrid buses. Thus, this paper aims to simulate the use of hybrid bus with fuzzy logic applied to improve the efficiency of this type of system. We made six simulations with MATLABÂ© software and Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, considering velocity, topography and battery status as input variables. The results showed an effective control of the fuzzy system, with the feasibility of combining this with others experts systems.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Additional Financing for Transport and Information and Communication Technology

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:19:12 +0100

In May 2005, the Bank adopted a new policy and new procedures on Additional Financing (OP/BP13.20) for investment lending, replacing the previous policy on supplemental financing. This policywas later revised in March 2012. This learning product assesses the performance of the AdditionalFinancing (AF) operations approved since then and draws lessons from their implementationexperience. The assessment focuses on AF in projects of the Transport and Information andCommunication Technology (ICT) Global Practice (GP). This was selected as the first batch ofoperations to review because they represent a large share in lending volume, as well as the fact that there is an existing AF study conducted by the former Transport Anchor which this review coulduse to verify the AF portfolio. This note aims to enhance the understanding of the way it has been used and how it has affected the project outcomes, through reviewing a subset of the AF portfolio for which the relevant data was readily available. The review notes the limitation of the small sample. More areas could be investigated when the data of more projects become available.

D5.3: Access Charge Final Report. The sustainable freight railway: Designing the freight vehicle – track system for higher delivered tonnage with improved availability at reduced cost (SUSTRAIL)

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:48:57 +0100

An energy-efficient metro speed profiles for energy savings: application to the Valencia metro

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:47:10 +0100

[EN] Nowadays one of the main priorities for metro line operators is the reduction of energy consumption, due to the environmental impact and economic cost. In order to achieve this objective different strategies can be applied, normally focused into rolling stock, infrastructure and/or operation. Considering short-term measures and related to the traffic operation strategies, different approaches are being researched. One of the most effective strategy which reduce net energy consumption is the use of efficient driving techniques. These techniques produces a speed profile between two stations that requires the minimum net energy consumption, without degrading commercial running times or passenger comfort. In this paper, a computer model for calculating the metro vehicles speed profiles minimizing the energy consumption was developed. The equations considered in the model represent the behavior of a single vehicle operated under manual driving, subject to different constraints such as the headway, cycle time, distances and acceleration limits. The proposed model calculates different commands to be systematically executed by the driver. The resulting simulator has been tuned by means of on board measurements of speed, accelerations and energy consumption obtained along different lines in Metro de Valencia network. For this purpose, different scenarios are analyzed to assess the achievable energy savings. In general terms and comparing with the actual energy consumption, the solutions proposed can reduce the net energy consumption around 19% The authors wish to thank Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat Valenciana (FGV) for their kind support during the development of this study, including their assistance during the installation of the consumption devices aboard their trains and their permission to carry out measurements during the normal service. This project has by funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Ref. TRA2011-26602). Villalba Sanchis, I.; Salvador Zuriaga, P. (2016). An energy-efficient metro speed profiles for energy savings: application to the Valencia metro. En XII Congreso de ingenierÃa del transporte. 7, 8 y 9 de Junio, Valencia (EspaÃ±a). Editorial Universitat PolitÃ¨cnica de ValÃ¨ncia. 1820-1832. https://doi.org/10.4995/CIT2016.2016.3774 OCS 1820 1832

Potenziale neuer Mobilitätsformen und -technologien für eine nachhaltige Raumentwicklung - Fazit und Ausblick

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:42:25 +0100

Dieser Beitrag fasst in einem Fazit wichtige Ergebnisse und Schlussfolgerungen der Arbeitsgruppe "Potenziale neuer MobilitÃ¤tsformen und -technologien fÃ¼r eine nachhaltige Raumentwicklung" zusammen und gibt einen kurzen Ausblick auf die weitere Entwicklung in diesem Feld. Nach einem Abriss der Potenziale neuer bzw. alternativer MobilitÃ¤tsformen und -technologien werden ihre mÃ¶glichen BeitrÃ¤ge zu einer nachhaltigen MobilitÃ¤ts- und Raumentwicklung diskutiert, vorhandene Strategien, Programme und PlÃ¤ne in diesem Bereich bewertet, HandlungsmÃ¶glichkeiten der Raumplanung, insbesondere der Raumordnung und Regionalentwicklung, aufgezeigt und schlieÃlich aus den Befunden Forderungen an Politik und Planung abgeleitet. Ein kompakter Ausblick am Ende des Beitrags versucht, wesentliche Rahmenbedingungen und Herausforderungen fÃ¼r die zukÃ¼nftige MobilitÃ¤tsentwicklung als wichtigen Baustein einer nachhaltigen Raumentwicklung zu kennzeichnen. The paper summarises the important results and conclusions of the working group "Potentials of new forms of mobility and mobility technologies for sustainable spatial development" and provides a short overview of further developments in this field. After outlining the potential of new or alternative forms of mobility and mobility technologies, their possible contributions to sustainable mobility and spatial development is discussed, existing strategies, programmes and plans in this area evaluated, possible courses of action for spatial planning and regional development demonstrated, and finally the findings used to derive proposals for policy and planning. A compact overview at the end of the paper attempts to identify important framework conditions and challenges for the future development of mobility as an important component of sustainable spatial development.

Fieldwork Entrepreneurs. Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:32:29 +0100

Additional Efficient Warning Sounds for Electric and Hybrid Vehicles

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:27:02 +0100

International audience; Electric or hybrid vehicles are very silent, which represents a major advantage for the reduction of noise annoyance in urban areas. But this makes them dangerous for pedestrians, especially vulnerable ones as visually-impaired people. Current solutions consist in using warning sound so that the exterior noise of an electric vehicle is as high as for a conventional one. This may cancel the benefit of electric vehicles for the reduction of sound annoyance. The eVADER project (funded by the European Commission) aims at proposing a prototype car which combines a high safety and a low noise level. A part of the the work program consisted in perceptual studies. The goal of these studies was to evaluate the influence of various timbre parameters on the detectability and the unpleasantness of a warning sound. Results show that it is possible to make an electric vehicle easily detected while keeping its sound level much lower than the one of a conventional car.

Special Issue "Agent-Based Modelling of City Systems"

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:18:55 +0100

International audience; City systems, consisting of the various social and technical infrastructures required for urban areas to function, are facing major challenges in the coming decades as global urbanization and the pressure on resource efficiency and sustainability continue. Agent-based simulation and modelling techniques enable us to study these systems from various levels of abstraction looking at actors as well as system level perspectives, and are particularly suited to understand the dynamics of underlying structures and experiment with various scenarios and the effect of local decisions on emerging system properties. This special issue aims to showcase innovative use of agent-based modelling (ABM) and multi-agent system (MAS) approaches for effective decision support regarding urban innovations in fields linked with urban development and to explore and identify how researchers in different disciplines integrate their knowledge through agent models. We are inviting researchers from across a wide range of disciplines (including computer science, physics, engineering, economics, sociology and others) to submit papers to this special issue that exhibit state-of the art innovation in ABM/MAS applied to cities. This innovation may come in the form of computational, conceptual, analytical, participatory or epistemological advances for a range of aims and motivations associated with the challenge of combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development in city systems. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following:[...]

An adaptive and VANETs-based Next Road Re-routing system for unexpected urban traffic congestion avoidance

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:13:33 +0100

Unexpected road traffic congestion caused by en-route events, such as car crashes, road works, unplanned parades etc., is a real challenge in today's urban road networks as it considerably increases the drivers' travel time and decreases travel time reliability. To face this challenge, this paper extends our previous work named Next Road Rerouting (NRR) by designing a novel vehicle rerouting strategy that can adapt itself to the sudden change of urban road traffic conditions. This is achieved through a smart calibration of the algorithmic and operational parameters of NRR without any intervention from traffic managers. Specifically, a coefficient of variation based method is used to assign weight values to three factors in the routing cost function of NRR, and the k-means algorithm is applied periodically to choose the number of NRR enabled agents needed. This adaptive-NRR (a-NRR) strategy is supported by vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) technology as this latter can provide rich traffic information at much higher update frequency and much larger coverage than induction loops used in the previously proposed static NRR. Simulation results show that in the city center area of TAPASCologne scenario, compared to the existing vehicle navigation system (VNS) and static NRR, our adaptive-NRR can achieve considerable gain in terms of trip time reduction and travel time reliability improvement.

Infrastructure and the International Export Performance of Turkish Regions

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:12:18 +0100

We estimate the Anderson and van Wincoop model of trade by using the data on the bilateral export flows from 26 Turkish regions to 180 countries for the years 2002 through to 2010. Regional transportation and communication infrastructure capacity, the positioning of point infrastructure in a region, and geography are explicitly accounted for. Our results highlight that land infrastructure, air transport capacity, and private maritime infrastructure presence, together with the distance of regional economies to exit nodes such as ports and airports, are important determinants of export performance. Based on our preferred regression where multilateral resistance terms are accounted for, we estimate that increases in the current land infrastructure, air transport capacity, and number of private ports of 1 per cent increases exports approximately by 0.38 per cent, 0.14 per cent, and 0.045 per cent respectively.

Meeting Locations in Real-Time Ridesharing Problem: A Buckets Approach

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:08:47 +0100

Improving transportation efficiency without increasing urban traffic congestion, requires to carry out new services such as ridesharing which contributes to reduce operating cost and to save road resources. In this paper, we provide users of a ridesharing system greater flexibility: given a set of driversâ offers already in the system, and a new riderâs request, we determine a best driver, a best pick-up and drop-off locations, and a sharing cost rate between rider and driver for their common path. The main idea of our approaches consists in labelling interesting nodes of a geographical map with information about drivers, in so-called buckets. Based on the information contained in these buckets, when a rider enters the system we determine a best driver, as well as a best pick-up and drop-off locations that minimize the total travel cost of rider and driver. Exact and heuristic approaches to identify a best driver, as well as a best pick-up and drop-off locations are proposed. Finally, we perform a comparative evaluation using real road network of the Lorraine region (FR) and real data provided by a local company. Experimental analysis shows a running time of a few seconds while improving participantsâ cost-savings and matching rate compared to the recurring ridesharing.

Numerical Solution of Advection Equations Using Structured Grids on Plane Irregular Regions With a Finite Differences Scheme

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:14:26 +0100

Today we faced the problem of solving equations for shallow bodies of water in irregular regions; These equations are very important to be able to model the behavior of liquids that have the characteristic that their extension is much greater than their depth. One of the important blocks to solve these equations is the advection equation. In this work, some schemes are proposed to approximate the solution of the advection equation in irregular regions in the plane, using a variation of the finite difference method in convex and structured meshes.

Estudio de las ondas viajeras en el modelo de Gray-Scott

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:14:18 +0100

El modelo químico Gray-Scott representa la dinámica de la reacción autocatalítica cúbica en su mínima expresión. Este modelo químico comenzó a ser estudiado por Peter Gray y Stephen Scott en los años 80, con el fin de analizar las características primordiales que propician las dinámicas complejas de esta reacción química. Por lo tanto, el presente trabajo se enfoca en presentar los distintos escenarios que presenta el modelo, contrastando el efecto que se tiene al tener hipótesis de dependencia o independencia química y de tener hipótesis de homogeneidad o heterogeneidad en el sistema. Como principal resultado, se mostrará numéricamente que el modelo presenta los fenómenos de reflexión de onda y de nacimiento de onda. Además, se dará una explicación del motivo por el cual se suscitan éstos fenómenos.

Dinámica Poblacional del SIDA en México de 1983 a 2012: un estudio retrospectivo y prospectivo

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:08:53 +0100

La epidemiología del SIDA es peculiar pues solo hay tres posibles estados: susceptible, infectado y muerto; a diferencia de otras infecciones donde se puede presentar también las fases de inmune, y hay una posible transición entre los estados infectado y susceptible. Ello junto con la esperanza de vida actual de una persona infectada en tratamiento, genera una dinámica acumulativa de casos. Esta peculiaridad sugiere ya un comportamiento sigmoidal no simétrico (Modelo de Gompertz). En este trabajo se establecen similitudes y diferencias significativas del comportamiento de la epidemia de SIDA en los últimos treinta años considerando diferentes escenarios: caso Nacional, Estatal (Zacatecas), diferenciado por sexo, por edad y por forma de contagio; haciendo comparativos de los para ́metros de los ajustes tipo Gompertz, en cada contexto.

Scalable and power efficient data analytics for hybrid exascale systems

Scipedia content — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 15:42:59 +0100

This project developed a generic and optimized set of core data analytics functions. These functions organically consolidate a broad constellation of high performance analytical pipelines. As the architectures of emerging HPC systems become inherently heterogeneous, there is a need to design algorithms for data analysis kernels accelerated on hybrid multi-node, multi-core HPC architectures comprised of a mix of CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs. Furthermore, the power-aware trend drives the advances in our performance-energy tradeoff analysis framework which enables our data analysis kernels algorithms and software to be parameterized so that users can choose the right power-performance optimizations.

Document type: Report

MOBILITY4EU - D2.1 - Societal needs and requirements for future transportation and mobility as well as opportunities and challenges of current solutions

Scipedia content — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 15:36:41 +0100

Mobility4EU is a Coordination and Support Action of the European Commission started in January 2016 and lasting for 3 years, until 31 December 2018. The project will deliver a vision for the European transport system in 2030 and an action plan including a roadmap to implement that vision. The work towards that vision and action plan is based on the identification and assessment of societal challenges that will influence future transport demand and supply and the compilation of a portfolio of promising cross-modal technical and organisational transport solutions. The entire process from studying trends and options for solutions, developing a vision and finally the action plan are organized within a structured participatory approach that focuses on user-centeredness and that aims to engage a broad stakeholder community into the consultation processes. A further goal is to build a European Transport Forum that continues the work beyond the project duration and works on complementing the action plan. The present document reports on the results of researching trends and societal drivers impacting mobility demands and transport in Europe until 2030.

Document type: Report

Urban planning 3 0 impact of recent developments of the web on urban planning

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:38:55 +0200

This chapter addresses the challenges that changing technologies pose to urban planning. Urban planning continues to be influenced by an emerging creativity and knowledge-sharing culture that has an inherent connection to digital transformation. Technology certainly plays an important role in the production of content and its distribution. Such a transformation is giving urban planning a new look, which is depicted in the concepts of Urban Planning 2.0 and Urban Planning 3.0. In this chapter, this paradigm shift is explained and illustrated with a special view to identifying the ways these second and third generations of the Web affect urban planning. There is a plethora of pilot projects and new practices in Urban Planning 2.0, even if experiences as a whole are so few and far between, which makes it difficult to assess both the best practices in this field and the long-term impacts of their application. Recent developments associated with the applications of Web 3.0 and related technology trends in urban planning, which are designed to bring intelligence into planning, have hardly seen daylight due to both technological and socio-technical challenges associated with them. In brief, in the case of Web 2.0, we know on the basis of our initial experiences by and large how it may support urban planning; however, in the case of Web 3.0, technological uncertainties and systemic dimension of related applications make the concept more ambiguous and thus more challenging to assess what the true potential of this emerging Web trend is from the point of view of urban planning.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Sustainable Urban Transport Financing from the Sidewalk to the Subway: Capital, Operations, and Maintenance Financing

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:38:42 +0200

Urban transport systems are essential for economic development and improving citizens' quality of life. To establish high-quality and affordable transport systems, cities must ensure their financial sustainability to fund new investments in infrastructure while also funding maintenance and operation of existing facilities and services. However, many cities in developing countries are stuck in an "underfunding trap" for urban transport, in which large up-front investments are needed for new transport infrastructure that will improve the still small-scale, and perhaps, poor-quality systems, but revenue is insufficient to cover maintenance and operation expenses, let alone new investment projects. The urban transport financing gap in these cities is further widened by the implicit subsidies for the use of private cars, which represent a minority of trips but contribute huge costs in terms of congestion, sprawl, accidents, and pollution. Using an analytical framework based on the concept of "Who Benefits Pays," 24 types of financing instruments are assessed in terms of their social, economic and environmental impacts and their ability to fund urban transport capital investments, operational expenses, and maintenance. Urban transport financing needs to be based on an appropriate mix of complementary financing instruments. In particular for capital investments, a combination of grants from multiple levels of government and loans together with investments through public private partnerships could finance large projects that benefit society. Moreover, the property tax emerges as a key financing instrument for capital, operation, and maintenance expenses. By choosing the most appropriate mix of financing instruments and focusing on wise investments, cities can design comprehensive financing for all types of urban transport projects, using multi-level innovative revenue sources that promote efficient pricing schemes, increase overall revenue, strengthen sustainable transport, and cover capital investments, operation, and maintenance for all parts of a public transport system, "from the sidewalk to the subway."

Document type: Book

Review of logistics service regulations for freight forwarding businesses: what should be addressed for a better logistics regulatory framework ?

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:33:31 +0200

Regulatory frameworks on logistics regulations are often opaque, especially in developing countries, because of the complex nature of logistics services. World Bank client countries have faced difficulty finding the issues that hinder them from improving logistics competence. Therefore, it is beneficial to understand how the logistics service industry is regulated and what should be addressed in building the regulatory framework to improve logistics competence. This note proposes questions to be addressed for beneficial regulations by reviewing existing logistics service regulations in 14 countries, particularly regulations for the freight forwarding industry. These questions will help in assessing a regulatory framework and identifying regulatory weaknesses. This note suggests that the regulatory framework should take into consideration national recognition of freight forwarding business, an institutional arrangement with clear division of responsibility among stakeholders, and streamlined but flexible regulations adapted to the country context.

Document type: Book

Estimating the size of external effects of energy subsidies in transport and agriculture

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:30:32 +0200

It is widely accepted that the costs of underpricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectorstransport and agriculturein two countries in the Middle East and North Africa, the Arab Republic of Egypt (transport) and the Republic of Yemen (agriculture). The focus is mainly on the costs associated with congestion and pollution, as well as the impact of underpriced energy for depletion of scarce water resources, including through crop selection. Quantifying the size of external effects in developing countries has received relatively little analytical attention, although there is a significant body of literature for developed countries. By building on earlier research, as well as employing the United Nations ForFITS model, the paper provides indicative estimates of the external costs of energy subsidies, as manifested in congestion and pollution. The estimates using simulations indicate that these costs could be materially reduced by elimination or reduction of energy subsidies. The paper also describes the impact of energy subsidies on water consumption in a region where water resources are particularly limited. The findings provide further evidence of the adverse and significant consequences of subsidizing energy.

Document type: Book

Crop choice and infrastructure accessibility in tanzania subsistence crops or export crops

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:17:40 +0200

Africa has great potential for agriculture. Although international commodity prices have been buoyant, Africas supply response seems to be weak. A variety of constraints may exist. Using the case of Tanzania, the paper examines the impact of market connectivity, domestic and international, on farmers crop choices. It is shown that the international market connectivity, measured by transport costs to the maritime port, is important for farmers to choose export crops, such as cotton and tobacco. Internal connectivity to the domestic market is also found to be important for growing food crops, such as maize and rice. Among other inputs, access to irrigation and improved seed availability are also important factors in the crop choices of farmers. The size of land area is one constraint to promote the crop shift. The paper also reports the finding that farmers are not using market prices effectively in their choice of crop, even after the endogeneity of local prices is taken into account.

Document type: Book

The impact of crude oil prices on the export of transport services in Europe

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:17:23 +0200

Celem publikacji jest ukazanie dorobku naukowego, g?ównie polskich i ukrai?skich uczonych, w zakresie uwarunkowa? procesów i rezultatów internacjonalizacji przedsi?biorstw oraz jej wp?ywu na funkcjonowanie biznesu w dobie globalizacji. Opracowanie stanowi istotny wk?ad w zakresie teorii i praktyki w proces restrukturyzacji przedsi?biorstw w kierunku ich internacjonalizacji. Mo?e pos?u?y? jako inspiracja do stworzenia strategii opartej na poszukiwaniach (prospector strategy), co b?dzie sprzyja? zwi?kszonej innowacyjno?ci w budowaniu strategii i organizacji firm przechodz?cych transformacj?. Mo?e te? by? przes?ank? do zacie?niania wspó?pracy biznesów z ró?nych krajów i do wspólnych bada? w tym wzgl?dzie. Ksi??ka powsta?a jako rezultat mi?dzynarodowej konferencji naukowej (teoretyczno-metodyczno-praktycznej), zorganizowanej 21-22 listopada 2016 r. pt. Internacjonalizacja polskich przedsi?biorstw uwarunkowania, modele, wyniki bada?. Zamieszczone studia przypadków i analizy jako?ciowe mog? u?atwi? przedsi?biorstwom dostosowanie si? do warunków dzia?ania na nowych rynkach. B?d? te? pomocne mened?erom oraz przedsi?biorcom w zrozumieniu konieczno?ci i metod dostosowania si? do globalnej konkurencji, która generuje nowe akcenty w zarz?dzaniu. Artyku? przedstawia charakterystyk? rynku us?ug transportowych w Europie. Celem artyku?u jest analiza wp?ywu cen ropy naftowej na eksport us?ug transportowych. Zawarto w nim charakterystyki zmian tych cen oraz najwi?kszych eksporterów i importerów ropy naftowej na ?wiecie. Do analizy wykorzystano dane uzyskane z firmy transportowej dzia?aj?cej na rynku europejskim. Przedstawiono tak?e casey odzwierciedlaj?ce sytuacje wielu przedsi?biorstw transportowych sektora M?P. Szukano równie? antidotum na wzrost cen paliw. Jednym z rozwi?za? mog? by? zaprezentowane w artykule nowe technologie. Stosowane s? one do redukcji spalania paliwa i poprzez to wp?ywaj? na obni?enie cen us?ug transportowych, a w konsekwencji na konkurencyjno?? tych firm w sektorze transportu. This article presents market characteristics of transport services in Europe. Main goal of this article is to analyze the impact of crude oil price on the export of transport services. Concluded in article characteristics of changes these price and the biggest crude oil exporters and importers all over the world. For these analysis author used data from transport company operating on European market. Cases were also presented, reflecting the situation of many transport companies of the Small Medium Enterprise sector. Authors also tried to find an antidote to the increase in fuel prices. New technologies presented in this article could be proposed as an solution to the problem. They are used to reduce the combustion of fuel and, by doing this, have impact on the reduced price of transport services, and in consequence on competitiveness of these companies in sector of transport. Publikacja jest rezultatem ministerialnego projektu: mi?dzynarodowej konferencji naukowej (teoretyczno-metodyczno-praktycznej) pt. Internacjonalizacja polskich przedsi?biorstw uwarunkowania, modele, wyniki bada? finansowana w ramach umowy 641/P-DUN/2016 ze ?rodków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wy?szego, przeznaczonych na dzia?alno?? upowszechniaj?c? nauk?.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Fast traffic sign recognition using color segmentation and deep convolutional networks

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:14:04 +0200

The use of Computer Vision techniques for the automatic recognition of road signs is fundamental for the development of intelligent vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. In this paper, we describe a procedure based on color segmentation, Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) for detecting and classifying road signs. Detection is speeded up by a preprocessing step to reduce the search space, while classification is carried out by using a Deep Learning technique. A quantitative evaluation of the proposed approach has been conducted on the well-known German Traffic Sign data set and on the novel Data set of Italian Traffic Signs (DITS), which is publicly available and contains challenging sequences captured in adverse weather conditions and in an urban scenario at night-time. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of both classification accuracy and computational speed.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Firm inventory behavior in east africa

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:11:50 +0200

Firms normally keep certain inventories, including raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods, to operate seamlessly and not to miss possible business opportunities. But inventory is costly, and the optimal firm inventory differs depending on various economic conditions, including trade and transport costs. The paper examines firm inventory behavior in East Africa, in which transport connectivity, especially to the ports, is considered as one of the major business constraints. Using firm-level data from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, it is shown that transport connectivity significantly affects firm inventory behavior. In particular, road density and transport costs to the port are important to determine the optimal inventory level. With more roads in a city and/or cheaper access to the port, firms would hold smaller inventories.

Document type: Book

Keywords of Mobility. What's in a Name?

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:09:35 +0200

ispartof: Keywords of mobility. Critical engagements pages:1-12 ispartof: Worlds in Motion vol:1 pages:1-12 status: published

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

The pulse of public opinion : using Twitter data to analyze public perception of reform in El Salvador

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:07:04 +0200

This study uses Twitter data to provide a more nuanced understanding of the public reaction to the 2011 reform to the propane gas subsidy in El Salvador. By soliciting a small sample of manually tagged tweets, the study identifies the subject matter and sentiment of all tweets during six one-month periods over three years that concern the subsidy reform. The paper shows that such an analysis using Twitter data can provide a useful complement to existing household survey data and even potentially replace survey data if none were available. The finding show that when people tweet about the subsidy, they almost always do so in a negative manner; and there is a decline in discussion of topics about the reform subsidy, which coincides with increase in support for the subsidy as reported elsewhere. Therefore, the study concludes that decreasing discussion of the subsidy reform indicates an increase in support for the reform. In addition, the gas distributor strikes of May 2011 may have contributed to public perception of the reform more than previously acknowledged. This study is used as an opportunity to provide methodological guidance for researchers who wish to undertake similar studies, documenting the steps in the analysis pipeline with detail and noting the challenges inherent in obtaining data, classification, and inference.

Document type: Book

Social and economic impacts of rural road improvements in the state of tocantins brazil

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:04:19 +0200

The aim of this paper is to provide feedback on the question of socioeconomic benefits from rural road development and the impact of transport infrastructure on the poor, particularly the poorest and the bottom 20 percent of the population. This paper relies on impact evaluation methodologies, which are traditionally used in social sectors but less so in the transport sector. The study, including first surveys, was launched in 2003 under the Tocantins Sustainable Regional Development Project. The paper highlights the context that led to the projects design, which included an impact evaluation of the works envisaged under the project. The paper also highlights some of the main challenges faced by this impact evaluation and how these challenges were addressed for the present study. It then provides details about the data collected during the surveys and the key relevant characteristics of the population targeted by the surveys. It discusses the possible estimation methods envisioned to undertake the study and provides the main results of the assessment based on these methods. The analysis shows that improved rural roads changed peoples transport modal choice. People used more public buses and individual motorized vehicles after the rural road improvements. The paper also finds that the project increased school attendance, particularly for girls. Although the evidence is relatively weak in statistical terms, it indicates that the project contributed to increasing agricultural jobs and household income in certain regions.

Document type: Book

Firm Productivity and Infrastructure Costs in East Africa

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:03:03 +0200

Infrastructure is an important driving force for economic growth. It reduces trade and transaction costs and stimulates the productivity of the economy. Africa has been lagging behind in the global manufacturing market. Among others, infrastructure is an important constraint in many African countries. Using firm-level data for East Africa, the paper reexamines the relationship between firm performance and infrastructure. It is shown that labor costs are by far the most important to stimulate firm production. Among the infrastructure sectors, electricity costs have the highest output elasticity, followed by transport costs. In addition, the paper shows that the quality of infrastructure is important to increase firm production. In particular, quality transport infrastructure seems to be essential. The paper also finds that agglomeration economies can reduce firm costs. The agglomeration elasticity is estimated at 0.030.04.

Document type: Book

Urban transport: analysis of commute energy use

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:01:52 +0200

Worldwide energy consumption is generally related with fossil fuels that increase CO? and other greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. The transport sector represents a significant part of energy demand. As its share comes mostly from petroleum products, known for their highly polluting effects, there is the need to quantify energy use by transport. This assessment supports the planning and implementation of energy consumption mitigation policies that reduce negative environmental outcomes of transport systems. The research introduces an approach to estimate transport energy consumption obtained from available data and scaling factors. As the emphasis is put on urban transport, only commute road and rail transport are considered in the analysis. Data is stored and managed in a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) framework environment that also supports mapping the results. These maps allow identifying higher energy consumption areas by mode of transport and type of vehicle. Plotting the results also enables understanding the geographic distribution of energy demand from urban to rural regions, providing tools to perceive the relationship between urban form and energy consumption of the transport sector. Taking into account that the analysis is produced at a large scale, the obtained results offer support to planners and policy makers that seek solving transport-related problems, as pollution and high energy demand. Large scale analysis allows and enhances better planning, primarily when designing strategies for such detailed areas as urban spaces. Assessing and analysing energy consumption of the transport sector, enables deriving alternative energy layouts that present better energy efficiency, aiming for the final goal of mitigate the negative effects of urban transport systems.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

BONUS BALTSPACE Deliverable D2.1: Baseline-mapping and Refined Case Study Design

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:59:36 +0200

Document type: Book

Congestion aware warehouse flow analysis and optimization

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:50:45 +0200

Generating realistic configurations of urban models is a vital part of the modeling process, especially if these models are used for evaluation and analysis. In this work, we address the problem of assigning objects to their storage locations inside a warehouse which has a great impact on the quality of operations within a warehouse. Existing storage policies aim to improve the efficiency by minimizing travel time or by classifying the items based on some features. We go beyond existing methods as we analyze warehouse layout network in an attempt to understand the factors that affect traffic within the warehouse. We use simulated annealing based sampling to assign items to their storage locations while reducing traffic congestion and enhancing the speed of order picking processes. The proposed method enables a range of applications including efficient storage assignment, warehouse reliability evaluation and traffic congestion estimation.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Economic importance of the Belgian ports: Flemish maritime ports, Liège port complex and the port of Brussels: Report 2013

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:50:17 +0200

This paper is an annual publication issued by the Microeconomic Analysis service of the National Bank of Belgium. The Flemish maritime ports (Antwerp, Ghent, Ostend, Zeebrugge), the Autonomous Port of Liège and the port of Brussels play a major role in their respective regional economies and in the Belgian economy, not only in terms of industrial activity but also as intermodal centres facilitating the commodity flow. This update paper1 provides an extensive overview of the economic importance and development of the Flemish maritime ports, the Liège port complex and the port of Brussels for the period 2008 - 2013, with an emphasis on 2013. Focusing on the three major variables of value added, employment and investment, the report also provides some information based on the social balance sheet and an overview of the financial situation in these ports as a whole. These observations are linked to a more general context, along with a few cargo statistics. Annual accounts data from the Central Balance Sheet Office were used for the calculation of direct effects, the study of financial ratios and the analysis of the social balance sheet. The indirect effects of the activities concerned were estimated in terms of value added and employment, on the basis of data from the National Accounts Institute. As a result of the underlying calculation method the changes of indirect employment and indirect value added can differ from one another. The developments concerning economic activity in the six ports in 2012 - 2013 are summarised in the table on the next page. The overall decline in maritime traffic seen in the Flemish maritime ports in general in 2012, and in each individual port, was reversed in 2013, but only thanks to growth in Antwerp; the other three ports (Ghent, Ostend and Zeebrugge) experienced a further decrease. In terms of value added, the opposite occurred: a general increase, except in Antwerp, resulting in a slight rise for these ports as a whole. The employment picture was variable, but there was expansion overall, matching the growth of value added, namely 0.3 %. Finally, investment in the Flemish ports declined overall, totalling 3.2 % less in 2013 than in the previous year. In the ports of Liège and Brussels, cargo traffic and employment both declined in 2013. After the sharp fall in 2012, value added at the port of Liège edged upwards again, but in Brussels it recorded a significant decline2. Conversely, investment in Liège was down again, following the surge in 2012, whereas the port of Brussels saw a substantial increase. This report provides a comprehensive account of these issues, giving details for each economic sector, although the comments are confined to the main changes that occurred in 2013.

Document type: Book

Improving Service Quality in Public Transportation in Brazil: How Bus Companies are Simplifying Quality Management Systems and Strategic Planning to Increase Service Level?

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:48:53 +0200

Part 4: Project Management, Engineering Management, and Quality Management; International audience; Improving the service quality in public transportation is essential for convinced users to abandon the use of private cars. However, to improve service quality, companies need to adopt a quality management system and strategic planning which is not an easy task. This paper presents a way of simplifying a Quality Management System (QMS) and developing a Simple Strategic Planning (SSP) to be adopted for bus transportation companies. A methodology is developed and showed in this paper, together with a case study that illustrate the system. A Brazilian Bus Company applied the methodology and reached an improvement of their service levels with low costs.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Sustainable transport system transport on demand

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:45:31 +0200

Transport systems are major emitters of greenhouse gases, which makes environmental sustainability of any transport a crucial issue. Another issue is the lack of a systematic approach to the modeling and implementation of public transport systems. Finally, there are problems with the human interfaces to public transport systems, which do not encourage, and many do not allow, comfortable and simple interaction with the system. In this chapter, the authors discuss their solutions for these problems, explaining how to cover the existing gaps in a methodological and systematic way. The main contribution of this chapter is a model of an on-demand transport system that covers all the points mentioned above and focuses on spatial planning and optimizations including environmental issues in transport planning.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

The effect of metro expansions on air pollution in delhi

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:44:37 +0200

The Delhi Metro (DM) is a mass rapid transit system serving the National Capital Region of India. It is also the worlds first rail project to earn carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations for reductions in CO2 emissions. Did the DM also lead to localized reduction in three transportation source pollutants? Looking at the period 20042006, one of the larger rail extensions of the DM led to a 34 percent reduction in localized CO at a major traffic intersection in the city. Results for NO2 are also suggestive of a decline, while those for PM25 are inconclusive due to missing data. These impacts of pollutant reductions are for the short run. A complete accounting of all long run costs and benefits should be done before building capital intensive metro rail projects.

Document type: Book

Del atraso a la convergencia la red de carreteras en espana 1900 2010

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:41:27 +0200

espanolLa necesidad de dar respuesta al freno que suponia la deficitaria red de transporte terrestre para el crecimiento de la economia se convirtio en un objetivo basico de la politica inversora del Estado durante el siglo XX. Un primer esfuerzo constructor se produjo en el primer tercio del siglo, dando inicio a la etapa contemporanea del transporte por carretera en Espana. Tras el paron de la postguerra civil, un nuevo impulso tuvo lugar a partir de 1960 y hasta la crisis de mediados de los setenta, multiplicandose las inversiones destinadas a este fin. Durante la transicion asistimos a una brusca caida de las inversiones que llevo aparejado un estancamiento de la longitud de la red y a la transferencia de una parte de las carreteras a las nacientes Comunidades Autonomas. El pais realizo, desde mediados de los ochenta y ayudado por los fondos europeos, un esfuerzo considerable, pasando de pais atrasado a converger con Europa en equipamiento de grandes infraestructuras de transporte. EnglishThe need to address the constraint on the growth of the Spanish economy caused by the deficient road transport network became a primary objective of the States investment policy during the whole of the 20th century. An initial effort to build the network was made in the first thirty years of the century, marking the start of the contemporary era of road transport in Spain. This development was interrupted by the civil war, then, a new boost in road construction took place between 1960 until the crisis of the mid 1970s, a period during which investments in road infrastructure were multiplied. During the Transition period there was a sharp fall in investments, no efforts were made to extend the length of the network and the competences for part of the roads were transferred to the newly-formed Autonomous Regions. From the mid-1980s and with the help of European funds, Spain made a considerable effort to modernise its network. It is no longer underdeveloped and has converged with the rest of Europe in terms of its largescale transport infrastructure facilities.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Transport infrastructure and welfare an application to nigeria

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:34:55 +0200

Transport infrastructure is deemed to be central to development and consumes a large fraction of the development assistance envelope. Yet there is debate about the economic impact of road projects. This paper proposes an approach to assess the differential development impacts of alternative road construction and prioritize various proposals, using Nigeria as a case study. Recognizing that there is no perfect measure of economic well-being, a variety of outcome metrics are used, including crop revenue, livestock revenue, non-agricultural income, the probability of being multi-dimensionally poor, and local gross domestic product for Nigeria. Although the measure of transport is the most accurate possible, it is still endogenous because of the nonrandom placement of road infrastructure. This endogeneity is addressed using a seemingly novel instrumental variable termed the natural path: the time it would take to walk along the most logical route connecting two points without taking into account other, bias-causing economic benefits. Further, the analysis considers the potential endogeneity from nonrandom placement of households and markets through carefully chosen control variables. It finds that reducing transportation costs in Nigeria will increase crop revenue, non-agricultural income, the wealth index, and local gross domestic product. Livestock sales increase as well, although this finding is less robust. The probability of being multi-dimensionally poor will decrease. The results also cast light on income diversification and structural changes that may arise. These findings are robust to relaxing the exclusion restriction. The paper also demonstrates how to prioritize alternative road programs by comparing the expected development impacts of alternative New Partnership for Africas Development projects.

Document type: Book

Reducing Stress and Fuel Consumption Providing Road Information

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:34:28 +0200

In this paper, we propose a solution to reduce the stress level of the driver, minimize fuel consumption and improve safety. The system analyzes the driving style and the driver's workload during the trip while driving. If it discovers an area where the stress increases and the driving style is not appropriate from the point of view of energy efficiency and safety for a particular driver, the location of this area is saved in a shared database. On the other hand, the implemented solution warns a particular user when approaching a region where the driving is difficult (high fuel consumption and stress) using the shared database based on previous recorded knowledge of similar drivers in that area. In this case, the proposal provides an optimal deceleration profile if the vehicle speed is not adequate. Therefore, he or she may adjust the vehicle speed with both a positive impact on the driver workload and fuel consumption. The Data Envelopment Analysis algorithm is used to estimate the efficiency of driving and the driver's workload in in each area. We employ this method because there is no preconceived form on the data in order to calculate the efficiency and stress level. A validation experiment has been conducted using both a driving simulator and a real environment with 12 participants who made 168 driving tests. The system reduced the slowdowns (38%), heart rate (4.70%), and fuel consumption (12.41%) in the real environment. The proposed solution is implemented on Android mobile devices and does not require the installation of infrastructure on the road. It can be installed on any model of vehicle. The research leading to these results has received funding from the HERMES-SMART DRIVER project TIN2013- 46801-C4-2-R within the Spanish "Plan Nacional de I+D+I" under the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad and from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad funded projects (co-financed by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER)) IRENE (PT-2012-1036-370000), COMINN (IPT-2012-0883-430000) and REMEDISS (IPT-2012-0882-430000) within the INNPACTO program.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Multi agent active collaboration between drivers and assistance systems

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:32:44 +0200

International audience Intelligent vehicles refer currently to vehicles able to drive autonomously or able to provide pertinent information to the driver for safety, assistance and comfort. Cognitive cars are intelligent vehicles with additional capabilities like being able to collaborate with the driver in operating conditions. In this paper, a multi-agent system is used as a digital butler that does the interface between the driver and the machine. In order to test this approach, we consider an Advanced Driving Assistance System (ADAS) providing speed warnings when approaching dangerous areas. The system has been tested on an actual use case carried out with an experimental vehicle. We report some illustrative collaboration between the driver and the machine

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Pathways to Reducing Poverty and Sharing Prosperity in India

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:32:11 +0200

India is uniquely placed to help reduce global poverty and boost prosperity. The country has the largest number of poor people in the world, as well are the largest number of people who have recently escaped poverty. There is an emerging middle class but the majority of people are still vulnerable to falling back into poverty. What lessons do the past two decades offer for what it will take for the country to sustain progress and bring about deeper changes? This synthesis brings together the key insights from extensive and in-depth research conducted by the World Bank on Indias experience in reducing poverty and sharing prosperity over the last two decades. The beginning chapter of the synthesis offers an overview of the trends in living standards and mobility in India. This is followed by a chapter on the main drivers of poverty reduction. The third chapter sheds light on some of the gaps India needs to fill for sustaining mobility and spreading prosperity more widely.

Document type: Book

Urbanization and property rights

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:31:01 +0200

Since the industrial revolution, the economic development of Western Europe and North America was characterized by continuous urbanization accompanied by a gradual phasing-in of urban land property rights over time. Today, however, the evidence in many fast urbanizing low-income countries points towards a different trend of urbanization without formalization, with potentially adverse effects on long-term economic growth. This paper aims to understand the causes and the consequences of this phenomenon, and whether informal city growth could be a transitory or a persistent feature of developing economies. A dynamic stochastic equilibrium model of a representative city is developed, which explicitly accounts for the joint dynamics of land property rights and urbanization. The calibrated baseline model describes a city that first grows informally, with the growth of individual incomes leading to a phased-in purchase of property rights in subsequent periods. The model demonstrates that land tenure informality does not necessarily vanish in the long term, and the social optimum does not necessarily imply a fully formal city, neither in the transition, nor in the long run. The welfare effects of policies, such as reducing the cost of land tenure formalization, or protecting informal dwellers against evictions are subsequently investigated, throughout the short-term transition and in the long-term stationary state.

Document type: Book

Functional Interior Point Programming Applied to the Aircraft Path Planning Problem

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:22:34 +0200

International audience The two first CEAS (Council of European Aerospace Societies) Specialist Conferences on Guidance, Navigation and Control (CEAS EuroGNC) were held in Munich, Germany in 2011 and in Delft, The Netherlands in 2013. ONERA The French Aerospace Lab, ISAE (Institut Supérieur de lAéronautique et de lEspace) and ENAC (Ecole Nationale de lAviation Civile) accepted the challenge of jointly organizing the 3rd edition. The conference aims at promoting new advances in aerospace GNC theory and technologies for enhancing safety, survivability, efficiency, performance, autonomy and intelligence of aerospace systems. It represents a unique forum for communication and information exchange between specialists in the fields of GNC systems design and operation, including air traffic management. This book contains the forty best papers and gives an interesting snapshot of the latest advances over the following topics:l Control theory, analysis, and designl Novel navigation, estimation, and tracking methodsl Aircraft, spacecraft, missile and UAV guidance, navigation, and controll Flight testing and experimental resultsl Intelligent control in aerospace applicationsl Aerospace robotics and unmanned/autonomous systemsl Sensor systems for guidance, navigation and controll Guidance, navigation, and control concepts in air traffic control systemsFor the 3rd CEAS Specialist Conference on Guidance, Navigation and Control the International Program Committee conducted a formal review process. Each paper was reviewed in compliance with standard journal practice by at least two independent and anonymous reviewers. The papers published in this book were selected from the conference proceedings based on the results and recommendations from the reviewers.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Development of Ceramic Functional Layers for Solid Oxide Cells

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:14:35 +0200

Ceramic multi-layer systems are the key components of solid oxide cells (SOC) to be used either for power generation or energy storage. Over the last decades continuous improvement in materials, architecture and manufacturing processes have been achieved to improve performance, durability and lifetime. The advanced concept of a metal-supported SOC where the functional ceramic layers are deposited onto a mechanically stable porous metal support is the most advanced approach for mobile application as auxiliary power units (APU) having strict requirements in terms of low volume, limited weight and improved ability for rapid start-up and thermal cycling. The paper provides an overview of the metal-supported cell development at DLR where functional layers are consecutively deposited by plasma spray technology onto a metal substrate. The current status of this development including materials aspects, stack technology and electrochemical performance is reported. When operating temperature is governed mainly by the electrocatalytic properties of the functional electrode materials and thickness of the electrolyte, thin-film electrolyte opens up the opportunity of low temperature operating SOC. Recently, further research efforts have started to develop a metal-supported cell with thin-film electrolyte. Hermetic thin films have been applied through PVD technology resulting in bilayer structured coatings. Recent results of this development are also presented.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Economics: Agents, Pilgrims, and Profits

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:11:27 +0200

International audience; In the nineteenth century, the ancient muslim pilgrimage economy, based on the caravan system, was rocked by technology and administrative rationality. At the same time, with colonization, the pilgrimage wich had hitherto remained a strictly muslim affair, become a common concern of the colonial powers which subsequently had to manage it from an administrative and economic perspective. With the introduction of steam navigation, which was, in this case, a true revolution, the transportation of pilgrims proved very vulnerable to the assault of European capitalism. The internal economy of Hejaz, on the other hand, was negatively affected by the changes of this period, especially those of a political nature. The disappearance of the financial boon that came with the Ottoman Empire in particular was offset by heavier taxes on the pilgrims. Those driven by faith much more than economic rationality left for Hejaz with very modest means and sometimes in situations of real financial insecurity. On arriving in the holy places of Islam, they encountered a level of misery hardly different from their own, which the regions inhabitants sought to relieve by exploiting the pilgrims until the arrival of oil revenues propelled the pilgrimage into a new economic era.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

III.7 Planets orbiting stars more massive than the Sun

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:01:07 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

A methodological framework for prioritizing infrastructure investment

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:00:05 +0200

Policy makers are often confronted with a myriad of factors in the investment decision-making process. This issue is particularly acute in infrastructure investment decisions, as these often involve significant financial resources and lock-in technologies. In regions and countries where the infrastructure access gap is large and pubic budgets severely constrained, the importance of considering the different facets of the decision-making process becomes even more relevant. This paper discusses the trade-offs policy makers confront when attempting to prioritize infrastructure investments, in particular with regard to economic growth and welfare, and proposes a methodological framework for prioritizing infrastructure projects and portfolios that holistically equates such trade-offs, among others. The analysis suggests that it is not desirable to have a single methodology, providing a single ranking of infrastructure investments, because of the complexities of infrastructure investments. Rather, a multidisciplinary approach should be taken. Decision makers will also need to account for factors that are often not easily measured. While having techniques that enable logical frameworks in the decision-making process of establishing priorities is highly desirable, they are no substitute for consensus building and political negotiations.

Document type: Book

Firms Locational Choice and Infrastructure Development in Tanzania : Instrumental Variable Spatial Autoregressive Model

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:53:54 +0200

Agglomeration economies are among the most important factors in increasing firm productivity. However, there is little evidence supportive of this in Africa. Using the firm registry database in Tanzania, this paper examines a new application of the logit approach with two empirical issues taken into account: spatial autocorrelation and endogeneity of infrastructure placement. The paper finds significant agglomeration economies. It is also found that firms are more likely to be located where local connectivity and access to markets are good. The paper finds that dealing with infrastructure endogeneity and spatial autocorrelation in the empirical model is important. According to the exogeneity test, infrastructure variables are likely endogenous. The spatial autoregressive term is significant. As expected, therefore, there are positive externalities of firm location choice around the neighboring areas.

Document type: Book

Global Experiences with Special Economic Zones: Focus on China and Africa

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:40:28 +0200

This study briefly summarizes the development experiences of special economic zones in China and Africa, the lessons that Africa can learn from China, and the preliminary results of the Chinese investments in special economic zones in Africa. The study makes recommendations on how to unleash the power of special economic zones and industrial zones in Africa through strategically leveraging the Chinese experiences. The success factors of Chinese special economic zones include the strong and long-term commitment of the government, a conducive business environment in the zones, strategic locations, technology upgrading and skills training, and strong linkages with the local economy. However, the Chinese experiences highlight some pitfalls to avoid, such as the mushroom approach and high-level overlaps at the later stage, environmental degradation, and the unbalance between industrial development and social dimensions. This calls for a bigger role for the market. Sub-Sahara Africas experience with traditional economic zones has been relatively poor, except in a few countries, such as Mauritius. The key challenges include the poor regulatory and institutional framework, lack of effective strategic planning, weak governance and implementation capacity, and inadequate infrastructure, among others. Since 2006, China has implemented special economic zone projects globally, including in four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is still too early to conduct a full assessment of these projects; however, the evidence shows that some zones have begun to attract investments and make important contributions to the local economy. The main challenges include access to land, regulatory barriers, resettlement and coordination issues, and lack of external infrastructure.

Document type: Book

Consolidation of technical, safety and human resources in Eurasian railway transport corridors

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:39:11 +0200

The monograph is based on the outcomes of the considerations that took place within the ambit of the project NEAR 2 Network of European-Asian Rail Research Capacities from 2012 to 2014. The monograph serves to bridge the gaps in knowledge and technology to improve the technical interoperability of railway, rail traffic safety regulations and risk assessment, and rolling stock maintenance system. It also analyses different railway infrastructure and identifies interoperability problems of the Eurasian Railways. This research considers three railway systems (geographical regions): first, the railways of the countries in the European Union; second, the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian railways; and third, the railways of Asian countries. The monograph comprises seven chapters dealing with the particularities of rail safety regulation in different countries, technical aspects of safety and interoperability, infrastructure and signalling, track-side equipment and traffic management, locomotive slip and slide control rolling stock maintenance problems, and staff training & educational issues of Eurasian Railways. Overall concluding remarks identify future research needs and priorities that support the formulation of a relevant research agenda for the Eurasian land bridge; ascertain the common future research projects concerned with the main topics of the monograph, as well as to the combination of the interests of the Eurasian rail industry and undertakings. EUR 4,974.7 BPC fee funded by the EC FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilo

Document type: Book

Comparison of single and multi objective evolutionary algorithms for robust link state routing

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:38:00 +0200

Traffic Engineering (TE) approaches are increasingly impor- tant in network management to allow an optimized configuration and resource allocation. In link-state routing, the task of setting appropriate weights to the links is both an important and a challenging optimization task. A number of different approaches has been put forward towards this aim, including the successful use of Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs). In this context, this work addresses the evaluation of three distinct EAs, a single and two multi-objective EAs, in two tasks related to weight setting optimization towards optimal intra-domain routing, knowing the network topology and aggregated traffic demands and seeking to mini- mize network congestion. In both tasks, the optimization considers sce- narios where there is a dynamic alteration in the state of the system, in the first considering changes in the traffic demand matrices and in the latter considering the possibility of link failures. The methods will, thus, need to simultaneously optimize for both conditions, the normal and the altered one, following a preventive TE approach towards robust configurations. Since this can be formulated as a bi-objective function, the use of multi-objective EAs, such as SPEA2 and NSGA-II, came nat- urally, being those compared to a single-objective EA. The results show a remarkable behavior of NSGA-II in all proposed tasks scaling well for harder instances, and thus presenting itself as the most promising option for TE in these scenarios.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

The cost of road infrastructure in low and middle income countries

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:34:09 +0200

The connections between transport infrastructure and economic development have been extensively analyzed in previous research, but little is known about the cost of infrastructure investments in poor countries. This paper examines drivers of unit costs of construction and maintenance of transport infrastructure in low and middle income countries and documents that: (i) there is a large dispersion in unit costs for comparable road work activities; (ii) after accounting for environmental drivers of costs, residual unit costs are significantly higher in conflict countries; (iii) there is evidence that costs are higher in countries with higher levels of corruption; (iv) these effects are robust to controlling for a countrys public investment capacity and business environment. Our findings have implications for governments aiming to increase connectivity in poor countries.

Document type: Book

Infrastructure Investment Demands in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:31:47 +0200

The authors have assembled 19602012 infrastructure stock data from 145 countries to estimate the demand for infrastructure services in emerging markets and developing economies. This paper identifies that the required resource flows to satisfy new demand while maintaining service for existing infrastructure amounts to $836 billion or 6.1 percent of current gross domestic product per year over the period 201420. The annual infrastructure investment gap for emerging markets and developing economies is $452 billion per year, which implies that emerging markets and developing economies should almost double their current spending. The paper also estimates that half of the spending should be allocated to maintenance of existing assets. Acknowledging the challenges to compare infrastructure investment estimates across different methodologies, the authors recognize this result as a lower bound estimate and compare the results with others available in the literature.

Document type: Book

Using probabilistic models to appraise and decide on sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:26:24 +0200

This paper presents an overview of the structure of probabilistic catastrophe risk models, discusses their importance for appraising sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance instruments and strategy, and puts forward a model and a process for improving decision making on the linked disaster risk management strategy and sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance strategy. The paper discusses governments use of probabilistic catastrophe models to inform sovereign disaster risk financing decision making and describes the ex ante and ex post financing instruments available for responding to extreme natural events. It also discusses the challenge of appraising sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance instruments, including a review of the multiple dimensions of disaster risks and the value that probabilistic catastrophe risk models provide. The decision making framework for sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance put forward by the paper includes the use of a decision model (an influence diagram) as a rigorous representation of the relationships between the decisions, uncertain events, and consequences relevant to sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance decision making. The framework also includes a process for generating high-quality customized components for the decision model, and a tool for designing coherent sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance strategies. The paper ends with suggestions for improving catastrophe risk models to facilitate sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance decision making.

Document type: Book

A survey of sme accounting and reporting practices in austria

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:22:57 +0200

This report gives an overview of the key results from the analysis of the data collected in a survey conducted in October and November 2012 by the Austrian Institute for small and medium enterprise (SME) research on behalf of the World Bank center for financial reporting reform (CFRR). The survey was carried out using an online questionnaire and captures data from more than 780 SMEs that are representative of the Austrian SME sector. The primary purpose of this report is to assist the accounting and auditing profession, policy makers, and users of financial information in understanding the value and the constraints of SMEs financial reporting practices. It also feeds into a broader CFRR study on corporate financial reporting reform in Austria. The report presents the results of the survey grouped by topical areas as follows: accounting practices in Austrian SMEs; auditing financial statements; SME financing; and financial reporting and access to finance.

Document type: Book

From goods to traffic first steps toward an auction based traffic signal controller

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:20:36 +0200

Traffic congestion is a major issue that plagues many urban road networks large and small. Traffic engineers are now leaning towards Intelligent Traffic Systems as many types of physical changes to road networks are costly or infeasible. Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) have become a popular paradigm for exploring intelligent solutions to traffic management problems. There are many MAS approaches to traffic management that utilise market mechanisms. In market-based approaches, drivers pay to use the roadways. However, a major issue with many of these solutions is that they require technology that, as yet, does not exist or is not widely available. For example, they rely on a special software agent that resides within the vehicle. This vehicle agent is responsible for participating in the market mechanism and communicating with the transportation infrastructure. In this paper, an auction-based traffic controller is proposed which exploits all the benefits of market mechanisms without the need for a vehicle agent. Experimental results show that such a controller is better at reducing delay and increasing throughput in a simulated city, as compared to fixed-time signal controllers.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Employing traffic lights as road side units for road safety information broadcast

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:19:03 +0200

There is great concern over growing road accidents and associated fatalities. In order to reduce accidents, improve congestion and offer smooth flow of traffic, several measures, such as providing intelligence to transport, providing communication infrastructure along the road, and vehicular communication, are being undertaken. Traffic safety information broadcast from traffic lights using Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a new cost effective technology which assists drivers in taking necessary safety measures. This chapter presents the VLC broadcast system considering LED-based traffic lights. It discusses the integration of traffic light Roadside Units (RSUs) with upcoming Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) architecture. Some of the offered services using this technology in vehicular environment together with future directions and challenges are discussed. A prototype demonstrator of the designed VLC systems is also presented.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Dismal science, accounting and Newton?s second law : identifying force and rigidity in public expenditure analysis

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:18:33 +0200

This paper proposes a new measure of public expenditure force that policy makers and budget analysts should track in detail over time in routine fiscal monitoring. The paper suggests that adopting the measure will not only warn policy makers of possible impending fiscal pressures, but will help them to differentiate between those budgetary pressures that are temporary and those that may require reforms. The main utility of the expenditure force measure will be in country fiscal analysis. Measuring force across the entire budget allows practitioners to monitor and decompose the micro drivers of public spending pressure, watch out for rapidly expanding spending lines, and identify priorities for reform before these pressures lead to macro fiscal problems. Yet by its construct, spending force is internationally comparable, and independent of expenditure levels or spending types. This could allow global monitoring comparisons and global research into the drivers of public spending force across particular types of country characteristics and economic conditions. In time, and as more data become available, researchers can use the force measure to compare and contrast the dynamics of expenditure types across countries. For example the measure can be used to explore what gives some spending types an initial impulse; whether underlying factors cause different public spending categories to grow faster than average, or to accelerate over time; and what successful countries have done to manage rising force without damaging public services. Since force seems to be a decent predictor of fiscal episodes, it is suggested that speed limits for spending might be a feasible component of fiscal rules.

Document type: Book

Industrial Control System Fingerprinting and Anomaly Detection

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:13:48 +0200

Part 2: CONTROL SYSTEMS SECURITY International audience Industrial control systems are cyber-physical systems that supervise and control physical processes in critical infrastructures such as electric grids, water and wastewater treatment plants, oil and natural gas pipelines, transportation systems and chemical plants and refineries. Leveraging the stable and persistent control flow communications patterns in industrial control systems, this chapter proposes an innovative control system fingerprinting methodology that analyzes industrial control protocols to capture normal behavior characteristics. The methodology can be used to identify specific physical processes and control system components in industrial facilities and detect abnormal behavior. An experimental testbed that incorporates real systems for the cyber domain and simulated systems for the physical domain is used to validate the methodology. The experimental results demonstrate that the fingerprinting methodology holds promise for detecting anomalies in industrial control systems and cyber-physical systems used in the critical infrastructure.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Effects of land misallocation on capital allocations in india

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:13:20 +0200

Growing research and policy interest focuses on the misallocation of output and factors of production in developing economies. This paper considers the possible misallocation of financial loans. Using plant-level data on the organized and unorganized sectors, the paper describes the temporal, geographic, and industry distributions of financial loans. The focus of the analysis is the hypothesis that land misallocation might be an important determinant of financial misallocation (for example, because of the role of land as collateral against loans). Using district-industry variations, the analysis finds evidence to support this hypothesis, although it does not find a total reduction in the intensity of financial loans or those being given to new entrants. The analysis also considers differences by gender of business owners and workers in firms. Although potential early gaps for businesses with substantial female employment have disappeared in the organized sector, a sizeable and persistent gap remains in the unorganized sector.

Document type: Book

Movilidad elementos esenciales y riesgos en el distrito metropolitano de quito

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:09:28 +0200

International audience; En este libro se presenta una reflexión sobre los riesgos a los cuales está expuesto el Distrito Metropolitano de Quito DMQ considerando la cuestión de la movilidad cotidiana de las personas y la cuestión de la accesibilidad. Este análisis se funda en un método elaborado en el marco del programa Sistema de información y riesgos en el DMQ llevado a cabo por la Dirección Metropolitana de Territorio y Vivienda del Municipio de Quito y el Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD, ex ORSTOM). Para prevenir eficazmente los riesgos a los cuales está expuesta la capital ecuatoriana por problemas de movilidad habituales o excepcionales, es imprescindible enfocar el análisis en las obras viales claves y los equipamientos de transporte esenciales. En efecto, la pérdida de su operatividad podría dificultar gravemente las comunicaciones y reducir fuertemente la accesibilidad de algunos sectores lo que causaría perjuicios muy severos al territorio metropolitano. La situación es tanto más crítica cuanto que las obras claves son vulnerables y tanto más problemática cuanto que los sectores en cuestión cuentan con funciones urbanas estratégicas (grandes equipamientos de la logística urbana, grandes centros hospitalarios,...). En primer lugar se estudia los flujos y movimientos de personas y el sistema de transporte vigente. Se identifica y localiza en la segunda parte las infraestructuras claves de la movilidad. En una tercera fase se analiza los factores de vulnerabilidad de estas infraestructuras claves, vulnerabilidad que las predisponen a fallos o daños. Por último se aborda los riesgos a los cuales está expuesto el Distrito dada la reducción de la accesibilidad de los diferentes espacios metropolitanos que puede resultar del cierre de las vías claves. En una perspectiva de planificación urbana preventiva, el libro proporciona una base de reflexión para los gestores, pistas para la reducción de la vulnerabilidad y medidas encaminadas a orientar la gestión de crisis. Si bien se dirige a los encargados del manejo del transporte o riesgos, este libro está destinado a los planificadores urbanos y de manera general a todo público interesado en comprender el funcionamiento de la movilidad de las personas y la vulnerabilidad de la capital ecuatoriana.; Ce livre présente une réflexion sur les risques encourus par le District Métropolitain de Quito DMQ en considérant la question de la mobilité quotidienne des personnes et la question de l'accessibilité. Cette analyse s'appuie sur une méthode mise au point dans le cadre du programme « Système d'information et risques dans le DMQ » mené par la Direction Métropolitaine du Territoire et du Logement de la Municipalité de Quito et l'Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD). Pour prévenir de façon efficace les risques auxquels est exposée la capitale équatorienne compte tenu des problèmes de mobilité habituels ou exceptionnels, il est indispensable de cibler l'analyse sur les infrastructures routières enjeux et sur les équipements de transport enjeux. En effet, la perte de leur opérationnalité pourrait compromettre sérieusement les communications et réduire fortement l'accessibilité de certains secteurs, situation qui handicaperait gravement le territoire métropolitain. La situation est d'autant plus critique que les enjeux sont vulnérables et d'autant plus problématique que les secteurs en question rassemblent des fonctions urbaines stratégiques (grands équipements de la logistique urbaine, grands centres hospitaliers...). En premier lieu, sont étudiés les flux et de personnes et le système de transport actuel. En second lieu, sont identifiées et localisées les infrastructures enjeux de la mobilité. En troisième lieu, les vulnérabilités déplacements enjeux, les prédisposant aux défaillances ou à l'endommagement, sont analysées. Enfin sont évalués les risques encourus par le District compte tenu de la réduction de l'accessibilité des différents espaces métropolitains pouvant découler de la fermeture des routes enjeux. Dans une perspective de planification urbaine préventive, le livre propose une base de réflexion utile aux gestionnaires, fournit des pistes pour la réduction des vulnérabilités et apporte des orientations pour la préparation aux crises. S'il s'adresse aux responsables de la gestion des transports ou des risques, ce livre est aussi destiné aux planificateurs urbains et de manière générale à quiconque désire comprendre le fonctionnement de la mobilité des personnes et la vulnérabilité de la capitale équatorienne.

Document type: Book

Data-intensive computing infrastructure systems for unmodified biological data analysis pipelines

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:01:52 +0200

Accepted manuscript version. The final publication is available at Springer via "a href=http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24462-4_22"http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24462-4_22"/a". Biological data analysis is typically implemented using a deep pipeline that combines a wide array of tools and databases. These pipelines must scale to very large datasets, and consequently require parallel and distributed computing. It is therefore important to choose a hardware platform and underlying data management and processing systems well suited for processing large datasets. There are many infrastructure systems for such data-intensive computing. However, in our experience, most biological data analysis pipelines do not leverage these systems. We give an overview of data-intensive computing infrastructure systems, and describe how we have leveraged these for: (i) scalable fault-tolerant computing for large-scale biological data; (ii) incremental updates to reduce the resource usage required to update large-scale compendium; and (iii) interactive data analysis and exploration. We provide lessons learned and describe problems we have encountered during development and deployment. We also provide a literature survey on the use of data-intensive computing systems for biological data processing. Our results show how unmodified biological data analysis tools can benefit from infrastructure systems for data-intensive computing.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Investigating the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Uganda

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:01:39 +0200

Women comprise 50 percent of the agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, but manage plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less productive. As a source of income inequality and aggregate productivity loss, the country-specific magnitude and drivers of this gender gap are of great interest. Using national data from the Uganda National Panel Survey for 2009/10 and 2010/11, the gap before controlling for endowments was estimated to be 17.5 percent. Panel data methods were combined with an Oaxaca decomposition to investigate the gender differences in resource endowment and return to endowment driving this gap. Although men have greater access to inputs, input use is so low and inverse returns to plot size so strong in Uganda that smaller female-managed plots have a net endowment advantage of 12 percent, revealing a larger unexplained gap of 29.5 percent. Two-fifths of this unexplained gap is attributed to differential returns to the child dependency ratio and one-fifth to differential returns to transport access, implying that greater child care responsibilities and difficulty accessing input and output markets from areas without transport are the largest drivers of the gap. Smaller and less robust drivers include differential uptake of cash crops, and differential uptake and return to improved seeds and pesticides.

Document type: Book

World Bank Policy Lending and the Quality of Public Sector Governance

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:00:40 +0200

This study investigates the impact of World Bank development policy lending for public sector governance on the quality of public sector management and institutions. The World Banks Country Policy and Institutional Assessments (CPIA) are used to measure the latter, the study considers only policy conditions targeted at improvements in those areas. The analysis uses a comprehensive country-year panel data set of aid receiving-countries and finds a significant and inverse U-shaped effect of public sector conditions on the quality of public sector governance. For most observed values in the data, the impact is positive, but it turns negative beyond a value of 80 conditions. At that point, the predicted CPIA score is about 0.25 point (0.3 standard deviation) higher than with zero conditions. For most observations, the number of cumulative conditions is below 80, so the estimated effect of more conditions is generally positive. The analysis corrects for potential endogeneity and shows that the results are robust to sample restrictions, the use of an alternative governance measure, and the inclusion of an extended set of control variables. Falsification tests are also consistent with a causal interpretation from conditions to quality of public sector governance. The paper shows that conditions related to public financial management and tax reforms are more effective than those related to anti-corruption or civil service and administrative reform, where progress requires changing the behavior of a larger set of deconcentrated actors. The paper concludes by describing some innovative ideas in the Banks ambitious new public sector management strategy that could improve the effectiveness of its support for public sector governance reform.

Document type: Book

Entropy minimizing curves with application to automated flight path design

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 13:56:51 +0200

International audience; Air traffic management (ATM) aims at providing companies with a safe and ideally optimal aircraft trajectory planning. Air traffic controllers act on flight paths in such a way that no pair of aircraft come closer than the regulatory separation norm. With the increase of traffic, it is expected that the system will reach its limits in a near future: a paradigm change in ATM is planned with the introduction of trajectory based operations. This paper investigate a mean of producing realistic air routes from the output of an automated trajectory design tool. For that purpose, an entropy associated with a system of curves is defined and a mean of iteratively minimizing it is presented. The network produced is suitable for use in a semi-automated ATM system with human in the loop.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Towards a Federated Infrastructure for the Global Data Pipeline

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 13:51:22 +0200

Interoperability in logistics is a prerequisite for realizing data pipelines and the Physical Internet. Forecasting data, real time data, and actual positions of shipments, containers, and transport means shared via events have to be harmonized and are expected to improve all types of processes, support synchromodal planning, and improve risk analysis from a compliance and resilience perspective. Technically, several solutions are implemented by organizations and innovations have been validated in so-called Living Labs or demonstrators in various projects. These solutions do not yet provide open systems required for a (global) data pipeline. A federation of solutions is required to construct data pipelines and to support sustainable development of applications on smart devices allowing Small and Medium sized Enterprises to collaborate. This paper proposes a set of platform services and so-called platform protocols to allow interoperability of different platforms for constructing a data pipeline. The proposed services and protocols further extend existing interoperability solutions and services for supply and logistics. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2015.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Cycling and sustainable transport

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 13:06:21 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Jobs housing balance the right ratio for the right place

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 13:04:27 +0200

The concept of Jobs-housing balance (JHB) has attracted many city and transportation planning agencies for the interest of increasing place quality and reducing travel demand. Operationalizing JHB, however, has been a challenge. There are several critical questions in the application of JHB: what is a good ratio? How should JHB be quantified for guiding land use development? And, to what extent could jobs-housing ratio be effectively used as an intervention instrument?

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Trade in Zimbabwe: Changing Incentives to Enhance Competitiveness

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 13:01:15 +0200

In Zimbabwe trade has been a driver of economic growth, rising incomes, and progressive empowerment of Zimbabweans through rising standards of living and the promise of better jobs. Since 1980, through good years and bad years, increases in exports have been positively associated with increases in national income. Zimbabwe's location and resource base, together with a low-cost but relatively well educated labor force, have endowed it with a naturally high trade ratio built on a diversified base that facilitates using trade as an engine of growth. While trade volumes have rebounded smartly from the deep recession of 2007-2008, these do not offset other worrisome longer-term trends: 1) export growth during the last decade has been lackluster and failed to drive high growth; 2) agricultural exports, other than tobacco, have lost their once dominant role in the region, and are no longer a source of diversification; 3) manufacturing has withered in a continuing secular decline; and 4) Zimbabwe's export basket has become less diversified and more dependent on a narrow range of mineral and, to a lesser extent, agricultural products. In short, exports have become less diversified, less-technologically sophisticated, and less labor-intensive, and ever more dependent on a few large mining activities to provide foreign exchange and employment. This report traces the roots of this poor performance to several policy issues: poor predictability of macroeconomic policy and economic governance has created an unfavorable climate for private investment and trade; a tariff structure that dampens export profitability; industrial policies (indigenization policy in particular) that undermine investor confidence and inhibits private investment; and finally, competition-limiting policies toward services that limit connectivity of Zimbabweans and raise trade costs. The good news arising from the study is that the remedies for these policy shortcomings lie in Zimbabwean hands. If the government were to adopt reforms that reconfigure economy-wide incentives and trade and industrial policies, it could promote sustained growth, economic diversification and empowerment of poor people.

Document type: Book

D5.3: Access Charge Final Report. The sustainable freight railway: Designing the freight vehicle track system for higher delivered tonnage with improved availability at reduced cost (SUSTRAIL)

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:55:29 +0200

Document type: Book

An automated framework for the management of P2P traffic in ISP infrastructures

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:52:18 +0200

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) is nowadays a widely used paradigm underpinning the deployment of several Internet services and applications. However, the management of P2P traffic aggregates is not an easy task for Internet Service Providers (ISPs). In this perspective, and considering an expectable proliferation in the use of such ap- plications, future networks require the development of smart mechanisms fostering an easier coexistence between P2P applications and ISP infrastructures. This paper aims to contribute for such research efforts presenting a framework incorporating useful mechanisms to be activated by network administrators, being also able to operate as an automated management tool dealing with P2P traffic aggregates. This work has been partially supported by FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia Portugal in the scope of the project: UID/CEC/00319/2013.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Dynamic multi period freight consolidation

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:51:30 +0200

Logistic Service Providers (LSPs) offering hinterland transportation face the trade-off between efficiently using the capacity of long-haul vehicles and minimizing the first and last-mile costs. To achieve the optimal trade-off, freights have to be consolidated considering the variation in the arrival of freight and their characteristics, the applicable transportation restrictions, and the interdependence of decisions over time. We propose the use of a Markov model and an Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) algorithm to consolidate the right freights in such transportation settings. Our model incorporates probabilistic knowledge of the arrival of freights and their characteristics, as well as generic definitions of transportation restrictions and costs. Using small test instances, we show that our ADP solution provides accurate approximations to the optimal solution of the Markov model. Using larger problem instances, we show that our modeling approach has significant benefits when compared to common-practice heuristic approaches.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Firms locational choice and infrastructure development in rwanda

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:50:24 +0200

Agglomeration economies are among the most important factors to increase firm productivity. However, there is little evidence supportive of this in Africa. By applying the conditional and nested logit models, this paper examines the relationship between firm locations and infrastructure accessibility in Rwanda. It is found that agglomeration economies matter to even one of the smallest countries in Africa. It is also found that infrastructure availability has an important role in affecting the firm location decision. Electricity access and transport connectivity to the domestic and international markets are found to be important to attract new investment. In addition, the quality of local labor supplied, measured by educational attainment, is found as an important determinant of firm location, while the effect of labor costs remains inconclusive.

Document type: Book

Ultrasonic Data Compression and Analysis During Material Inspection

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:49:25 +0200

Part 3: Data Representation and Analysis; International audience; Ultrasonic inspection is nowadays widely used in material inspection to detect and locate internal defects. However, in case of large structures inspection, such as pipelines, vessel reactors etc., the amount of signals to acquire and interpret may be very important, especially in modern techniques that use image representations.In this article, a proposed algorithm to ultrasonic data selection and processing is described. Images will be replaced by 2 arrays that contain only the data regarding a detected defect. This allows avoiding the storage of useless received ultrasonic data, and simple pattern recognition techniques may be exploited to defect characterization.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

High School Track Choice and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Urban Mexico

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:49:02 +0200

Parents and students from different socioeconomic backgrounds value differently school characteristics, but the reasons behind this preference heterogeneity are not well understood. In the context of the centralized school assignment system in Mexico City, this study analyzes how a large household income shock affects choices over high school tracks exploiting the discontinuity in the assignment of the welfare program Oportunidades. The income shock significantly increases the probability of choosing the vocational track vis-a-vis the other more academic-oriented tracks. The findings suggest that the transfer relaxes the financial constraints that prevent relatively low-ability students from choosing the schooling option with higher labor market returns.

Document type: Book

Agriculture production and transport infrastructure in east africa an application of spatial autoregression

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:48:04 +0200

Africa is estimated to have great potential for agricultural production, but there are a number of constraints inhibiting the development of that potential. Spatial data are increasingly important in the realization of potential as well as the associated constraints. With crop production data generated at 5-minute spatial resolution, the paper applies the spatial tobit regression model to estimate the possible impacts of improvements in transport accessibility in East Africa. It is found that rural accessibility and access to markets are important to increase agricultural production. In particular for export crops, such as coffee, tea, tobacco, and cotton, access to ports is crucial. The elasticities are estimated at 0.34.6. In addition, the estimation results show that spatial autocorrelation matters to the estimation results. While a random shock in a particular locality would likely affect its neighboring places, the spatial autoregressive term can be positive or negative, depending on how fragmented the current production areas are.

Document type: Book

Disruption-Free Link Wake-up Optimisation for Energy Aware Networks

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:45:26 +0200

Part 1: Autonomic and Decentralized Management International audience Energy efficiency has become a major research topic in the Internet community as a result of unprecedented rise in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector. One typical approach towards energy efficiency is to select a subset of IP routers or interfaces that will go to sleep mode during the off-peak period. However, on-the-fly network reconfiguration is generally deemed harmful especially to real time packets due to routing re-convergence. In this paper, we develop an efficient algorithm for achieving energy efficiency which is disruption free. The objective is to incrementally wake up sleeping links upon the detection of increased traffic demand. Unlike normal approaches of manipulating link weights or reverting to full topology in case of even minor network congestion and thereby sacrificing energy savings, our algorithm wakes up the minimum number of sleeping links to the network in order to handle this dynamicity. The performance of our algorithm was evaluated using the GEANT network topology and its traffic traces over a period of one week. According to our simulation results, up to almost 47% energy gains can be achieved without any obstruction to the network performance. Secondly, we show that the activation of a small number of sleeping links is still sufficient to cope with the observed traffic surge.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Evaluation of Recent Computational Approaches in Short-Term Traffic Forecasting

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:45:11 +0200

Part 3: Computational Intelligence and Algorithms; International audience; Computational technologies under the domain of intelligent systems are expected to help the rapidly increasing traffic congestion problem in recent traffic management. Traffic management requires efficient and accurate forecasting models to assist real time traffic control systems. Researchers have proposed various computational approaches, especially in short-term traffic flow forecasting, in order to establish reliable traffic patterns models and generate timely prediction results. Forecasting models should have high accuracy and low computational time to be applied in intelligent traffic management. Therefore, this paper aims to evaluate recent computational modeling approaches utilized in short-term traffic flow forecasting. These approaches are evaluated by real-world data collected on the British freeway (M6) from 1st to 30th November in 2014. The results indicate that neural network model outperforms generalized additive model and autoregressive integrated moving average model on the accuracy of freeway traffic forecasting.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Road Improvement and Deforestation in the Congo Basin Countries

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:44:55 +0200

Road construction has often been viewed as the precursor to deforestation, especially in tropical forests. Traditional responses to such threats have been reactive, with attempts to mitigate impacts through physical measures, or the establishment of protected areas. These approaches often have not been entirely successful, especially in areas where economic potential is significant. This paper seeks to mitigate such conflicts by proposing a proactive approach to development planning and environmental policy. It develops a high-resolution spatial model of road improvement impacts that includes ecological risks and the economics of forest clearing. The approach is implemented by estimating the potential impact of road upgrading on forest clearing and biodiversity in eight Congo Basin countries. The paper demonstrates how the detailed analysis can identify areas of high ecological priority as well as areas at high risk of forest loss. The paper contributes to several aspects of the literature. First, it provides the most recent and reliable estimates of the drivers of deforestation in the Congo Basin, with the latest high-resolution satellite data on forest cover changes. Second, it presents novel estimates of biodiversity threats by creating an index that combines and synthesizes several measures of biodiversity loss and impacts. It then develops an empirical framework for estimating the ecological impacts of road improvement. Finally, the paper illustrates how the empirical framework can be used to preempt impacts and avoid potential ecological damage.

Document type: Book

Wave climate for inland vessels between Zeebrugge and the mouth of the Western Scheldt: estimation by the Belgian coast model in SWAN

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 10:00:33 +0200

The Masterplan 'Vlaamse Baaien' outlines the need to develop an integrated vision for the Belgian coast. One of the Masterplan’s goals is to achieve a win-win situation between coastal protection and the maintenance and improvement of the maritime access to the port of Zeebrugge."p"The hinterland connection of the port of Zeebrugge by means of inland vessels is a major issue. Therefore, a specific type of inland vessels is conditionally allowed to make use of the 16 nautical miles long sea trajectory between Zeebrugge and the mouth of the Western Scheldt estuary to connect the port with the inland waterway network."p"Detailed information about the wave climate in the area between the eastern dam of the port of Zeebrugge, Pas van het Zand, Scheur-Oost/Wielingen, Vlissingen, Breskens and the coastline is essential to maximize the efficiency of the sea-river traffic in the present situation, and to decrease the requirements of inland vessels for safe navigation on a coastal route between the port of Zeebrugge and the mouth of the Western Scheldt."p"The existing project focuses on the model set-up and calculation of the detailed wave climate between Zeebrugge and the mouth of the Western Scheldt estuary in the present situation and also a future configuration for wind, wave and water level conditions throughout the year 2013 by means of the validated numerical model. The result of the simulation are delivered to the client for the further analysis (e.g. shading effects of new islands scenarios for the ship navigation). Research results can be used for the further analysis of the navigation of all vessels which are making use of the present route and future alternative routes. Besides, it can serve as a basis to evaluate the impact of measures on the response of inland vessels.

Document type: Book

Robust and real time lane marking detection for embedded system

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:58:20 +0200

Lane marking detection is part of most advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) as an important component of computer vision. This paper presents a lane detection system based on a novel lane feature extraction approach. The robustness and real-time of algorithm enable different configurations of embedded solutions. The system is divided into three phases. Firstly, using the Prewitt operator we can get the rich useful details and using Shen Jun operator we can get step edge, on the other hand Shen Jun operator is the best filter to detect the symmetrical markings according to the maximum signal noise ratio (SNR) criterion. So we introduce the best compromise method between noise smoothing and edge locating that combining the Prewitt operator with Shen Jun operator to extract lane markings. Then a fast Hough transform based on image pyramid is applied to get the lane lines. The posterior algorithm of reasonably refining the Lane lines angle is introduced to correct to error caused by Hough transform. Finally, robust detection of vehicle’s departure warning is also discussed. Experiment results on real road will be presented to prove the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed lane detection algorithm.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Probabilistic grid based collision risk prediction for driving application

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:53:50 +0200

In the recent years, more and more modern cars have been equipped with perception capabilities. One of the key applications of such perception systems is the estimation of a risk of collision. This is necessary for both Advanced Driver Assistance Systems and Autonomous Navigation. Most approach for risk estimation propose to detect and track the dynamic objects in the scene. Then the risk is estimated as a Time To Collision (TTC) by projecting the object’s trajectory in the future. In this paper, we propose a new grid-based approach for collision risk prediction, based on the Hybrid-Sampling Bayesian Occupancy Filter framework. The idea is to compute an estimation of the TTC for each cell of the grid, instead of reasoning on objects. This strategy avoids to solve the difficult problem of multi-objects detection and tracking and provides a probabilistic estimation of the risk associated to each TTC value. After promising initial results, we propose in this paper to evaluate the relevance of the method for real on-road applications, by using a real-time implementation of our method in an experimental vehicle.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Understanding the operations of freight forwarders : evidence from Serbia

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:48:49 +0200

Freight forwarders play a key role in moving goods across international borders. They arrange transport, oversee customs clearance on behalf of their clients, and more generally troubleshoot issues that arise while goods are in transit. This paper reports the results from a survey of 153 freight forwarding firms in Serbia. Respondents report on firm characteristics, operational choices, and conditions at the border posts and terminals where imported goods are cleared for release. One key purpose of the study is to investigate operational trade-offs between time and cost that arise when import shipments are in transit. In three of four hypotheticals, respondents suggest that money savings dominate time savings. Responses regarding real operational decisions such as route choices reinforce this finding. Respondents also reported penalty rates for late delivery of import shipments as well as the value of a typical import shipment. From these responses, it is estimated that the contracted value of one additional (unexpected) day of delivery time in Serbia appears to be approximately 1 percent of the value of the underlying shipment.

Document type: Book

Impacts on Poverty of Removing Fuel Import Subsidies in Nigeria

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:48:02 +0200

The petroleum sector contributes substantially to the Nigerian economy; however, the potential benefits are diminished because of the existence of significant subsidies on imports of petroleum products. Subsidies on imported petroleum products are considered to be an important instrument for keeping fuel prices, and hence the cost of living, low. The costs of these subsidies, however, have risen dramatically in recent years along with increased volatility in world petroleum and petroleum product prices and increased illegal exportation of subsidized petroleum products into neighboring countries. Removing the subsidy on fuel is one of the most contentious socioeconomic policy issues in Nigeria today. In this paper, an economy-wide framework is used to identify the impact of removing the fuel subsidy on the Nigerian economy and investigate how alternative policies might be used to meet socioeconomic objectives related to fuel subsidies. The results show that although a reduction in the subsidy generally results in an increase in Nigeria’s gross domestic product, it can have a detrimental impact on household income, and in particular on poor households. Accompanying the subsidy reduction with income transfers aimed at poor households or domestic production of petroleum products can alleviate the negative impacts on household income.

Document type: Book

Traffic Management Systems

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:45:18 +0200

This study uses regression analysis to evaluate long-run traffic management system performance. Three important traffic management systems in the Twin Cities metro area - Ramp Metering, Variable Message Signs (VMS), and Freeway Service Patrol (the Highway Helper Program) were evaluated with multiple regression models to predict link speed and incident rate. We find that ramp meters increase freeway link speed and reduce incident rate. Freeway Service Patrols increase link speed when incidents are present. The results for variable message signs are ambiguous.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

A feasibility study of the effect of phone based feedback of other commuters subjective experiences on driver intentions to change

Scipedia content — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 09:02:07 +0200

Encouraging people to make sustainable transport choices remains a global challenge and many interventions have been attempted. This study investigated the reflection on own/others’ subjective experiences (SE) as an intervention using a smartphone application as the intervention tool. Participants were car drivers and used the app to automatically capture and reflect on their commute journeys and experiences. The experimental group were also able to reflect upon others’ experiences across car, walk and cycle modes. Others’ experiences were designed based on a previous self-report study. Results of the study showed that quantitative measures of intentions to change were not affected by the intervention but that qualitative data showed that the positive experience of the active transport modes did bring about reflection on behaviour and a potential influence on opinions and intentions which warrants further study.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Auditing and maintaining provenance in software packages

Scipedia content — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 14:18:16 +0200

Science projects are increasingly investing in computational reproducibility. Constructing software pipelines to demonstrate reproducibility is also becoming increasingly common. To aid the process of constructing pipelines, science project members often adopt reproducible methods and tools. One such tool is CDE, which is a software packaging tool that encapsulates source code, datasets and environments. However, CDE does not include information about origins of dependencies. Consequently when multiple CDE packages are combined and merged to create a software pipeline, several issues arise requiring an author to manually verify compatibility of distributions, environment variables, software dependencies and compiler options. In this work, we propose software provenance to be included as part of CDE so that resulting provenance-included CDE packages can be easily used for creating software pipelines. We describe provenance attributes that must be included and how they can be efficiently stored in a light-weight CDE package. Furthermore, we show how a provenance in a package can be used for creating software pipelines and maintained as new packages are created. We experimentally evaluate the overhead of auditing and maintaining provenance and compare with heavy weight approaches for reproducibility such as virtualization. Our experiments indicate minimal overheads. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Assessment and control of chemical risk from organic vapors for attendants in a gas station

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:13:22 +0200

This research comprises monitoring, assessment and recommendations for chemical risk originating from organic vapors (benzene, toluene and xylene) of fuel (super and extra gasoline) to which attendants at a gas station are exposed. Given the concentration measured of organic vapors (benzene, toluene and xylene) the chemical risk to which attendants are exposed in the supply area is acceptable. Control measures are recommended to ensure healthy working conditions for gas station attendants and also to avoid occurrence of occupational diseases in the medium or long term

Design of a power amplifier for wireless communications using microstrip technology and Microwave Office

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:13:13 +0200

This paper provides a detailed description and all the procedures involved in designing a power amplifier using microstrip technology and the design software Microwave OfficeTM. Specifically, the design is oriented to build an amplifier with central frequency at 14 GHz, but the same fundamentals and principles could be applied in the whole range of radio frequency. For the design, a MESFET transistor and simultaneous input and output matching networks are considered. The values of the parameters and the simulation for every stage are computed and performed using AWR Microwave OfficeTM. At the end of the document, a fully functional circuit layout represented in 2D and 3D is shown with all their complementary elements

Automatic delimitation of microwatershed using SRTM data of the NASA

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:13:03 +0200

The watershed as the basic territorial unit of planning and management of water resources, requires its proper delimitation of the catchment or drainage area, faced with this situation, the lack of geographic information of Casacay river micro watersheds, hydrographic unit should be resolved, for this purpose the research was aimed at automatic delimitation of micro watersheds using of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) techniques and the project Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission (SRTM) 30 meters spatial resolution data. The selected methodology was the Pfafstetter one, with which nine micro watersheds were obtained with their respective codification allowing to continue with watersheds standardization adopted by Ecuador Water's Secretariat. With the investigation results watersheds will be updated with more detail information, promoting the execution of tasks or activities related to the integrated management of the hydrographic unit studied

Aspects and environmental impacts associated with the production of concrete

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:12:53 +0200

Concrete plants are important to the economy of a country. However, this industry causes major environmental impacts in each of the steps involved in the manufacturing process of concrete production which are analyzed in this research. In addition, the perception of experts and workers in the area, about the environmental impacts associated with the activity of a producer of concrete was evaluated. The methodology used for the analysis of steps in the production process was as kind documentary. For to evaluate perception of environmental impacts the methodology used was descriptive non experimental, using interviews with workers related to the manufacturing process of the concrete. Among the major identified environmental impacts are dust emissions and improper handling of effluents, hazardous and non-hazardous materials. Among the proposals put forward to address these impacts include: installation of dust collectors, settling tanks, management plans for hazardous and non-hazardous materials, among others. An analysis of the results incorporating the principles of corporate social responsibility for improving or minimizing adverse impacts are detected proposed

Formulation and characterization of a nutritional pumpkin-based whey beverages, enriched with oatmeal and passion fruit

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:12:42 +0200

In this work, the effect on the addition of oatmeal (Avena sativa) and passion fruit (Passiflora edulis) in the content of fiber, calcium, iron, phosphorus and A vitamin in beverage formulation based on pumpkin (Cucurbita maxima), milk and whey, was determined. The beverages undergone significant changes during the storage time, the pH decreased as the acidity showed a slight increase. The coordinates of CIELAB (L *, a * and b *) were located in quadrant 1 indicating a clear tendency to yellow caused by the presence of carotenoids from the pumpkin and passion fruit. Based on the sensory analysis it was selected best treatment who was higher in 3 of the 4 parameters evaluated. This sample also presented a pseudoplastic behavior with a consistency index of 3.57 Pa.s0.24 and a shelf life of 9 days

Characterization of residual biomass from the Arequipa region for the production of biofuels

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:12:30 +0200

The aim of this work is to select residual biomass from the Arequipa Region for the production of biofuels (biodiesel, bioethanol and biogas). In each case, the initial point is a matrix based on products with residual biomass available in the region, from the agricultural and livestock sectors, information that was obtained from the regional Management of Agriculture web site. Specific factors of the resudue that will be used as raw material for each biofuel production would be considered for the selection process. For the production of biodiesel it is necessary to start from the oil extracted from oilseeds. Regarding obtaining bioethanol, it requires that the residual biomass has high percent of cellulose. With regard to the generation of biogas, we will use animal droppings. Finally, the raw materials selected are: squash and avocado seeds for biodiesel, rice chaff and deseeded corncob for bioethanol and cow and sheep droppings for biogas

Potential use of vegetal Biomass as insulation in extreme climates of Ecuador

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:12:19 +0200

In Ecuador, a factor of great ecological wealth is linked to its tradition in the use of fibers and other organic waste composite character as filler element, reinforcement or insulation in the field of housing construction, which carries great potential under the most viable architecture. The climate variability in Ecuador and the low purchasing power of their inhabitants forced to use local available building materials inexpensive or at no cost, in order to achieve economic and comfortable housing. That is why we have analyzed the presence of natural resources and waste biomass confronting regional building tradition, later superimpose geographically with major climatic variables affecting energy efficiency. This makes it possible to determine what, where and how to use the different biomass resources to allow a response to build that has a strong social, economic, environmental and energy argument in order to facilitate the conditions for access to economic habitat efficient, safe and dignified.

Revision of the state of the art for the administration and improvement of the managerial processes

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:12:08 +0200

The present article relates concepts and knowledge on the international tendency as for the administration and improvement of the managerial processes. In the methodology review and analysis published online access, indexed database and other Web of Science is considered to identify those aspects of interest that influence the performance of companies and their processes. The main findings indicate that today any attempt to formalize the management and process improvement must contain theoretical assumptions about process management and system integration, it is also imperative to accept the basis of good management practices, treated with a focus process, highlighted in the selection process, the identification and assessment of opportunities for improvement, indicators and its relationship with business strategies

Visual pollution Indicators and its Effects on Population

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:11:57 +0200

One of the areas where you can distinguish an increase in business activity is Cotocollao parish, located in the Metropolitan District of Quito, this commercial development has meant an increase in the outdoor advertising, which is a source of visual pollution. The aims of this investigation are estimate levels of visual pollution in an area of Cotocollao parish, and its effects on the population, propose indicators measuring, analyzing critical points that the area has with respect to the visual pollution and compliance with respect to the outdoor advertising set in the sector. Methodology is based on the proposal of indicators made based on the research conducted and local regulations, which are proposed for a quantitative analysis of this type of contamination and thus estimate existing levels; and implementation of surveys on the population of the place to make a qualitative analysis of the effects of this pollution. Estimated levels of visual pollution present in this place were the Middle and Upper-Middle mostly, and effects that this pollution has had on the population are eyestrain, headaches, stress, visual obstructions, among others.

Real-Time Embedded Control System for a Portable Meteorological Station

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:11:48 +0200

The aim of this work is to design and code an embedded system for a portable automatic weather station. The portable station includes high performance sensors to measure parameters such as: i) wind speed and direction, micro perturbations and wind gusts, ii) air temperature, iii) solar radiation, iv) relative humidity, and v) atmospheric pressure. The main contribution of this work is the development of an embedded control system operating in real time. This system is based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device. The method developed guarantees high-resolution data acquisition of a number of samples in real time. The samples obtained are grouped and stored in a database, which will be used as a starting point for further analysis.

Composition and diversity of tree species in transects of location lowland evergreen forest of Ecuador

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:11:38 +0200

The study was conducted in 9 transects 1000m2 of lowland evergreen forest, located in two locations on the coast and one in eastern Ecuador. It was to contribute to knowledge of the diversity and composition of woody plants over 10 cm diameter at breast height (DBH) plus infer the state of conservation of forests based on the composition, the number of species, indices diversity and importance value (IV), found in 9 transects of 1000 m² of forest: 156 species, 107 genera and 39 families distributed in 9 transects, in each one the Simpson diversity index is of 0.92 to 0.95, in this case are diversity because all approaches 1. Most were found species aren´t present in all transects, the index value in each transect does not exceed 40%. Grouping transects match three locations exception made to transect 5 and 8 were conducted in disturbed sites, the most transects are intermediate disturbance that their high levels of diversity.

Design of a fluidized bed incinerator to process organic solid waste

Scipedia content — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 10:11:28 +0200

This work includes the theoretical design of a fluidized bed incinerator for organic waste disposal, according with the most advanced parameters published about the subject, taking into account the regulations provided for this type of equipment and related environment. Current designs of incinerators and fluidized bed gasifiers proved to be mostly cylindrical. The design element to which greater importance is ascribed to the incinerator operating temperature and residence time of the waste inside it. The incinerator operating temperature should be between 850 and 1.100 ° C to ensure almost complete destruction of the organic compounds in the waste and prevent the emission of pollutants, mainly dioxins and furans, the residence time is three (3) minutes and silica sand is proposed to be used as support material, to comply with environmental regulations and health techniques. Incinerator dimensions for 1 ton hr-1 treatment capacity are determined by the residence time, volume and density of the waste to be incinerated, and were 514 mm in diameter and 6.650 mm of high.

Scipedia: Documents published in 2015

Towards a Federated Infrastructure for the Global Data Pipeline

Proposed Practice for Alternative Bidding of Highway Drainage Systems

Evaluating the Implementation of a Fuzzy Logic System for Hybrid Vehicles as Alternative to Combustion Engine Buses in Big Cities

Additional Financing for Transport and Information and Communication Technology

D5.3: Access Charge Final Report. The sustainable freight railway: Designing the freight vehicle – track system for higher delivered tonnage with improved availability at reduced cost (SUSTRAIL)

An energy-efficient metro speed profiles for energy savings: application to the Valencia metro

Potenziale neuer Mobilitätsformen und -technologien für eine nachhaltige Raumentwicklung - Fazit und Ausblick

Fieldwork Entrepreneurs. Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Additional Efficient Warning Sounds for Electric and Hybrid Vehicles

Special Issue "Agent-Based Modelling of City Systems"

An adaptive and VANETs-based Next Road Re-routing system for unexpected urban traffic congestion avoidance

Infrastructure and the International Export Performance of Turkish Regions

Meeting Locations in Real-Time Ridesharing Problem: A Buckets Approach

Numerical Solution of Advection Equations Using Structured Grids on Plane Irregular Regions With a Finite Differences Scheme

Estudio de las ondas viajeras en el modelo de Gray-Scott

Dinámica Poblacional del SIDA en México de 1983 a 2012: un estudio retrospectivo y prospectivo

Scalable and power efficient data analytics for hybrid exascale systems

MOBILITY4EU - D2.1 - Societal needs and requirements for future transportation and mobility as well as opportunities and challenges of current solutions

Urban planning 3 0 impact of recent developments of the web on urban planning

Sustainable Urban Transport Financing from the Sidewalk to the Subway: Capital, Operations, and Maintenance Financing

Review of logistics service regulations for freight forwarding businesses: what should be addressed for a better logistics regulatory framework ?

Estimating the size of external effects of energy subsidies in transport and agriculture

Crop choice and infrastructure accessibility in tanzania subsistence crops or export crops

The impact of crude oil prices on the export of transport services in Europe

Fast traffic sign recognition using color segmentation and deep convolutional networks

Firm inventory behavior in east africa

Keywords of Mobility. What's in a Name?

The pulse of public opinion : using Twitter data to analyze public perception of reform in El Salvador

Social and economic impacts of rural road improvements in the state of tocantins brazil

Firm Productivity and Infrastructure Costs in East Africa

Urban transport: analysis of commute energy use

BONUS BALTSPACE Deliverable D2.1: Baseline-mapping and Refined Case Study Design

Congestion aware warehouse flow analysis and optimization

Economic importance of the Belgian ports: Flemish maritime ports, Liège port complex and the port of Brussels: Report 2013

Improving Service Quality in Public Transportation in Brazil: How Bus Companies are Simplifying Quality Management Systems and Strategic Planning to Increase Service Level?

Sustainable transport system transport on demand

The effect of metro expansions on air pollution in delhi

Del atraso a la convergencia la red de carreteras en espana 1900 2010

Transport infrastructure and welfare an application to nigeria

Reducing Stress and Fuel Consumption Providing Road Information

Multi agent active collaboration between drivers and assistance systems

Pathways to Reducing Poverty and Sharing Prosperity in India

Urbanization and property rights

Functional Interior Point Programming Applied to the Aircraft Path Planning Problem

Development of Ceramic Functional Layers for Solid Oxide Cells

Economics: Agents, Pilgrims, and Profits

III.7 Planets orbiting stars more massive than the Sun

A methodological framework for prioritizing infrastructure investment

Firms Locational Choice and Infrastructure Development in Tanzania : Instrumental Variable Spatial Autoregressive Model

Global Experiences with Special Economic Zones: Focus on China and Africa

Consolidation of technical, safety and human resources in Eurasian railway transport corridors

Comparison of single and multi objective evolutionary algorithms for robust link state routing

The cost of road infrastructure in low and middle income countries

Infrastructure Investment Demands in Emerging Markets and Developing Economies

Using probabilistic models to appraise and decide on sovereign disaster risk financing and insurance

A survey of sme accounting and reporting practices in austria

From goods to traffic first steps toward an auction based traffic signal controller

Employing traffic lights as road side units for road safety information broadcast

Dismal science, accounting and Newton?s second law : identifying force and rigidity in public expenditure analysis

Industrial Control System Fingerprinting and Anomaly Detection

Effects of land misallocation on capital allocations in india

Movilidad elementos esenciales y riesgos en el distrito metropolitano de quito

Data-intensive computing infrastructure systems for unmodified biological data analysis pipelines

Investigating the Gender Gap in Agricultural Productivity: Evidence from Uganda

World Bank Policy Lending and the Quality of Public Sector Governance

Entropy minimizing curves with application to automated flight path design

Towards a Federated Infrastructure for the Global Data Pipeline

Cycling and sustainable transport

Jobs housing balance the right ratio for the right place

Trade in Zimbabwe: Changing Incentives to Enhance Competitiveness

D5.3: Access Charge Final Report. The sustainable freight railway: Designing the freight vehicle  track system for higher delivered tonnage with improved availability at reduced cost (SUSTRAIL)

An automated framework for the management of P2P traffic in ISP infrastructures

Dynamic multi period freight consolidation

Firms locational choice and infrastructure development in rwanda

Ultrasonic Data Compression and Analysis During Material Inspection

High School Track Choice and Financial Constraints: Evidence from Urban Mexico

Agriculture production and transport infrastructure in east africa an application of spatial autoregression

Disruption-Free Link Wake-up Optimisation for Energy Aware Networks

Evaluation of Recent Computational Approaches in Short-Term Traffic Forecasting

Firms Locational Choice and Infrastructure Development in Tanzania : Instrumental Variable Spatial Autoregressive Model

D5.3: Access Charge Final Report. The sustainable freight railway: Designing the freight vehicle track system for higher delivered tonnage with improved availability at reduced cost (SUSTRAIL)