Scipedia: Documents published in 2018

Scene Understanding Networks for Autonomous Driving Based on Around View Monitoring System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:17:12 +0100

Modern driver assistance systems rely on a wide range of sensors (RADAR, LIDAR, ultrasound and cameras) for scene understanding and prediction. These sensors are typically used for detecting traffic participants and scene elements required for navigation. In this paper we argue that relying on camera based systems, specifically Around View Monitoring (AVM) system has great potential to achieve these goals in both parking and driving modes with decreased costs. The contributions of this paper are as follows: we present a new end-to-end solution for delimiting the safe drivable area for each frame by means of identifying the closest obstacle in each direction from the driving vehicle, we use this approach to calculate the distance to the nearest obstacles and we incorporate it into a unified end-to-end architecture capable of joint object detection, curb detection and safe drivable area detection. Furthermore, we describe the family of networks for both a high accuracy solution and a low complexity solution. We also introduce further augmentation of the base architecture with 3D object detection.

Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2018 Workshop on Autonomous Driving

Development of Integrated Traffic Management Scheme in Moscow

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:12:16 +0100

Moscow city is a dynamically developing city with dense buildings in the centre and a constantly increasing number of vehicles and passenger traffic. By 2014 the main transport problems of the city were the following: 1) High pendulum movements of personal transport during peak hours (region-centre, centre-region) 2) Low efficiency of Surface Urban Passenger Transport (SUPT): high traffic congestion, low priority and delayed movement of the SUPT 3) Chaotic parking in the city centre, sharply reducing the traffic capacity of the streets 4) Low level of safety for both pedestrians and drivers Solving these and other tasks in the city, earlier we developed several projects to change the traffic organization, but the lack of an integrated approach to design and the introduction of local operational changes did not give the desired result. In this regard, it was decided to develop a set of measures throughout the city, with a unified approach to design, allowing to consider Moscow street and road network as a single object, thereby to introduce integrally and simultaneously a number of measures to change the traffic organization such as: 1) organisation of separated lanes for public transport; 2) the introduction of one-way traffic; 3) ordering of the parking space; 4) proposals for locally-reconstructive measures (widening of the driveway part, sidewalks, organization of parking bays, security islands; 5) development of cycling infrastructure (cycle lanes and cycle tracks); 6) the organization of parking lots for taxi and cargo transport. Thus, in 2014, began the work on the creation of the ITMS in Moscow. In Moscow there are more than 4,000 streets, and the change of traffic organisation in some of them is reflected in the traffic situation of the whole city. And to change the traffic organisation in the whole city during 1 year is simply not possible.

Efficient asphalt pavement technologies by combination of increased reclaimed asphalt content and warm mix solutions – effect on workability and cracking

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:07:56 +0100

The ongoing discussion spanning over 20 years in Europe, along with continuous development of solutions and"br" additives, has led to warm mix asphalts (WMA). In reality, applications lag significantly behind the progress made"br" in the USA in last 10 years. Nevertheless, the road administrations begin to understand the potential, presented"br" mainly by the combination of WMA concepts with an increased use of reclaimed asphalt material from"br" rehabilitated roads. If reclaimed asphalt is treated at a lower working temperature and, moreover, additional"br" techniques or additives are capable of improving the added value delivered by reclaimed material in new asphalt,"br" the result is not only energy savings but also an increased contribution to circular economy at the same time."br" In this respect, several trial sections were defined, funded and completed in the Czech Republic with a focus on"br" comparing different WMA solutions in combination with reclaimed asphalt contents of over 30 % for the wearing"br" course and over 40 % for the binder course. Basic field tests were done and advanced experimental assessments"br" were performed on asphalt mixtures for each subsection. This assessment included not only traditional test methods"br" as required by the standards, but also more advanced functional tests, including ageing simulation and workability"br" assessments."br" The paper focuses on testing and characterization of asphalt mix workability and resistance to fatigue crack"br" propagation. Neither of the two characteristics is covered by any national or European standard and, therefore, the"br" established practice from North America is used. Workability is determined by compacting test specimens by"br" gyratory compactor to the selected level of target bulk density. Fatigue crack testing utilizes the same procedure"br" as in the case of thermal crack propagation. The only modification is the loading rate applied. The paper presents"br" extensive comparisons and asphalt mix performance assessments with respect to both of the aforementioned"br" characteristics.

Community-based mobility: a transport option for rural areas?

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:07:01 +0100

high dependence on cars characterizes rural regions when it comes to everyday travel. Community-based carsharing offers a solution for places where commercial operators of sharing systems are not present. However, people not able or willing to drive a car on their own are still dependent on poor public transport or close persons giving them a lift. Integrating community-based carsharing and spontaneous, short-distance ridesharing could offer a solution for this challenge. A quantitative online-based survey conducted among members of carsharing communities in Austria and Germany reveals user characteristics and potentials. This paper presents personal and household characteristics of members and their influence on (1) motives to participate in carsharing, (2) usage of shared cars and travel behaviour and (3) attitudes towards ridesharing and preferences regarding the arrangement, realization and different conditions of the ride (e. g. time of the day, requested detour). Finally, we identify needs for future research in this field.

A Dynamic Programming Approach for Thermal Comfort Control in Electric Vehicles

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:05:56 +0100

International audience; The HVAC system represents the main auxiliary load in electric vehicles (EVs) and requires efficient control approaches that balance energy saving and thermal comfort. In fact, passengers always demand more comfort, but on the other hand the HVAC system consumption strongly impacts the vehicle driving range, which constitutes the major concern in EVs. In this paper, dynamic programming is applied to develop an HVAC system supervisor that optimizes the thermal comfort on a given journey, for given climatic conditions and energy available. The electric vehicle model and the optimization approach are presented. Two test- cases, corresponding to hot climate, are simulated. In the first one, the energetic cost of improved comfort is quantified, while in the second one the trade-off between driving speed and thermal comfort is analyzed.

High Temperature Fire & Overheat Sensor Elements (FOSE) for aircraft Fire & Overheat Detection System (FODS)

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 20:04:39 +0100

One of the 21st century major challenges is to answer the growing mobility by a carbon saver solution. For aeronautics, improvement of engine architecture (NIPSE European project) permits to reduce its volume and so to get more space for passengers & freight (15%), to save weight and fuel consumption (2-3% i.e. 1% CO2 emissions). This optimization hinges on integrating the engine and the nacelle into single assembly (Ultra High-Bypass Ratio turbofan engines or UHBR) that means equipment close to engine (calculator, valves, but also sensors and their extension cables…) have to resist higher temperatures. The Fire and Overheat Detection System (FODS) is a critical component for safe working of the aircraft as it controls and prevents from overheat and fire all those electrical equipment and the engine itself. THERMOCOAX, manufacturer of Mineral Insulated Cable (MIC) for over 60 years, is a privileged partner of the aeronautics industry (anti-icing for air inlet, pitot sensor, drain mast and thermal measurement from thermocouples to complete systems such as harnesses). For 25 years THERMOCOAX has manufactured Fire and Overheat Sensor Elements (FOSE) - the sensitive part of FODS - and as a specialist has taken part in this innovative project. The sensing principle of FOSE lies on electrical insulation resistance (IR) drop as the cable is exposed to heat. A wide range of research was made to find technical solutions for the new thermal specification. The difficulty comes from having IR with good sensitivity and linearity at temperature, covering a large temperature range: overheat threshold of either 473K ( 200°C) or 873K ( 600°C) depending on the location of the sensor. Also, the FOSE has to remain functional after 2 fires at 1453K ( 1180°C) during 5 min each, so the sensor sensitive insulant must not be deteriorated. Several solutions based either on thermistor powders or on percolation effect powders have been tested by miscellaneous trials: repeatability, thermal cycling, fire resistance test, local response at different room temperatures (from RT to 723K) and homogeneity along the cable. Finally, a new insulant solution has been selected to be integrated to the FOSE future generation. The other aspect of those new temperature rates is the electrical connectics that should not deteriorate the FOSE response, especially when the aircraft is in overheat or fire situation. So, a new design of 3 contacts ceramic-metal connector has been developed to resist more than 2 fires without generating parasite responses and to fit with aeronautics standards. Severe environment requested by NIPSE project forces THERMOCOAX to develop a new technology of FOSE based on insulant advanced studies and specific connectors to resist high temperature.

Simplified scenario based simulation of parcel deliveries in urban areas using electric cargo cycles and urban consolidation centers.

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:56:54 +0100

Densely populated cities in Europe are getting more and more under political and juridical pressure because they fail in meeting EU directive 2008/50/EC, which obliges cities to reduce harmful externalities (NOx, SOx, PM etc.) caused by the transport sector. City administrations in England, Germany and France are even considering banning Diesel engines from city centers. Logistics could contribute to emission reductions by switching to other vehicles on the last mile. This paper proposes a simplified but very effective approach (SEAM) to simulate different delivery concepts by fulfilling parcel deliveries with cargo cycles instead of conventional vans. The number of parcels, the volume, the driving time, the contact time with the recipient, and size of the catchment area are considered. Five different delivery concepts considering urban consolidation center and speed deliveries are simulated with SEAM and economically and ecologically assessed.

Data sorting and signal processing algorithms for high weight in motion systems for direct application

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:54:34 +0100

WIM (Weight in motion) technologies are already widely used to detect overloaded vehicles. However, these systems have not yet been approved by the Legal Metrology for automated overload control and verbalization. The Automated Overload Control (AOC) project, supported by the French Ministry of Transport (DGITM), aims to demonstrate the feasibility of AOC with existing WIM technologies adapted to allow certification. The target accuracy is the 5% class from the OIML R1342006. To perform this, we need to know very precisely all the influence factors in order to correct and sort data to be sure to keep only the heavy weights overloaded. Repeatability, reproducibility tests were carried out on IFSTTAR full scale pavement fatigue facility in Nantes on piezo quartz sensors. Also real tests were performed on highway A4 near St Avold in France where Ten WIM sensors were installed. Road instrumentation also included like temperature, vertical displacement, geophones and accelerometers sensors. A large database of signals has been collected and Sorting algorithms were developed from to identify the various influencing factors such as pavement temperature, wheel position on the sensor, speed, dynamic overload, etc. Weighing within the required tolerances and road tests are intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the entire system. This paper focuses on the approach adopted to construct the criteria and sorting algorithms. It is based on 3 levels of sorting: Level 1 is the raw signals delivered by the sensors; Level 2 is dynamic force compared to static weight deviations; Level 3 is external factors affecting sensor response. In conclusion, experience shows that WIM sensors and additional data processing are able to accurately estimate truck loads in the OIML class 5. However, calibration of WIM sensors must be performed periodically with load position on the sensor and the road profile must be checked in order to evaluate the effects of dynamic loading. Finally, it is necessary to clearly define the ranges of validity of the pavement temperature and the speed of the vehicle

An Ontological Approach to Inform HMI Designs for Minimising Driver Distractions with ADAS

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:50:45 +0100

DAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) are in-vehicle systems designed to enhance driving safety and efficiency as well as comfort for drivers in the driving process. Recent studies have noticed that when Human Machine Interface (HMI) is not designed properly, an ADAS can cause distraction which would affect its usage and even lead to safety issues. Current understanding of these issues is limited to the context-dependent nature of such systems. This paper reports the development of a holistic conceptualisation of how drivers interact with ADAS and how such interaction could lead to potential distraction. This is done taking an ontological approach to contextualise the potential distraction, driving tasks and user interactions centred on the use of ADAS. Example scenarios are also given to demonstrate how the developed ontology can be used to deduce rules for identifying distraction from ADAS and informing future designs.

Document type: Conference object

Management of fault tolerance and traffic congestion in cloud data center

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:47:36 +0100

In this era of ubiquitous computing, coupled with the emergence of big data and internet of things, there have been constant changes in every aspect of cloud data center communications - its network connectivity, data storage, data transfer, and architectural design. As a result of this, the amount of data transferable, and the frequency of data transfer have tremendously increased; causing device failures and traffic congestions. To cope with these changes so that performance can be sustained amidst device failures and traffic congestion, the design of fault tolerant cloud data center is important. A fault tolerant cloud data center network should be able to provide alternative paths from source to destination during failures so that there will not be abrupt fall in performance. But still with the ongoing researches in this regard, there has not been a robust cloud data center design that can boast of being suitable for alleviating the poor fault tolerance of cloud data center. In this paper, we proposed the improved versions of fat-tree interconnection hybrid designs derived from the structure called Z-fat tree; to address the issues of fault tolerance. Then, we compared these designs with single fat tree architecture with the same amount of resources for client server communication pattern such as Email application in a cloud data center. The simulation results obtained based on failed switches and links, show that our proposed hybrid designs outperformed the single fat tree design as the inter arrival time of the packets reduces.

Traffic users delays variability at pedestrian crossings

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:46:56 +0100

Most cities (especially in Central and Eastern Europe) focus on improving the road network, which aims to improve the efficiency of motor vehicle traffic and minimize congestion. Most existing tools for analysing the effectiveness of urban transport networks do not correctly analyse the impact of walking and cycling on network performance. Instead, they focus exclusively on the results of motor vehicle transport and exclude pedestrians and cyclists, or incorporate them as factors that interfere with the traffic of motor vehicles. It is therefore necessary to introduce solutions that will, on the one hand, reduce congestion and, on the other, improve the safety and travel quality of vulnerable road users. One of the tasks that need to be done to improve pedestrian conditions is to determine the relationship between pedestrian and vehicle traffic. An example of the application of microscopic models in the study of delays of traffic participants (road users) is presented in this paper. These analyses do not exhaust the test issues but are only a prelude to further research that will be run, among others, within the FLOW Project framework (HORIZON 2020).

Design of a Decision Support System for Buried Pipeline Corrosion Assessment

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:46:41 +0100

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91478-7Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-91479-4; International audience; Maintaining the level of integrity of pipeline networks to guarantee at least a reliable and safe service is a challenge operators of such networks are facing everyday. TIGF is one of the French operator which manages 5000 km of pipelines in the south-west quarter of France. This paper presents a decision-making tool which automatically ranks the pipeline sections regarding the risk of deterioration (damages and corrosion) and the gravity of the consequences, indicating which pipeline sections should be excavated. The tool relies on a fuzzy expert system which gathers 26 input variables, processes more than 300 rules, classifies the risk of deterioration into 7 classes and estimates the gravity. The rules are a formalization of human expertise: the fuzzy logic helps to tackle the vagueness of their knowledge and the measurement inaccuracy of some of the 26 input variables. The method has been tested on past excavations to assess its performances.

Conference Publications Year 1 (10/2016 To 4/2018)

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:46:05 +0100

Year 1 (10/2016 to 4/2018) Conference Publications from the University Transportation Center for Underground Transportation Infrastructure (UTC-UTI)"br

Real-time urban traffic state estimation and prediction using a data-fusion framework based on link neighbors.

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:43:56 +0100

Effective ITS and traffic management purposes requires a complete and accurate information about current and predicted traffic states in the transport network. The current state-of-the-art in literature regarding traffic state estimation and prediction yields efforts which mostly focus on highways, which are not bluntly transferrable to an urban environment and do not maximize the utilization of all available traffic data."br" This paper describes the development and assessment of a data-driven traffic state estimation and prediction framework for application in an urban environment. It uses the intuitive relationship between past, current and future traffic states on neighboring links to train and improve estimation/prediction accuracy and fill the gaps on those links where no floating car data are available. Additionally, this framework is tested on the well-known Sioux Falls Scenario. When penetration rate of floating cars is 5%, on average 50% of the urban links are estimated within 5 km/h accuracy. For a prediction horizon of 5 minutes, it performs almost equal with a percentage of 49%.

AN ANALYSIS OF IMPEDIMENTS TO DELIVER SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT IN CITIES OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES: THE CASE OF HARARE, ZIMBABWE

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:43:04 +0100

Addressing the Challenges of Supplying People with Daily Consumer Goods in Rural Areas

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:40:41 +0100

The project “Active Ageing” identified several difficulties and challenges of proper goods supply in rural areas. In this paper we present the follow-up project “GreisslerPLUS”, which tries to overcome the difficulties of a proper supply of daily goods in rural areas. The trend of daily good supply is heading towards larger grocery companies which are mostly located in areas settling larger communities. Such grocery companies often provide a wider range of goods, they have higher budgets for advertising, and they are mostly able to offer similar goods with lower prices. As a consequence, local suppliers cannot keep up with those offers and, therefore, they have difficulties to survive. In particular, elder and less mobile people suffer from this situation. Because of longer transport distances they need to ask others for help. Thus, they will lose their opportunity to care for themselves. The project GreisslerPLUS intends to counter this trend and to find solutions. We describe the survey about daily consumer habits in the area “Schneebergland” and explain models we designed based on the survey evaluation.

IKaaS Project: "Intelligent Knowledge-As-A-Service platform"

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:40:25 +0100

The project iKaaS, “intelligent Knowledge as a Service” is part of the European Program Horizon 2020 – EUJ2014 of the European Union. The aim is the development of innovative Cloud technologies to fulfil the new challenges surged with the large amount of data steaming from the Internet of Things, facing the requirements from business, industrial and social applications."br" In this sense iKaaS aims to integrate these three technological fields to develop a new platform that leverage the advantages of IoT such as object virtualization and real time processing, Big Data analysis to build knowledge while offering their capabilities through a multi-cloud environment."br" Platform features will be demonstrated through Smart City applications to promote the self-management of health and security of citizens and improving information systems and data analysis to achieve a more intelligent city, focused in areas like epidemiological surveillance. The results of the project are tested in three use cases, including the so-called “Environmental health service in Madrid City (Spain)”, which includes transport and mobility.

CODECS – Coordination and Support for C-ITS in Europe

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:36:39 +0100

CODECS is a Coordination and Support Action for Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems funded by the European Commission in the Horizon 2020 programme. Communication of vehicles directly amongst each other and with road infrastructure enables a plethora of information and warning services for a safe, sustainable and comfortable future mobility. These services require new cooperations not only between private and public sector in order to provide seamless experience for the end-user. The issues to be tackled jointly are of very different nature ranging from fundamental technical and organisational aspects to legal concerns. Therefore lively exchange between the new collaboration partners is essential. In order to support this and to foster C-ITS deployment in Europe CODECS was set up as a nodal point for the various involved stakeholder groups."br" The CODECS consortium, consisting of road operators, car manufacturers, automotive industry experts as well as user and cities representatives, aims at pooling the main actors’ preferences and requirements for a concerted C-ITS roll-out across Europe. The inventory phase was the starting point when the numerous pilots and deployment initiatives and private key stakeholders were brought together and the current plans, concepts and ideas were gathered. Numerous documents were analysed and several workshops organised. The experiences of this knowledge exchange and the constant survey of the C-ITS landscape in Europe were used in the consolidation phase to come up with guidelines and recommendations. This report summarises the CODECS activities.

The MINERVA Software Development Process

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:32:53 +0100

This paper presents a software development process for safety-critical software components of cyber-physical systems. The process is called MINERVA, which stands for Mirrored Implementation Numerically Evaluated against Rigorously Verified Algorithms. The process relies on formal methods for rigorously validating code against its requirements. The software development process uses: (1) a formal specification language for describing the algorithms and their functional requirements, (2) an interactive theorem prover for formally verifying the correctness of the algorithms, (3) test cases that stress the code, and (4) numerical evaluation on these test cases of both the algorithm specifications and their implementations in code. The MINERVA process is illustrated in this paper with an application to geo-containment algorithms for unmanned aircraft systems. These algorithms ensure that the position of an aircraft never leaves a predetermined polygon region and provide recovery maneuvers when the region is inadvertently exited.

Evaluation of Phase Shift in Electric Drive by Kalman Filter for Wheel Slip Control

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:30:50 +0100

Slip controller is an essential part of the locomotive controller because it enables maximum force transfer and increases the service life of the locomotive parts. The modern slip controllers try to determine actual adhesion parameters and set the required tractive force to avoid slippage occurrence. Many types of the slip controller methods were developed, and one of developed principle try to determine adhesion parameters from phase shift between motor torque and corresponding speed measured on the motor or wheelset. The paper presents a novel evaluation procedure for the phase shift calculation that is based on the Kalman filter that enables directly compare force corresponding with the motor torque and the adhesion force. The method principle is described in the paper, and the method performance is evaluated on the mathematical model.

Laser Induced Speckle as a Foundation for Physical Security and Optical Computing

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:28:16 +0100

We present a photonic system that exploits the speckle generated by the interaction of a laser source and a semi-transparent scattering medium, in our case a large-core optical fiber, as a physical root of trust for cryptographic applications, while the same configuration can act as a high-rate machine learning paradigm.

Integrated Modeling of Dynamic Airline Behavior in the Air Transport System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:26:17 +0100

Optimization of the Catalyst and Membrane Performance by addition of various Additives for the alkaline Direct Ethanol Fuel Cell

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:22:54 +0100

ohol fuel cells are promising energy converters especially for portable applications. Ethanol as fuel is an"br" attractive candidate for fuel cells due to the high volumetric energy density and to the easy handling, transport"br" and storing. The chemical energy of ethanol is converted directly in electricity without any treatment step. The"br" operation of the direct ethanol fuel cell (DEFC) in alkaline media compared to acidic media includes the"br" advantages of the use of non-precious metals e.g. nickel or manganese as catalysts, the improved water"br" management and reduced ethanol-crossover using anion exchange membranes (AEMs) which conduct the"br" hydrated anions in the opposite direction than the electro-osmotic drag and the kinetic enhancement of the"br" ethanol oxidation reaction (EOR) and oxygen reduction reaction (ORR).

Towards End-to-End Lane Detection: an Instance Segmentation Approach

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:20:16 +0100

Modern cars are incorporating an increasing number of driver assist features, among which automatic lane keeping. The latter allows the car to properly position itself within the road lanes, which is also crucial for any subsequent lane departure or trajectory planning decision in fully autonomous cars. Traditional lane detection methods rely on a combination of highly-specialized, hand-crafted features and heuristics, usually followed by post-processing techniques, that are computationally expensive and prone to scalability due to road scene variations. More recent approaches leverage deep learning models, trained for pixel-wise lane segmentation, even when no markings are present in the image due to their big receptive field. Despite their advantages, these methods are limited to detecting a pre-defined, fixed number of lanes, e.g. ego-lanes, and can not cope with lane changes. In this paper, we go beyond the aforementioned limitations and propose to cast the lane detection problem as an instance segmentation problem - in which each lane forms its own instance - that can be trained end-to-end. To parametrize the segmented lane instances before fitting the lane, we further propose to apply a learned perspective transformation, conditioned on the image, in contrast to a fixed "bird's-eye view" transformation. By doing so, we ensure a lane fitting which is robust against road plane changes, unlike existing approaches that rely on a fixed, pre-defined transformation. In summary, we propose a fast lane detection algorithm, running at 50 fps, which can handle a variable number of lanes and cope with lane changes. We verify our method on the tuSimple dataset and achieve competitive results.

Visual object tracking in a parking garage using compressed domain analysis

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:20:01 +0100

Modern driver assistance systems enable a variety of use cases which rely on accurate localization information of all traffic participants. Due to the unavailability of satellite-based localization, the use of infrastructure cameras is a promising alternative in indoor spaces such as parking garages. This paper presents a parking management system which extends the previous work of the eValet system with a low-complexity tracking functionality on compressed video bitstreams (compressed-domain tracking). The advantages of this approach include the improved robustness to partial occlusions as well as a resource-efficient processing of compressed video bit-streams. We have separated the tasks into different modules which are integrated into a comprehensive architecture. The demonstrator setup includes a 2D visualizer illustrating the operation of the algorithms on a single camera stream and a 3D visualizer displaying the abstract object detections in a global reference frame.

Highway traveller information services success (HiTISS): Tools and information needs

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:16:02 +0100

This paper aims to present the issues of the urban transportation system, implication, and proposed solutions. A sustainable urban mobility planning has a direct positive effect on the urban economic wellbeing dimensions such as; business diversity, financial viability, and service efficiency. However, the growing pressure on urban roads and highway travel demand could affect the failure of the performance of its networks. Thus, the proposed solution is to successfully implement highway traveller information services in this digital age. An urban highway can be classified as a road or street within the boundaries of an urban area which is subject to the approval of the federal highway administration, whereby, the means of boundaries area which are including and adjacent to a municipality or urban place with a population of 5,000 or more. In the traveller information service non-technical perspective, bridging the gap between psychological and implementation needs is the key to wellbeing that leads to the success of a service. The traveller information is vital to building a smarter urban highway and sustains its mobility which is valuable for a timely, safe and cost-effective public trip. The identified fundamental value-added from this service is to facilitate in managing travel demand, whereby supporting measures in the urban facilities management and sustainable transportation systems could be established through; real-time and local-based communication network.This paper aims to present the issues of the urban transportation system, implication, and proposed solutions. A sustainable urban mobility planning has a direct positive effect on the urban economic wellbeing dimensions such as; business diversity, financial viability, and service efficiency. However, the growing pressure on urban roads and highway travel demand could affect the failure of the performance of its networks. Thus, the proposed solution is to successfully implement highway traveller information services in this digital age. An urban highway can be classified as a road or street within the boundaries of an urban area which is subject to the approval of the federal highway administration, whereby, the means of boundaries area which are including and adjacent to a municipality or urban place with a population of 5,000 or more. In the traveller information service non-technical perspective, bridging the gap between psychological and implementation needs is the key to wellbeing that leads to the ...

LSTM-based Flight Trajectory Prediction

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:15:48 +0100

Safety ranks the first in Air Traffic Management (ATM). Accurate trajectory prediction can help ATM to forecast potential dangers and effectively provide instructions for safely traveling. Most trajectory prediction algorithms work for land traffic, which rely on points of interest (POIs) and are only suitable for stationary road condition. Compared with land traffic prediction, flight trajectory prediction is very difficult because way-points are sparse and the flight envelopes are heavily affected by external factors. In this paper, we propose a flight trajectory prediction model based on a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. The four interacting layers of a repeating module in an LSTM enables it to connect the long-term dependencies to present predicting task. Applying sliding windows in LSTM maintains the continuity and avoids compromising the dynamic dependencies of adjacent states in the long-term sequences, which helps to improve accuracy of trajectory prediction. Taking time dimension into consideration, both 3-D (time stamp, latitude and longitude) and 4-D (time stamp, latitude, longitude and altitude) trajectories are predicted to prove the efficiency of our approach. The dataset we use was collected by ADS-B ground stations. We evaluate our model by widely used measurements, such as the mean absolute error (MAE), the mean relative error (MRE), the root mean square error (RMSE) and the dynamic warping time (DWT) methods. As Markov Model is the most popular in time series processing, comparisons among Markov Model (MM), weighted Markov Model (wMM) and our model are presented. Our model outperforms the existing models (MM and wMM) and provides a strong basis for abnormal detection and decision-making.

Unmanned air traffic network design concepts

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:15:18 +0100

This paper introduces the concept of network design for an Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) system. First, data-driven air traffic modelling and analysis is used to define feasible low-level urban airspace regions suitable to embed the network. Second, a modified k-centres approach is used to define candidate network node locations by considering the geographical coverage of typical unmanned aircraft operations expected in urban areas. Third, k-nearest neighbours and graph theory concepts are used to define an Unmanned Traffic Network (UTN) structure that attempts to maximise coverage without impacting existing manned air traffic operations. The approach is applied to Brisbane, Australia and is the first known attempt to realistically model the spatial structure of an Unmanned Traffic Network.

Determination and prediction of traffic conditions using an extended FCO approach

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:13:20 +0100

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) for traffic control and traffic guidance depend on knowledge of the current and, in particular, of the future traffic conditions. The estimation methods for determining traffic conditions require very precise and large amounts of traffic data. Conventional traffic data acquisition with detectors on the infrastructure side cannot meet these requirements for known reasons. One way of increasing the database is to use vehicle-generated data. This paper presents an approach to the determination of traffic conditions which includes not only the vehicle's own data but also traffic-relevant data from the surrounding area. This so-called extended Floating Car Observer (FCO) approach can identify vehicles in the surrounding area, and thus detect them at several points in a road network. Systems for the identification of vehicles that are already known from stationary recognition, such as the recognition of Bluetooth MAC addresses or automatic number plate recognition (ANPR), could also be used in a vehicle for mobile identification. Identification can also be done with information from C-ITS. In the communication of these systems, messages such as cooperative awareness messages (CAM) are transmitted with an identifier, and thus enable identification. This article first determines the number of FCO vehicles needed to obtain results that are just as statistically good as the results of the standard FCD calculation. In addition, this paper describes a calculation method that can derive traffic parameters from the data of identification.

A simulation-based testing and validation framework for ADAS development

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:12:44 +0100

This paper presents a virtual validation and testing framework for ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistant System) planning and control development based on a co-simulation platform of vehicle dynamics and traffic environment tools. One of the main challenges in ADAS development is validating the planning and control algorithms in a closed-loop fashion, where both vehicle dynamics characteristics and a wide variety of traffic scenarios are taken into account. The designs should also guarantee optimal performance toward precise trajectory tracking, and time/fuel optimality with respect to various constraints. This work focuses on simulation-based approaches to frontload control design verification during the early phases of ADAS development involving two software: LMS Imagine.Lab Amesim and PreScan. The requirements for an interface that help to facilitate the co-simulation development are studied. The approach is demonstrated with three different use cases: adaptive cruise control, green wave technology, and autonomous parking.

A 4-Cylinder High Performance Diesel Engine Concept for D/E-class Vehicles Featuring Low Fuel Consumption and EU7 Emission Levels

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:11:55 +0100

Within the EU / Horizon 2020 funded project “REWARD”, Volvo Cars and AVL developed a High Performance Engine concept based on Volvo´s 2.0 l 4-cylinder engine architecture. The power output is increased to over 100 kW / liter by simultaneously reducing fuel consumption by 5% compared to Best In Class D/E class vehicles 2014 and achieving EU7 emission levels."br" A completely new “Zero-Swirl” combustion concept was developed with a rather straight intake port geometry and a stepped piston bowl concept. Increased injection pressure of up to 3000 bar and fast, accurate injection control allows optimal spray conditions. The charging concept is based on a permanent operating 2-stage turbo system with water cooled air intercooler to achieve the peak power level. It is supported by an electrical compressor for low end torque and response improvement. Furthermore, the Exhaust Aftertreatment System was optimized to achieve the challenging NOx targets and reducing exhaust back pressure to enable the high performance target. All results will be demonstrated in a Volvo XC60 to verify the fuel consumption and emission targets in both WLTC and in real driving conditions.

Stable Bin Packing of Non-convex 3D Objects with a Robot Manipulator

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:11:39 +0100

Recent progress in the field of robotic manipulation has generated interest in fully automatic object packing in warehouses. This paper proposes a formulation of the packing problem that is tailored to the automated warehousing domain. Besides minimizing waste space inside a container, the problem requires stability of the object pile during packing and the feasibility of the robot motion executing the placement plans. To address this problem, a set of constraints are formulated, and a constructive packing pipeline is proposed to solve these constraints. The pipeline is able to pack geometrically complex, non-convex objects while satisfying stability and robot packability constraints. In particular, a new 3D positioning heuristic called Heightmap-Minimization heuristic is proposed, and heightmaps are used to speed up the search. Experimental evaluation of the method is conducted with a realistic physical simulator on a dataset of scanned real-world items, demonstrating stable and high-quality packing plans compared with other 3D packing methods.

Smart Inspection–Innovative solutions for maintenance of bridges

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:11:19 +0100

Bridges are one of the key structural elements in the transportation system where the performance of the transportation network is based on their reliability. Therefore, in order to guarantee the demanded performance in the traffic system, bridges are regularly inspected, maintained and repaired or renovated according to the safety standards. The most commonly used inspection method for bridges is visual inspection with which large amount of data are recorded. With the objective of providing a tool for a comprehensive data documentation and transfer of data to a central server, an application was developed. The application allows an interactive interface for imaging and contextual data logging using smart phone or tablet. This collected data is directly sent to the central server. This fully automated approach enables an inspection with immediate recording of engineering data and an in-situ analysis as well as easy retrieval of historical data.

Adaptive Traffic Monitoring for Software Dataplanes

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:10:04 +0100

Network operators have recently been developing multi-Gbps traffic monitoring tools that execute on commodity hardware and are part of the packet-processing pipelines realizing software dataplanes. These solutions allow sophisticated tasks to be performed on a per-packet basis, without relying on sampling or passive trace analysis, by leveraging the processing power available on servers. Although advances in packet capture have enabled intercepting packets from network cards at high rates, bottlenecks can still arise in the monitoring process as a result of concurrent access to shared processor resources, variations of the traffic skew, and unbalanced packet-rate spikes. In this paper we present an adaptive traffic monitoring approach that copes with emerging bottlenecks by timely detecting changes in the operational conditions and reconfiguring monitoring-related operations for subsets of traffic flows. Our solution performs responsive adaptations at the time scale of milliseconds and does not require a significant amount of resources. To demonstrate the capabilities of our approach we implemented it as part of a generic packet-processing pipeline and show that lossless traffic monitoring can be achieved for a wide range of conditions.

Evaluating London's congestion charge: An approach using the macroscopic fundamental diagram

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:09:10 +0100

The rationale of road-pricing schemes is to reduce the negative externalities of road traffic by increasing costs to decrease demand. Although in the transportation literature this is a well-acknowledged means of relieving cities from congestion, only few cities have introduced such schemes so far. One of the most notable examples in Europe is London’s congestion charge. Motorists entering London’s city center are required to pay a fixed levy during working hours. The revenue generated by this levy is partly dedicated to improvements of the public transport system. The benefits of this congestion charge have only been analyzed from an economic perspective without reference to its impact on macroscopic traffic indicators. The recently introduced macroscopic fundamental diagram (MFD) and its extension to multimodal traffic, the 3D-MFD, offer a novel framework to address this gap."br" In this paper, we analyze the performance of London’s overground traffic with the empirical 3D-MFD covering both car traffic and buses. Data is acquired from loop detectors (for car traffic) and automated vehicle location devices (for buses).

Sensor based Prediction of Human Driving Decisions using Feed forward Neural Networks for Intelligent Vehicles

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:03:22 +0100

Prediction of human driving decisions is an important aspect of modeling human behavior for the application to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) in the intelligent vehicles. This paper presents a sensor based receding horizon model for the prediction of human driving commands. Human driving decisions are expressed in terms of the vehicle speed and steering wheel angle profiles. Environmental state and human intention are the two major factors influencing the human driving decisions. The environment around the vehicle is perceived using LIDAR sensor. Feature extractor computes the occupancy grid map from the sensor data which is filtered and processed to provide precise and relevant information to the feed-forward neural network. Human intentions can be identified from the past driving decisions and represented in the form of time series data for the neural network. Supervised machine learning is used to train the neural network. Data collection and model validation is performed in the driving simulator using the SCANeR studio software. Simulation results are presented alone with the analysis.

ANALYTIC METHOD TO IDENTIFY TRAIN LOAD FROM INTEGRATED SLEEPER IN-SITU

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:02:22 +0100

International audience; The degradation of railway tracks can be observed through several measurement techniques. Recently, a method to diagnose the railway track using Fiber Bragg gratings (FBG) has been proposed. FBG are integrated inside the railway sleeper and is named a "Smart Sleeper". To study the sleeper behavior, an analytical model for the dynamics of railway sleepers has been developed, which can calculate rapidly the sleeper responses. In this model, by using the relation between the rail forces and displacements of a periodically supported beam, the dynamic equation of the sleeper is written with the help of the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation and Dirac's functions. Subsequently, thanks to the Green's function of this system, the sleeper dynamic response is calculated analytically. A linear relation between the train loads and the sleeper strains is shown in the frequency domain. This article presents an application of this model to calculate the train loads from the strains measured by the FBG. Based on the analytical model, we obtain a matrix which presents the link between the loads and the sleeper responses. By integrating this matrix and the Fourier transform of the measurements recorded by the FBG at the middle and at the two rail-seats, the train loads can be quickly calculated by using the solver mldivide of MATLAB. The numerical application shows that the identified train loads are different for different wheels and different rails. This highlights the irregularity of the wheel-rail contact forces which can be used to detect the defaults in the rolling stock in future works.

Extreme weather exposure identification for road networks in heterogeneous landscapes

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:02:07 +0100

Resilient transport infrastructure is essential to the functioning of society and economy. Ensuring network"br" functionality is particularly vital in the case of severe weather events and natural disasters, which pose serious"br" threats to both people’s health and the integrity of infrastructure elements. Thus, providing reliable estimates"br" about the frequency and intensity of extreme weather impacts on road infrastructure is of major importance for"br" road maintenance, operation and construction. However, against the background of data scarcity in terms of"br" area-covering, long-term time series, the assessment of extreme weather events is difficult, especially in areas"br" with diverse landscape properties."br" In order to account for heterogeneous small-scale topographic conditions, a hot-spot approach based on selected"br" characteristic regions is used in this study. For each region, combinations of different extreme value approaches"br" and fitting methods are compared with respect to their value for assessing the exposure of transport networks to"br" extreme precipitation and temperature impacts. Four parameter estimation methods (maximum likelihood"br" estimation, probability weighted moments, generalized maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian parameter"br" estimation) are applied to extreme value series obtained via both the block maxima approach (annual maxima"br" series, AMS) and the threshold excess approach (partial duration series, PDS). Their relative performances are"br" compared based on the CRMSE5, i.e. the conditional root mean square error for observations with a return period"br" exceeding 5 years, which gives much weight to the most extreme events."br" The viability of the approach is demonstrated at the example of Austria by analyzing five meteorological"br" indicators related to temperature and precipitation at 26 meteorological stations. These stations have been"br" selected to represent diverse meteorological conditions and different topographic regions. Results show the"br" merits of Bayesian parameter estimation methods as compared to traditional fitting methods. Bayesian"br" estimation of generalized Pareto (GP) distributions fitted to the PDS yielded the best results in 46% of all cases,"br" followed by Bayesian estimation of Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distributions fitted to AMS, which"br" showed the best performance in 35% of all cases. The study suggests that the concept of meteorological hot spot"br" areas offers a suitable approach for characterizing extreme weather exposure of road networks in heterogeneous"br" landscapes. The presented framework may contribute to a comprehensive climate risk assessment of"br" infrastructure networks.

Interacting with Autonomous Vehicles

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 19:01:44 +0100

The rise of evermore autonomy in vehicles and the expected introduction of self-driving cars have led to a focus on human interactions with such systems from an HCI perspective over the last years. Automotive User Interface researchers have been investigating issues such as transition control procedures, shared control, (over)trust, and overall user experience in automated vehicles. Now, it is time to open the research field of automated driving to other CHI research fields, such as Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI), aeronautics and space, conversational agents, or smart devices. These communities have been dealing with the interplay between humans and automated systems for more than 30 years. In this workshop, we aim to provide a forum to discuss what can be learnt from other domains for the design of autonomous vehicles. Interaction design problems that occur in these domains, such as transition control procedures, how to build trust in the system, and ethics will be discussed.

Family formation and everyday travel in Britain since c.1850

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:56:21 +0100

This paper focuses on the extent to which everyday travel behaviour in Britain changes in relation to family responsibilities, and examines how this has altered over the past century and a half. It is argued that prior to the mid-twentieth century changes in the family such as increased child-care responsibilities barely influenced the modes of transport used for everyday travel, but that increasingly in the later twentieth century people adjusted their travel behaviour during the family formation phases of the life cycle. In particular, parents of young children have become more car-dependent and less likely to walk or cycle. Data are drawn from two separate projects, one that collected travel life histories from the past half-century as context for research on cycling in later life, and one that uses personal diaries to reveal everyday mobility strategies of people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is argued that the observed changes are due not only to increased access to a wide range of different transport forms, especially the motor car, but also to changes in societal perceptions of risk and norms of travel behaviour. In conclusion, it is suggested that more awareness of past travel behaviours could aid the development and implementation of more sustainable transport policies in the UK.

Unlocking Large Scale Access to Combined Mobility Through MaaS Applications in Europe: the IMOVE Approach

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:55:55 +0100

This paper describes the developments on MaaS concept and operation currently ongoing in the context of the IMOVE initiative, part-funded by EU under the H2020 program. IMOVE is looking at scaling up Mobility as a Service and combined mobility solutions by investigating (1) sets of measures, organisational frameworks, operational and business models enhancing the framework conditions for MaaS development and operation, and (2) advancing current MaaS supporting technologies by enhancing interoperability and integration of MaaS schemes in the landscape of ITS and other mobility services. Leveraging on recent experiences with MaaS piloting, such as the UbiGo/Go:Smart scheme operated in Göteborg, IMOVE is currently implemented in four European areas including Göteborg and the Västra Götaland region, Berlin Brandenburg region, Greater Manchester and Turin metropolitan areas, all strongly engaged in MaaS adoption and development. The paper describes the approach to organisational and technological enablers for MaaS and the main objectives and elements in the participating pilot sites.

Studying road restraint systems to develop new guidelines

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:55:40 +0100

Key to understanding the needs and tools of road infrastructure management for preventing run-off-road crashes or minimising their consequences, is to identify the hazards and sources of hazards caused by wrong or improper use of road safety devices and identify errors in the design, structure, construction and operation of road safety devices. Studying such an extended scope of the problem required fieldwork and surveys with road authorities, designers, road safety auditors and road maintenance services. An outline of new guidelines could only be developed after understanding the effects of restraint systems, the design, additional elements, type of road and safety barrier location on a road or engineering structure and the road and traffic conditions on their functionality and safety. The paper will present the preliminary results of this research (research project – ROSE). After an in-depth study of the literature, a comparative analysis was made of selected guidelines and principles of using road safety devices in nearly 40 countries from different continents. The parameters which were identified to influence the choice of safety barriers were divided into thematic groups. Two main categories were identified based on the theory of risk: probability and consequences. Probability included factors which, if present in the road cross-section, may make an accident more likely. Consequences included factors which increase the severity and consequences of an accident. One way to understand the functionality of road safety devices is to build numerical models and conduct simulation tests of virtual crash tests. While the literature on numerical road safety device studies includes plenty of detailed works, there are no cross-cutting papers to summarise the partial results of the work of many research teams and condense the theoretical formulations and numerical implementations for the purposes of crash test analysis. The paper will present a proposed approach to such work along with preliminary results of numerical studies for selected problems using road safety devices such as safety barriers on horizontal curves, the effect of kerbs on bridges or the location of obstacles within the barrier’s working width. The paper will discuss assumptions to a methodology of numerical models, calculations and automated processing of data to help with assessing the functionality of the devices. The paper will outline the design of the method for selecting optimal road safety devices. This will be based on device selection factors, fieldwork, surveys and simulations. The models and procedures used in the method will help to identify and link different sources of hazard when using road safety devices to tackle a specific event and will help to identify the weaknesses in the safe use of types of road safety devices. The method will take account of the effect of different factors on optimising device selection. They are: types of hazard sources, road class and its parameters, road traffic parameters (volume, structure, speed). The method will be further developed in new research.

Classifying the Diversity of Bus Mapping Systems

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:55:02 +0100

This study represents the first stage of an investigation into understanding the nature of different approaches to mapping bus routes and bus network, and how they may best be applied in different public transport situations. In many cities, bus services represent an important facet of easing traffic congestion and reducing pollution. However, with the entrenched car culture in many countries, persuading people to change their mode of transport is a major challenge. To promote this modal shift, people need to know what services are available and where (and when) they go. Bus service maps provide an invaluable element of providing suitable public transport information, but are often overlooked by transport planners, and are under-researched by cartographers. The method here consists of the creation of a map evaluation form and performing assessment of published bus networks maps. The analyses were completed by a combination of quantitative and qualitative data analysis of various aspects of cartographic design and classification. This paper focuses on the resulting classification, which is illustrated by a series of examples. This classification will facilitate more in depth investigations into the details of cartographic design for such maps and help direct areas for user evaluation.

Document type: Conference object

Poster abstract: Minimizing flow completion times using adaptive routing over inter-datacenter wide area networks

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:52:09 +0100

Inter-datacenter networks connect dozens of geographically dispersed datacenters and carry traffic flows with highly variable sizes and different classes. Adaptive flow routing can improve efficiency and performance by assigning paths to new flows according to network status and flow properties. A popular approach widely used for traffic engineering is based on current bandwidth utilization of links. We propose an alternative that reduces bandwidth usage by up to at least 50% and flow completion times by up to at least 40% across various scheduling policies and flow size distributions.

Air Traffic Safety Risk Assessment based on Rough Set and BP Neural Network

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:51:48 +0100

Integration of safety and security in railway systems

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:49:26 +0100

Security is gradually taking center stage. Since traditional transport systems were based solely on mechanical or electromechanical devices and closed networks, today with an increasing number of information technologies and communications devices, systems are being migrated towards new communication technologies and open protocols. Although this has increased the efficiency and reduced costs to companies, the systems have become more vulnerable to external attacks. And railway is not and exception, its infrastructure is mainly based on computers that are interconnected via wired or wireless networks and it is highly distributed, therefore railway's infrastructure is difficult to protect and it is vulnerable to cyber-attacks. This work shows an analysis about the standards used in security. A comparison with safety norms and the main reasons why security is currently not considered when developing safety critical devices are also described. Finally, an example of safety and security integration is presented.

PEM Fuel Cell Degradation Analysis Based on Joint Experimental and Simulation Techniques

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:49:03 +0100

The research presented in this paper is aimed at the analysis and quantification of degradation processes in the"br" membrane-electrode-assembly (MEA) of low-temperature PEM fuel cells based on a joint experimental /"br" simulation based approach."br" For this purpose the PEM fuel cell catalyst layer model available in a multi-physics simulation environment is"br" extended from a zero-dimensional interface treatment to a three-dimensional agglomerate approach. The threedimensional"br" agglomerate catalyst layer model serves as the basis for modelling the effects of degradation on MEA"br" performance and durability by taking into account the fundamental aspects of chemical kinetics, mechanics and"br" physics. Model development and verification is supported by experimental studies of degradation in laboratory"br" cells under well-defined accelerated-stress-test conditions."br" Catalyst layer and degradation modeling details are presented together with results of the experimental / simulation"br" based analysis of cells with idealized and industrial flow fields under degradation relevant conditions.

Monitoring road traffic with a UAV-based system

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:48:35 +0100

International audience; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an attractive solution for road traffic monitoring because of their mobility, low cost, and broad view range. Up to now, existing traffic monitoring systems based on UAVs only use one UAV with fixed trajectory to extract information about vehicles. In this paper, we propose a road traffic monitoring system using multiple UAVs. We develop a method to generate adaptive UAVs trajectories, which is based on the tracking of moving points in the UAV field of view. Also we generate UAVs trajectories using mobility models that are usually used to model vehicles mobility. UAVs monitor the traffic on a city road, they are responsible for collecting and sending, in real time, vehicle information to a traffic processing center for traffic regulation purposes. We show that the performance of our system is better than the performance of the fixed UAV trajectory traffic monitoring system in terms of coverage rates and events detection rates.

Exploring the role of spatial cognition in predicting urban traffic flow through agent-based modelling

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:48:08 +0100

Urban systems are highly complex and non-linear in nature, defined by the behaviours and interactions of many individuals. Building on a wealth of new data and advanced simulation methods, conventional research into urban systems seeks to embrace this complexity, measuring and modelling cities with increasingly greater detail and reliability. The practice of transportation modelling, despite recent developments, lags behind these advances. This paper addresses the implications resulting from variations in model design, with a focus on the behaviour and cognition of drivers, demonstrating how different models of choice and experience significantly influence the distribution of traffic. It is demonstrated how conventional models of urban traffic have not fully incorporated many of the important findings from the cognitive science domain, instead often describing actions in terms of individual optimisation. We introduce exploratory agent-based modelling that incorporates representations of behaviour from a more cognitively rich perspective. Specifically, through these simulations, we identify how spatial cognition in respect to route selection and the inclusion of heterogeneity in spatial knowledge significantly impact the spatial extent and volume of traffic flow within a real-world setting. These initial results indicate that individual-level models of spatial cognition can potentially play an important role in predicting urban traffic flow, and that greater heed should be paid to these approaches going forward. The findings from this work hold important lessons in the development of models of transport systems and hold potential implications for policy.

Document type: Article

Decision support system for winter maintenance of the motorways in Slovenia

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:44:59 +0100

Weather has a significant impact on road safety, as evidenced by the many events of the past winters in Slovenia. Weather information systems provide important support to drivers and road maintenance services, increase road safety and reduce the cost of winter maintenance."br" In winter 2015/2016, the Slovenian Motorway Company’s Road Weather Information System (RWIS DARS) was upgraded with additional relevant functionalities that promoted the existing RWIS into the Maintenance Decision Support System (MDSS). MDSS is a tool that utilizes weather forecasts and observations to assist managers in making appropriate decisions to best utilize resources when planning for and treating snow and ice."br" A thermal mapping of the road network was conducted on Slovenian motorways. The thermal mapping data were primarily used in calculating the high-resolution route-based forecasts of road temperature and road conditions throughout the motorway network. On the basis of these forecasts, the system proposes treatments for the implementation of winter service (i.e. ploughing/gritting, gritting materials, time and location) and anticipates their impacts according to the forecasted road temperature and road conditions."br" DARS MDSS, which will be presented in the paper proposed, is developed on the latest technologies and it incorporates the knowledge and experience of the profession and users.

Automation in Human-Machine Networks: How Increasing Machine Agency Affects Human Agency

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:43:54 +0100

© 2018, Springer International Publishing AG. Efficient human-machine networks require productive interaction between human and machine actors. In this study, we address how a strengthening of machine agency, for example through increasing levels of automation, affect the human actors of the networks. Findings from case studies within air traffic management, emergency management, and crowd evacuation are presented, shedding light on how automation may strengthen the agency of human actors in the network through responsibility sharing and task allocation, and serve as a needed prerequisite of innovation and change.

Arrival and Departure Flights Sequencing Optimization Based on Flight Classification Model

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:35:13 +0100

Speeding up the Transition to Partly (Hybrid) or Fully Electric Waterborne Transportation through Education and Skills Upgrading

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:33:37 +0100

In response to the current development towards electric waterborne transportation, this paper introduces the consequent gap in maritime education. Although the transition is only slowly progressing, the first crew members have already started operating fully electric vessels, but without any battery-specific training or certification. In this paper, the magnitude and type of information required in the transition is assessed by comparing existing maritime educational standards with battery-specific regulations. From this comparison three focal areas are identified; safety operation behavior, electrical engineering skills and overcoming myths and misunderstandings. The paper analyzes how education can best be composed to speed up the transition to electric waterborne transportation through a case study based on the experiences from the E-ferry project and the educational strategy of the World’s first pilot courses offered by a renowned Danish maritime academy. The paper concludes by recommending a range of myths that a course concept should help put to rest.

Experiences with the implementation of the EU Directive on road infrastructure safety management in Hungary

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:33:25 +0100

The EU has adopted the directive on road infrastructure safety management in 2008. To comply with this directive, the Hungarian parliament and the government made legal actions and technical guidelines were also developed. The first guideline on Road Safety Impact Assessments in Hungary was published in 2010; an update of this was completed in 2015. Road Safety Audits have a longer history in Hungary. The first related Hungarian guideline was developed in 2004. Using experiences of early audits, the guideline was updated in 2009. A revision of this method was elaborated in 2016. For Road Safety Inspections a special guideline was developed in 2013. This guideline was also updated in 2016. Ranking of high accident concentration sections has already been conducted in Hungary for more than 20 years. Network safety ranking is a new and a more resource-consuming procedure. This paper describes the recent methods, re-defined in 2016.

Automation-ready framework for urban transport planning

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:33:00 +0100

The mission of the H2020 CoEXist project is to enable mobility stakeholders to get “Automation-ready” – which CoEXist currently defines as conducting transport and infrastructure planning for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in the same comprehensive manner as for existing modes such as conventional vehicles, public transport, pedestrians, and cyclists, while ensuring continued support for existing modes on the same network. This definition will be fine-tuned through stakeholder engagement processes. The H2020 CoEXist project started in May 2017 and will run until April 2020. This paper introduces this project and covers its progress until January 2018, with a focus on the methodology of the “Automation-ready framework” that provides a planning framework for urban road authorities to prepare for the introduction of CAVs on the road network. The framework includes elements about strategic urban mobility planning for CAVs and a clear guide for urban transport planners with a list of concrete actions that cities can do now to plan for CAVs on their road network.

Model for Torque Estimation of Pump System with Horizontal Pipe Network

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:32:47 +0100

This paper investigates the possibility of torque estimation of Centrifugal Pump System (CPS) with horizontal pipe network topology. It illustrates the concept of a model-based scheme for hydraulic system simulation. The simulation model developed for CPS takes into consideration the hydraulic properties of the pipe network based on the geometrical characteristics of a pipeline such as a length, diameter, and friction coefficient. The model allows not only to study the torque behavior for a given hydraulic system but also to implement it later for hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation. Additionally, the paper provides an example of working point (WP) calculation method based on the detection of a cross section of performance and system curves of a particular CPS. All variables of the system in the current model can be changed gradually until reaching the desired values. The model helps to estimate the torque in the broad range based on the hydraulic parameters of a network and a rotational speed of a pump.

System-Level Evaluation of Next-Generation Radio Communication System for Train Operation Services

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:31:37 +0100

GSM-R, the radio communication system based on GSM and enhanced to support services required for train operation has been adopted in most of the European countries on main lines. In order to fulfill railway operators' requirements evolving toward a larger use of the radio communication system with new applications, like closed-circuit television, and to overcome the upcoming GSM obsolescence, the design of the next radio communication system for train-to-ground communications has started in Europe. In this context, the X2Rail-1 project evaluates the system throughput of the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) mobile cellular system in a railway environment for both train-to-ground and ground-to-train links. Realistic system-level evaluation results taking into account typical railway deployment scenarios, including train density and speed, wayside base station deployment, propagation model, inter-cell interference and its mitigation are presented in this paper.

Accessibility and Network Changes of the Planned Budapest-Belgrade High-speed Railway

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:31:03 +0100

The development of the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed railway has been announced officially in autumn 2016. The railway link has a total length of 350 km, designed for a maximum speed of 200 km per hour. Enhancement of the railway connection is an important condition for achieving better mobility as well as promoting economic development of the regions concerned. There will be obvious changes in the Trans-European network connections and accessibility improvements will be achieved. In the current research the changes of a complex multimodal transport network indicator is assessed. The results indicate the positive changes in the competitive potential of the regions concerned as well as their role in the European co-operation. The other part of the research uses an enhanced accessibility function to characterize and compare multimodal regional and international connections, calculating the changes of the accessibility between some Central-European capitals proving competitiveness of high speed rail compared to other modes.

Developments in HF propagation predictions to support communications with aircraft on trans-polar routes

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:28:32 +0100

Commercial airlines began operations over polar routes in 1999 with a small number of proving flights. By 2014 the number had increased to in excess of 12,000 flights per year, and further increases are expected. For safe operations, the aircraft have to be able to communicate with air traffic control centres at all times. This is achieved by VHF links whilst within range of the widespread network of ground stations, and by HF radio in remote areas such as the Polar regions, the North Atlantic and Pacific where VHF ground infrastructure does not exist. Furthermore, the Russian side of the pole only has HF capability. This has created a demand for improved HF nowcasting and forecasting procedures to support the polar operations, which are the subject of this paper.

The role of the railway infrastructure in ports of Hungary

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:27:31 +0100

Hungary situated in the center of the continent is one of the most loaded transit country in Europe. There are six TEN-T corridors crossing the country. The ports are the most important turning points of transportation of goods. It is very important the coordination and the high utilization of the environment-friendly and economical transport modes like railway and inland navigation. Although Hungary had more seaports in the history, at present there are only few river ports on the Danube. The paper shows the development of some logistics centers on the Danube and deals with the pivotal role of the railway infrastructure in these ports.

Using wind observations from nearby aircraft to update the optimal descent trajectory in real-time

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:26:37 +0100

The ability to meet a controlled time of arrival during a continuous descent operation will enable environmentally friendly and fuel efficient descent operations while simultane- ously maintaining airport throughput. However, if the wind fore- cast used to compute the initial trajectory plan is not accurate enough, the guidance system will need to correct time deviations from the plan during the execution of the descent. Previous work proposed an on-board guidance strategy based on model predictive control, which repeatedly updates the trajectory plan in real-time from the current aircraft state and for the remainder of the descent. However, the wind conditions downstream, at altitudes not explored yet, were difficult to predict due to the lack of data. This paper shows the potential benefits of using wind observations, broadcast by nearby aircraft, to reconstruct the wind profile downstream. The wind profile in the trajectory opti- mization problem is modeled as a spline, which control points are updated to fit the observations before re-planning the trajectory. Results from simulations using realistic wind data show that the performance of model predictive control significantly improves when including up-to-date wind observations, in terms of time and energy errors at the metering fix and fuel consumption.

Peer Reviewed

Approximation with Error Bounds in Spark

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:26:09 +0100

Many decision-making queries are based on aggregating massive amounts of data, where sampling is an important approximation technique for reducing execution times. It is important to estimate error bounds when sampling to help users balance between precision and performance. However, error bound estimation is challenging because data processing pipelines often transform the input dataset in complex ways before computing the final aggregated values. In this paper, we introduce a sampling framework to support approximate computing with estimated error bounds in Spark. Our framework allows sampling to be performed at multiple arbitrary points within a sequence of transformations preceding an aggregation operation. The framework constructs a data provenance tree to maintain information about how transformations are clustering output data items to be aggregated. It then uses the tree and multi-stage sampling theories to compute the approximate aggregate values and corresponding error bounds. When information about output keys are available early, the framework can also use adaptive stratified reservoir sampling to avoid (or reduce) key losses in the final output and to achieve more consistent error bounds across popular and rare keys. Finally, the framework includes an algorithm to dynamically choose sampling rates to meet user-specified constraints on the CDF of error bounds in the outputs. We have implemented a prototype of our framework called ApproxSpark and used it to implement five approximate applications from different domains. Evaluation results show that ApproxSpark can (a) significantly reduce execution time if users can tolerate small amounts of uncertainties and, in many cases, loss of rare keys, and (b) automatically find sampling rates to meet user-specified constraints on error bounds. We also explore and discuss extensively tradeoffs between sampling rates, execution time, accuracy and key loss.

Urban Freight: What about construction logistics?

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:25:51 +0100

This paper aims to improve the knowledge and understanding of urban freight distribution related to the"br" construction sector. The contribution highlights the specificities of the chain which supplies construction sites in"br" urban areas as compared to other, well studied, supply chains such as retail, HoReCa (hotels-restaurants-cafes)"br" and home deliveries. The paper also tries to identify the barriers against and the triggers towards a more sustainable"br" urban freight transport for the construction sector. In conclusion, experiences from the ongoing CIVITAS Horizon"br" 2020 project “SUCCESS”, aiming at identifying the costs and benefits associated with the introduction of a number"br" of optimization strategies, including but not limited to Construction Consolidation Centres, are used to identify"br" potential ways to make urban construction logistics more sustainable.

Vizir: A Domain-Specific Graphical Language for Authoring and Operating Airport Automations

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:25:30 +0100

International audience; Automation is one of the key solutions proposed and adopted by international Air Transport research programs to meet the challenges of increasing air traffic. For automation to be safe and usable, it needs to be suitable to the activity it supports, both when authoring it and when operating it. Here we present Vizir, a Domain-Specific Graphical Language and an Environment for authoring and operating airport automations. We used a participatory-design process with Air Traffic Controllers to gather requirements for Vizir and to design its features. Vizir combines visual interactionoriented programming constructs with activity-related geographic areas and events. Vizir offers explicit humancontrol constructs, graphical substrates and means to scaleup with multiple automations. We propose a set of guidelines to inspire designers of similar usable hybrid humanautomation system

FLUXNET: Multimodal infrastructure integrated with land use, freight and logistics

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:24:44 +0100

The foreseen growth of freight transport in Europe asks for the optimization of multimodal transport chains. To"br" guarantee network performance and efficient investment strategies, National Road Authorities (NRAs) will have"br" to be empowered with tools to influence the modal choice by the freight and logistic sector. The traditional focus"br" by NRAs on small-scope infrastructure planning faces difficulties meeting societal challenges and such approach"br" doesn’t consider the drivers of the freight and logistic sector. In the FLUXNET study we develop a toolbox for"br" NRAs that is based on a smart combination of tools for land-use planning and infrastructure planning,"br" considering the driving forces in the freight and logistic sector such as optimizing chain efficiency. The"br" FLUXNET study focuses on practice: an analysis of good practices has been used to construct a preliminary"br" toolbox that was tested in several workshops around Europe with regional infrastructure, logistics and planning"br" experts."br" This paper discusses the preliminary results of the FLUXNET study. It provides an insight in the development of"br" the toolbox as well as the preliminary results of its application in ‘Test Beds’ in Sweden and the Netherlands."br" The toolbox will enable road administrations on a national level to improve multimodal use of their networks"br" with respect to the freight and logistic sector. It is based on a smart combination of tools for land use planning"br" and infrastructure planning, considering the driving forces in the freight and logistic sector. This will help NRAs"br" to influence the multimodal choices and interlinkages with spatial planning. The FLUXNET research was"br" commissioned by the Conference of European Directors of Roads (CEDR). A group of four front running"br" countries directed the research: Germany, The Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Identifying the sources of flight inefficiency from historical aircraft trajectories. A set of distance- and fuel-based performance indicators for post-operational analysis.

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:24:17 +0100

In this paper a set of new performance indicators (PIs) aiming to capture the environmental impact of aircraft operations is proposed. Its contribution is threefold: optimal trajectories are computed to compare them with historical trajectories and derive several flight efficiency PIs; a family of fuel-based PIs is proposed, where fuel is estimated only from surveillance trajectory datasets not requiring confidential data; and different PIs and variants are proposed aiming to decouple and to identify different sources of environmental inefficiencies, distinguishing those that could be attributed to the different layers of air traffic management (ATM), and those attributable to the airspace users (AUs). A case study is presented for two different days, where flight inefficiency was assessed with the proposed PIs for all traffic crossing the FABEC airspace during a 24h period. Main results show that average fuel inefficiencies that could be attributable to ATM are around 250 kg (7.8%) when a full free route without en-route charges scenario at maximum range operations is considered as reference for the optimal trajectories. AUs induced fuel inefficiencies (due to flying faster than the maximum range speed) have a mean around 100 kg (3%). It is also concluded that fuel inefficiencies in the vertical and horizontal trajectory domains have a similar contribution to the overall flight inefficiency. Yet, horizontal inefficiencies are higher at strategic level, while are negative at tactical level for the great majority of flights.

Peer Reviewed

Optimizing production schedules in classification yards

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:23:37 +0100

Classification yards play an important role in railroad networks for operating single wagonload transportation. Here, inbound trains are disassembled, the rail cars are sorted and then assembled to form outbound trains. The efficient and resource-conserving operation of shunting yards has a profound impact on the quality and profitability of single wagonload rail freight services. Preparing production schedules for classification yards that ensure punctuality and efficiency is a challenging task that becomes even harder with the specification of customer-oriented, digital supported transportation plans for each wagon."br" Against this background we introduce a decision support approach that helps yard managers to find optimal schedules for the resource allocation in the yard. The main component is an optimization approach that involves time constraints and capacity restrictions as well as an objective function that represents goals depending on planning level. At the strategic level of planning, these goals are determined by the utilization of resources (e.g. engines, staff, tracks). However, during the operation, including ad-hoc disturbances, it is useful to minimize the loss of quality instead (e.g. tardiness, missing connections). Besides the mathematical formulation of the problem we discuss solution methods, introduce an optimization framework and outline computational results that show the economical potential."br" Furthermore, we discuss the opportunities of real-time control and outline the path towards fully automated classification yards. With this work we support the transforming process of the railway freight transport system to meet the prospective challenges in the digital era.

Formal verification of automotive embedded software

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:23:16 +0100

International audience; The ever-increasing complexity of automotive embedded systems and the need for safe advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) represent a great challenge for car manufacturers. Furthermore, we expect that in the near future, authorities require a software certification in order to get convinced that ADAS are safe enough. Theoretical research and experience show that when using conventional design approaches it is impossible to guarantee high confidence to those systems. The way taken by some industries (e.g. aerospace, railway, nuclear) was by partially using formal verification techniques. In this paper, we first present a background of the formal verification techniques and how they can contribute to achieve the requirements of some safety standards. Next, we share our experience with the application of those techniques that seem to be mature enough to be used in an industrial context: Static analysis based on Abstract Interpretation, SMT-based software Model checking and Deductive proof. Finally, we make a detailed analysis about our experiments and propose an approach introducing formal methods into the development of automotive embedded software. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software verification; KEYWORDS Software verification · Formal methods · ADAS · Certification ACM Reference Format: Vassil Todorov, Frédéric Boulanger, and Safouan Taha. 2018. Formal verification of automotive embedded software. In FormaliSE '18: FormaliSE

Virtualisation of the test environment for signalling

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:19:31 +0100

ERTMS is a well-known, well-performing technology applied all over the world but it still lacks flexibility when"br" it comes to authorisation and certification procedures. The key of its success in the future lies as much in cost"br" reduction as in simplification of placing in service procedures. This holds true for the implementation of a new"br" subsystem and even more so for new software releases related to subsystems already in service."br" Currently the placing in service process of ETCS components and subsystems requires a large amount of tests due"br" to the complexity of the signalling systems and the different engineering rules applied. The S2R Multi-Annual"br" Action Plan states that the effort and time consumption of these onsite tests are at least 30% for any particular"br" project. VITE research project (VIrtualisation of the Test Environment) aims at reducing these onsite tests to a"br" minimum while ensuring that laboratory tests can serve as evidence for valid system behaviour and are accepted"br" by all stakeholders involved in the placing in service process. This paper presents the first VITE results.

Action and intention recognition of pedestrians in urban traffic

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:19:07 +0100

on and intention recognition of pedestrians in urban settings are challenging problems for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems as well as future autonomous vehicles to maintain smooth and safe traffic. This work investigates a number of feature extraction methods in combination with several machine learning algorithms to build knowledge on how to automatically detect the action and intention of pedestrians in urban traffic. We focus on the motion and head orientation to predict whether the pedestrian is about to cross the street or not. The work is based on the Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset, which contains 346 videoclips of various traffic scenarios captured with cameras mounted in the windshield of a car. An accuracy of 72% for head orientation estimation and 85% for motion detection is obtained in our experiments.

Comment: Accepted for publication at Intl Conf on Signal Image Technology & Internet Based Systems, SITIS 2018

Thermal Management System for a thermally controlled food delivery electric vehicle integrating heat pump, cold storage unit, solar panels and PCT resistors

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:18:04 +0100

The paper describes the development of a novel thermal system for all kind of low consumption electric vehicles. For the first time in our knowledge, a compact thermal system integrates a heat pump, a thermal storage unit, a photovoltaic panel and distributed high efficiency annular fans including PCT resistors in their centers. The vehicle is divided in three independent compartments: food storage, battery pack and cabin which are thermally managed with defined priorities in relation to whether the vehicle is plugged-in, in motion or parked unplugged. The implemented control strategies adapt themselves in relation to the outdoor temperature to minimize energy consumption. Phase Change Materials PCM are used to keep the battery pack temperature conditioned even when the vehicle is parked unplugged in the open air at extreme cold temperatures, in that case during the day the PMC material integrated in the battery pack accumulate the energy produced during the day by the solar panels and release heat during the night. Following simulations of various condition of operation rather advanced algorithms have been implemented into an electronic board so that the conditioning of the three compartments is made by autonomous decisions in practically all conditions of operations. The cold storage unit has been dimensioned in such a way that per the typical two-hour mission of a hot summer, the three compartments of the temperature controlled food delivery vehicle could be temperature and humidity conditioned using only the thermal energy storage. The system could also be monitored and activated by a smart phone. The temperature controlled food delivering vehicle integrating all developed technologies will be demonstrated in operation at the exhibition of TRA 2018.

The Research on Zhuhai Urban Cooperative Distribution System Based on Planning Demand

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:16:15 +0100

Sustainable Development Analysis and Extended Cost Benefit Analysis – A Promising Approach to Include Social Impacts and External Effects in Appraisal Procedures for Transportation Measures and Infrastructure Investments

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:14:26 +0100

Traditional evaluation methods have considerable disadvantages. The result of a conventional CBA is based on the total costs and benefits of the investigated alternatives. The distribution of the costs and benefits among different social groups and other social impacts are neither calculated nor taken into account. Existing disparities are not considered and can be increased by a decision based on such an evaluation tool. In Austria, a new set of tools for the assessment of road infrastructure projects was developed which endeavours to overcome the above mentioned problems. This set comprises the eCBA (extended Cost Benefit Analysis) which includes the evaluation of the distribution of costs and benefits among different social groups, indirect third party effects (regional welfare caused by the investment) as well as the impact of induced/suppressed transport demand. The SDA (Sustainable Development Analysis) includes the three dimensions of the holistic term sustainability, social, ecological and economic impacts. It is a special type of a multi-criteria analysis, which makes the term sustainability operable to assess the impact of alternatives. The result of the analysis leads to an indicator for sustainable development which assesses the contribution of each alternative to sustainability on a scale from 0 to 100.

Data collection for the 2nd generation of European bitumen standards in the Czech Republic – round robin test experience

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:13:59 +0100

The second generation of European standards for bituminous binders will include, largely, those performancerelated"br" characteristics, which have been gradually implemented in practice. With respect to the regular use though,"br" the characteristics have been recognized as a new requirement. Long-term experience with determination and"br" interpretation is still missing. Due to the fact that polymer modified bituminous binders (PMB) in particular have"br" become a standard product for all types of asphalt mixtures, it is necessary to stipulate the basic requirements for"br" particular binders specified in the standard and based on their characteristics. Extensive data collection over all of"br" Europe has gone on for several years. The main expectation is for laboratory data to provide sufficient information"br" for the proposed initial set of the required parameters to be potentially included in the standards. The Czech"br" Republic has started to gather experience and values based on round robin tests as well. The first stage of the"br" project was launched in 2014 and 3 laboratories have tested two binders from different bitumen producers - virgin,"br" short-term aged (RTFOT) and long-term aged (RTFOT + PAV). Traditional and performance analyses were"br" employed. The second stage of the project followed in 2015; there were already six participating laboratories. Four"br" binders were tested (one paving grade, three PMBs) in a similar framework as in 2014 with the addition of some"br" conditions (e.g. testing temperature on DSR, BBR test etc.). The last stage in 2016 included six laboratories and"br" four binders again (one paving grade, three PMBs). The last stage involved a further extension of test temperatures"br" on DSR, and included a new addition of different temperatures and further stress level for the MSCR test (8 kPa)."br" The evaluation of all results has led to the conclusion on a broader data collection for all polymer-modified binders"br" in use in the Czech Republic. The data collection should be based on the draft requirements, which can be expected"br" for EN 14023. The data will be collected from all producers/traders on the market anonymously. Then they will"br" be evaluated by an expert team after 3-year collection. This evaluation will result in the determination of"br" requirements for the standard PMB specifications. If the Czech Republic decides to use performance-related"br" characteristics in specifications of paving grades, a similar approach to data collection could be applied.

Damage detection of bridges through acceleration monitoring

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:12:05 +0100

The damage early warning of bridges is a mandatory issue if we want to guarantee the safety of transport lines."br" In principle, bridges should show a non-linear damaged phase which has enough remaining capacity to avoid"br" brittle collapse, while permitting the identification of the decrease in stiffness, and therefore the warning about"br" the efficiency of the structure (Farrar & Warden 2006)."br" It is however to point out that the change detection of the bridge dynamic properties is a very complicated task,"br" due to the variable environmental and loading conditions, and the small entity of change that by far severe"br" damages produce (Magalhães et Al., .2012)."br" In the paper the preliminary results of a two year long European project, granted by the Infravation Call, are"br" presented. In this period, a consistent number of bridges all around the world have been monitored, and some"br" specimen bridges thoroughly investigated in laboratory (see for instance the project description at the site"br" http://www.infravation.net/projects/SHAPE)."br" The performed investigation has shown that the continuous monitoring of bridges can be transformed in a sort of"br" bridge behaviour intrinsic model which fixes the range of normal operation of the bridge itself. By this way,"br" outliers can be identified, but a very important issue is the evaluation of the extent of the change that can start the"br" warning activity."br" Among the possible strategies, it is shown that algorithms that evaluate the derivative of the change can be"br" effective in pointing out the onset of a permanent damage (Nikowski & Jain, 2009).

REKOMO: REGIONAL COOPERATION- AND MOBILITY-PLATFORM

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:10:24 +0100

Numerical and Experimental Predictions of Pavement Texture Effects on Vehicle Fuel Consumption

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:07:39 +0100

119 litres is the average annual amount of fuel used by a typical car to overcome rolling resistance (RR) depending not only on vehicle-related factors but also pavement-related ones. By rearranging surface texture, fuel consumption may decrease bringing substantial long-term socio-economic benefits, which would help in meeting EU limits on CO2 (95 g/km until 2021) fostering sustainable construction of pavements. This paper outlines a newly developed multi-scale 3-D numerical model and two in-laboratory and one in-situ experimental tests to calculate micro-distortional RR due to indentation of aggregates into visco-elastic tread compound. Two computational and two experimental approaches to quantify micro-distortional RR were developed. The contact forces appeared of a reasonable distribution and magnitude. It was found that micro-distortional RR is higher on a rougher/sparsely packed surface compared to a smoother/tightly packed case; longitudinally grooved concrete was the most energy efficient texture studied. The predictions were confirmed qualitatively using the experiments.

An Intelligent Parking Scheduling Algorithm Based on Traffic and Driver Behavior Predictions

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:05:38 +0100

International audience; Smart parking is a common demand of citizen, especially for people living in a smart city. It is an important issue since it not only determines the required parking time of drivers but also impacts the urban population and traffic congestion. In this paper, an intelligent parking algorithm is presented based on the predictions of traffics and drivers’ behaviors. The proposed parking algorithm analyzes the historical parking records, predicts the parking traffics and the driver’s parking length and then schedules the vehicles to the parking grids such that the maximal benefits can be obtained. The proposed algorithm also dynamically allocates their reservations but guarantees the parking reservations for the VIP members. But based on the parking space resource. Performance analysis through extensive simulations demonstrates the efficiency and practicality of the proposed scheme.

Document type: Conference object

Beyond speed: a new outlook on mass transport systems in megalopoleis

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:04:52 +0100

Historically, urban areas expanded proportionally to the maximum speed one could travel within natural travel time budgets. However, driven by the availability of private motorised transport, major urban areas are now expanding so fast that achievable increases in transport speed cannot compensate for the growth in size. More importantly, such issue highlights that these shortcomings are inherent to traditional engineering approaches. Therefore, radical innovation is critical to support the future structures of megalopoleis. We thus propose a new framework for engineering radical change that is based on projection rather than prediction, illustrated by a new concept of operations for metro systems. Our models show that this novel approach can increase door-to-door achievable distances within the natural time budgets by approximately 50% without further increases in maximum line speeds. Expanding the potential applications of this framework, we position this research as a starting point to a new perspective on developing systems to support the complex urban environments of the future.

Passenger-oriented optimization of lines in a mass transit system

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:04:18 +0100

Based on passenger mobility knowledge, this research presents a model for the design of passenger-oriented"br" lines for SNCF Transilien (major railway operator for the Parisian suburban mass transit). In the Paris area, the"br" traffic has increased by 30% over the last decade, reaching 3.2 million passengers a day on the network. We"br" have developed a new method that proposes a line planning process aiming at the best quality level for"br" passengers, and at reasonable costs. First, we introduce indicators to characterize the performance of railway"br" services, with the traveler’s and the operator’s points of view. Then, a method to solve a graph theory-based"br" multiobjective model for the Line Planning Problem is presented, minimizing both users’ discomfort and"br" operating costs. This method provides all efficient solutions. Experimental results on SNCF Transilien real"br" instances are presented. Several objective functions are compared and analyzed with regards to the passenger"br" quality of service. These new criteria provide a more accurate outlook of the quality of service.

Optimal placement of charging stations for electric vehicles in large-scale transportation networks

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:04:07 +0100

This paper presents a new practical approach to optimally allocate charging stations in large-scale transportation networks for electric vehicles (EVs). The problem is of particular importance to meet the charging demand of the growing fleet of alternative fuel vehicles. Considering the limited driving range of EVs, there is need to supply EV owners with accessible charging stations to reduce their range anxiety. The aim of the Route Node Coverage (RNC) problem, which is considered in the current paper, is to find the minimum number of charging stations, and their locations in order to cover the most probable routes in a transportation network. We propose an iterative approximation technique for RNC, where the associated Integer Problem (IP) is solved by exploiting a probabilistic random walk route selection, and thereby taking advantage of the numerical stability and efficiency of the standard IP software packages. Furthermore, our iterative RNC optimization procedure is both pertinent and straightforward to implement in computer coding and the design technique is therefore highly applicable. The proposed optimization technique is applied on the Sioux-Falls test transportation network, and in a large-scale case study covering the southern part of Sweden, where the focus is on reaching the maximum coverage with a minimum number of charging stations. The results are promising and show that the flexibility, smart route selection, and numerical efficiency of the proposed design technique, can pick out strategic locations for charging stations from thousands of possible locations w ithout numerical difficulties. ©2019 Hie Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. "p"open acce

Collective Driving : Cloud Services for Automated Vehicles in UNICARagil

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:03:56 +0100

European Union air navigation projects: impact on airspace operations management

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:03:46 +0100

International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Industrial Management (13th. 2019. Gijón)

EVTOL Arrival Sequencing and Scheduling for On-Demand Urban Air Mobility

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:02:59 +0100

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has the ability to reduce ground traffic congestion by enabling rapid on-demand flight through three-dimensional airspace. Due to the use of electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) vehicles with distributed electric propulsion, UAM operates under zero operational emissions and cheaper and at a lower noise level compared to helicopters. In the long term with more UAM flights, air traffic control is expected to limit further growth of such operations. Therefore, first research has been performed on energy-efficient trajectory optimisation for a given required time of arrival, as the arrival phase is the most safety-critical flight phase with higher air traffic density and limited battery energy. However, research on the separation between eVTOL aircraft by computing their optimal required time of arrival (RTA) is limited. Besides, the available research has not considered limited battery power of the eVTOL aircraft or a limited vertiport landing pad capacity, neither discusses the ATC procedures for eVTOL flight. Unlike fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters in commercial aviation, eVTOL aircraft fly on-demand and have different flight dynamics, limited battery energy supply and a limited number of landing spots at a vertiport such as on top of high-rise buildings. Therefore, this research has aimed to take the first step in the development of Urban Air Mobility Traffic Management for autonomous on-demand eVTOL operations by developing the arrival procedures and arrival sequencing and scheduling tool searching for minimum total delay considering limited battery power and vertiport landing pad capacity. A concept of operations for vertiport terminal area airspace design has been proposed for a vertiport with one or two landing pads while making iterative use of the existing energy-efficient trajectory optimisation tool. A final approach area with a standard arrival route and two approach fixes is used to organise the flow inside the high-density area. Any scheduled delay is absorbed outside this area by flying a shallow descent, an approach fix detour or, only if necessary, in hover. The characteristics of the EHANG-184 multi-rotor eVTOL have been used throughout the research, such that a time separation requirement of 90s is determined. This work is the first to compute the optimal RTAs for eVTOLs to safely separate them for minimum delay based on remaining battery state of charge and vertiport capacity in three modules. Module 1 computes the most energy-optimal arrival trajectory for a set of different RTAs at the vertiport. The state and control vectors corresponding to this set of trajectories are fed intoModule 2. Also, the earliest and latest feasible arrival time based on flight dynamics, most energy-optimal arrival trajectory and the flight time between the approach fix and vertiport landing pad is obtained from this optimisation and fed intoModule 3. Module 2 is used to relate the initial eVTOL battery status to the scheduler in Module 3. It first computes the power required to perform each of the RTA trajectories using the flight dynamics. Afterwards, the power demand and the required SOC to perform each RTA trajectory are determined using a simplified battery model. A regression is then created between the RTAs and the required SOC to compute the latest possible landing time based on the initial SOC of each arriving eVTOL. This so-called RTA constraint is an input for Module 3. Module 3 is a mixed-integer linear programwhich ensures eVTOL separation and selects the arrival route and corresponding landing pad for minimum total delay. A column generation algorithm has been applied to enable delay absorption in hover. Besides, it contains a position shifting constraint with respect to the first-come-first-serve sequence and a rolling horizon algorithmto reduce the computational time required to solve themodel. The concept of operations and eVTOL arrival sequencing and scheduling tool have been tested for a proof of concept and afterwards validated using a hexagonal vertiport network and eVTOL arrival demand model for Houston, TX, USA. The number of eVTOLs expected to arrive has been obtained from the demand model, after which the expected time of arrival for each eVTOL has been modelled as a Poisson process. The initial state of charge of the arriving eVTOLs has been assumed to be normally distributed.

ARMS – Asfinag Traveltime Management System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:59:13 +0100

SFINAG – the Austrian motorway operator – calculates a comprehensive traffic situation, travel time and travel"br" time forecast for the entire motorway and expressway network in Austria. Over the last few years, the nature of"br" travel time estimation has evolved rapidly. In addi tion to the ever-increasing number of detection technologies"br" (Bluetooth, WLAN, CEN DSRC, radar, ultrasound as well as FCD), the different qualities and quantities of"br" generated data make a more exact and near-time travel time calculation more complex. The goal of the ARMS"br" project is, to harmonize these data sources and to combine them in the best possible way, so that a comprehensive"br" travel time estimation is possible on the entire 2200 km-wide motorway and expressway network. This is achieved"br" on the one hand by intelligent data fusing. On the other hand, data of the ASFINAG event management, roadworks"br" management and a short-term forecast are also included, in order to be able to provide travel times on motorway"br" sections as quickly as possible for customers. By harmonizing the input data, different data sources can be"br" interlinked very well, but can also be dynamically expanded by new detection technologies. In addition to"br" optimizing the travel time calculation for car and truck traffic, local events leading to traffic restrictions or delays"br" can also be precisely located and categorized, even down to the exact start and end of congestion. Because this"br" data is fed back into the ASFINAG event management, the quality of traffic information as well as traffic"br" management is also significantly improved.

Exploring logistics managers' preferences for sustainable freight transport: a literature review on choice experiments

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:59:02 +0100

The implementation of sustainable freight transport concepts such as intermodality or synchromodality depends on the preferences of logistics managers and finally their acceptance to introduce these concepts. Discrete choice experiments represent an effective method to elicit logistics managers’ mode choice preferences in freight transport. In this paper, a structured overview of existing discrete choice experiments in freight transport is provided to analyse the characteristics of freight transportation demand and understand how shippers select a transport service. Results from a literature review show that transport cost, reliability, transport time and service frequency represent the most important variables that influence mode choice. This information allows deriving policy implications for the introduction of sustainable transport concepts. Monetary incentives represent an effective political instrument to facilitate sustainable transport. Reliability of a transport service is also of high importance and should be additionally focused to promote synchromodal transport.

ANALYSIS OF LION AIR'S COMPETITIVE STRATEGY IN BUSINESS COMPETITION FOR SCHEDULED AIR TRANSPORT SERVICES IN INDONESIA

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:57:51 +0100

Discussion on the Revision Direction of China's Civil Aviation Carrier Liability System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:57:32 +0100

Orientation Dependence of Hydrogen Accelerated Fatigue Crack Growth Rates in Pipeline Steels

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:56:51 +0100

One of the most efficient methods for supplying gaseous hydrogen long distances is by using steel pipelines. However, steel pipelines exhibit accelerated fatigue crack growth rates in gaseous hydrogen relative to air. Despite conventional expectations that higher strength steels would be more susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement, recent testing on a variety of pipeline steel grades has shown a notable independence between strength and hydrogen assisted fatigue crack growth rate. It is thought that microstructure may play a more defining role than strength in determining the hydrogen susceptibility. Among the many factors that could affect hydrogen accelerated fatigue crack growth rates, this study was conducted with an emphasis on orientation dependence. The orientation dependence of toughness in hot rolled steels is a well-researched area; however, few studies have been conducted to reveal the relationship between fatigue crack growth rate in hydrogen and orientation. In this work, fatigue crack growth rates were measured in hydrogen for high strength steel pipeline with different orientations. A significant reduction in fatigue crack growth rates were measured when cracks propagated perpendicular to the rolling direction. A detailed microstructural investigation was performed, in an effort to understand the orientation dependence of fatigue crack growth rate performance of pipeline steels in hydrogen environments.

Ring Resonator Metamaterials for Radar Cross Section Reduction

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:55:00 +0100

In this communication, we present a comparison of different ring resonator absorber structures, and a proof of concept for the application of a thin metamaterial absorber to achieve radar cross section (RCS) reduction. We demonstrate over 10dB of RCS reduction in the S-band frequency range used by Air Traffic Control (ATC) radar.

Towards Precise Performance Measurements in Live Air Traffic Validation Exercises

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:53:56 +0100

Day-to-day air traffic is exposed to a large number of influencing factors, which are steadily changing and causing significant volatility. Examples would be the daily weather situation, charter flights, flight cancellations, changes in airspace configuration, or the temporary non-availability of supporting infrastructure such as navigation aids, runways, or taxiways. When conducting validation activities with live air traffic, as it is currently done in SESARs xStream project, this circumstance complicates meaningful performance measurements. Especially when the volatility of the air traffic under consideration is within the same magnitude than the expected benefit of the system under test, the positive effects may be invisible similar to a poor signal-to-noise ratio. In order to statistically determine a small effect, one must either evaluate a very large data basis or, if this is not possible, find and eliminate disturbances before the actual evaluation. Within the xStream project, a methodology has been developed to do this elimination in a reasonable and systematic way and filter out those datasets that, because of a totally different weather situation, traffic mix etc., make a meaningful baseline-solution comparison impossible. This is done by performing multiple systematic pair-wise comparability checks between dedicated reference and exercise data sets. Beside others, these checks cover local and area weather conditions, airspace and air traffic control service configurations as well as the current traffic constellation. Based on the methodology, algorithms were developed by the Institute of Flight Guidance of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Braunschweig and have been implemented in several in-house software modules, allowing the conduction of these checks in an almost fully automatic way. This software has then been tested with several different air traffic recordings from a European hub airport by calculating selected performance metrics. Obtained results were then compared with performance measurements without previous comparability checks. The results show that the developed methodology was able to compensate approximately 60% of the air traffic volatility of the used radar tracks when reducing the sample size to one quarter containing the best comparable datasets. This paper provides comprehensive information about the developed comparability checks itself and describes the observed effects, compared to unfiltered performance measurements. It closes with a discussion and an outlook with special regard to the upcoming application of this methodology in the xStream project.

Efficient Machine-Type Communication Using Multi-Metric Context-Awareness for Cars Used as Mobile Sensors in Upcoming 5G Networks

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:52:53 +0100

Upcoming 5G-based communication networks will be confronted with huge increases in the amount of transmitted sensor data related to massive deployments of static and mobile Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Cars acting as mobile sensors will become important data sources for cloud-based applications like predictive maintenance and dynamic traffic forecast. Due to the limitation of available communication resources, it is expected that the grows in Machine-Type Communication (MTC) will cause severe interference with Human-to-human (H2H) communication. Consequently, more efficient transmission methods are highly required. In this paper, we present a probabilistic scheme for efficient transmission of vehicular sensor data which leverages favorable channel conditions and avoids transmissions when they are expected to be highly resource-consuming. Multiple variants of the proposed scheme are evaluated in comprehensive realworld experiments. Through machine learning based combination of multiple context metrics, the proposed scheme is able to achieve up to 164% higher average data rate values for sensor applications with soft deadline requirements compared to regular periodic transmission.

Comment: Best Student Paper Award

Perturbed anonymization: two level smart privacy for LBS mobile users

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:52:31 +0100

The use of smart mobile devices like tablets, smart phones and navigational gadgets provide most promising communication and better services to mobile users. Location Based Services (LBS) have become very common in recent years. Mobile users submit their location dependent queries to the untrusted LBS server to acquire a particular service. Ideally, user’s personal information such as location data is supposed to be protected while communicating to LBS and at the same time quality of service must be maintained. Therefore, there is a need to have a balanced trade-off between privacy and quality of service. To fulfil such trade-off, this paper proposes a solution that first forms the cloaking region at mobile device, perform perturbation to handle the problem of trusted third party and the anonymizer further anonymizes the location to remove the problem of enough users required to form the cloaking region. The proposed approach protects the location privacy of the user and also maintains the quality of service by selecting appropriate service to the particular user. The proposed algorithm provides two-level location protection to the user, and thus ensures smart mobility of the LBS user.

Standardization of transport chain emission calculation. Status quo and what is needed next

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:52:08 +0100

Standardization of emission calculation is progressing swiftly in order to support the improvement of the sustainability of transport chains. Using the GLEC Framework v1.0 as a starting point, this research maps out, which further gaps need to be addressed for ensuring seamless coverage at a meaningful accuracy of such a calculation. The analysis is based on a desk research complemented by considerations and feedback received in the context of real-life test cases of the GLEC Framework. The paper closes with an outlook on requirements towards an eco-label related to the emission calculation standardization.

Multi-resolution simulations of material processes for e-mobility applications

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:48:46 +0100

The efficient lightweight design of e-mobility systems and the energy-efficient material processes (lightweight high performance materials) to achieve a required product quality, lower cost and high-performance products require a smart control of the main process parameters. Application of numerical simulation techniques to these complex processes enables scientist and practicing engineers to virtually optimize the design and\\or material process parameters. However, in order to arrive at the desired performance, quality and cost, a general engineering framework shall be setup to carry out the design\\material process simulation for the whole production process chain. The input lightweight material and design process parameters can affect the performance, running cost, maintenance and recyclability of e-mobility products. Many researchers have proposed different numerical and analytical framework and optimization techniques to carry out efficient and safe low-inertia mobility design schemes. In the research work herein, a multi-resolution simulation framework has been proposed and setup to develop a full process simulation system for energy-efficient lightweight material and design processes within mobility context."br" A multi-resolution and multi-scale numerical scheme has been considered for energy-optimized lightweight material processes (aluminum and magnesium alloys), while bridging techniques are developed to integrate the micro material properties with macro design simulations. The use of parallel processing and fast computing facilities along with smart numerical techniques for different scales (micro to macro) enable us to modernize the use of numerical virtual simulation systems for e-mobility applications. These techniques can integrate the existing solver capabilities at macro scale with emerging methods (multi-scale and multi-resolution methods) from diverse multi-disciplinary scientific areas. As the virtual and advanced computer-based simulation\\design techniques for e-vehicle parts have not been exploited at different time\\length scales yet, it has partially been integrated (micro to macro scales) into the real e-mobility design processes. It offers a great benefit over the traditional design processes in term of time, cost, energy efficiency and human resources. The main contribution of the research work herein, is to show the advantages of using multi-resolution virtual simulation\\design techniques to improve the lightweight and low-inertia design of components for better quality and high performance of e-mobility applications.

Dynamic Composition of Question Answering Pipelines with FRANKENSTEIN

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:46:22 +0100

Question answering (QA) systems provide user-friendly interfaces for retrieving answers from structured and unstructured data given natural language questions. Several QA systems, as well as related components, have been contributed by the industry and research community in recent years. However, most of these efforts have been performed independently from each other and with different focuses, and their synergies in the scope of QA have not been addressed adequately. FRANKENSTEIN is a novel framework for developing QA systems over knowledge bases by integrating existing state-of-the-art QA components performing different tasks. It incorporates several reusable QA components, employs machine learning techniques to predict best performing components and QA pipelines for a given question, and generates static and dynamic executable QA pipelines. In this paper, we illustrate different functionalities of FRANKENSTEIN for performing independent QA component execution, QA component prediction, given an input question as well as the static and dynamic composition of different QA pipelines.

An SDN hybrid architecture for vehicular networks: Application to Intelligent Transport System

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:45:48 +0100

International audience; Vehicular networks are one of the cornerstone of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). They are expected to provide ubiquitous network connectivity to moving vehicles while supporting various ITS services, some with very stringent requirements in terms of latency and reliability. Two vehicular networking technologies are envisioned to jointly support the full range of ITS services : DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communication) for direct vehicle to vehicle/Road Side Units (RSU) communications and cellular technologies. To the best of our knowledge, approaches from the literature usually divide ITS services on each of these networks according to their requirements and one single network is in charge of supporting the each service. Those that consider both network technologies to offer multi-path routing, load balancing or path splitting for a better quality of experience of ITS services assume obviously separately controlled networks. Under the umbrella of SDN (Software Defined Networking), we propose in this paper a hybrid network architecture that enables the joint control of the networks providing connectivity to multi-homed vehicles and, also, explore the opportunities brought by such an architecture. We show through some use cases, that in addition to the flexibility and fine-grained programmability brought by SDN, it opens the way towards the development of effective network control algorithms that are the key towards the successful support of ITS services and especially those with stringent QoS. We also show how these algorithms could also benefit from information related to the environment or context in which vehicles evolve (traffic density, planned trajectory, ..), which could be easily collected by data providers and made available via the cloud.

An Economic Analysis of Urban Traffic Congestion

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:43:53 +0100

Fuel Consumption improvement of a LCV diesel engine by conventional measures, targeting post Euro 6 emission compliance

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:41:12 +0100

Within the EU funded Horizon 2020 “dieper” project (Diesel engine efficiency improvement and Particulate number Reduction), the authors are working to develop a Light Commercial Vehicle (LCV) demonstrator to enable emissions of 50% of Euro 6 limits and a >80% reduction in particulate numbers including the 10-23nm range. A fuel economy improvement of >5% is also required. The “dieper” project is yet in an initial phase. The paper will outline aspects of a Euro 6b compliant vehicle in the near-future testing environment (RDE, WLTP) with post Euro 6 emissions limits (2020). The baseline vehicle was measured at project start (2017) and the improved vehicle will be measured again the end of the project (2019) by an independent institution (Virtuelles Fahrzeug in Graz, ViF). The paper describes the baseline situation and improvement steps to reach the targets. Hybridization and electrification are excluded from this project and could be added in a further step to meet expected 2025 CO2 regulations.

Thermodynamic influences of lubricant in an ORC for waste heat recovery in propulsion systems

Scipedia content — Thu, 28 Jan 2021 17:41:02 +0100

Efficiency enhancement of various propulsion systems is in the focus of technical development, with the aim of reducing both operating costs and emissions. When considering internal combustion engines, only a fraction of the supplied fuel energy can be converted to mechanical work, whereas the remaining energy is mostly being released to the environment as waste heat. Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) enable the use of this very waste heat for increasing overall efficiency of the propulsion system. To use the full potential of the waste heat recovery system, the impacts of the single influencing factors within the ORC have to be understood, such as the working medium, process management when using a regenerator, the number and arrangement of the single heat sources, the lower temperature level of the cycle (condensation temperature) or the share of circulating lubricant within the working cycle. This paper wants to assess the thermodynamic influence of the lubricant in an ORC in order to show the maximum potential of efficiency.