Scipedia: Documents published in 2018

Progressive Structure from Motion

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:26:30 +0100

Structure from Motion or the sparse 3D reconstruction out of individual photos is a long studied topic in computer vision. Yet none of the existing reconstruction pipelines fully addresses a progressive scenario where images are only getting available during the reconstruction process and intermediate results are delivered to the user. Incremental pipelines are capable of growing a 3D model but often get stuck in local minima due to wrong (binding) decisions taken based on incomplete information. Global pipelines on the other hand need the access to the complete viewgraph and are not capable of delivering intermediate results. In this paper we propose a new reconstruction pipeline working in a progressive manner rather than in a batch processing scheme. The pipeline is able to recover from failed reconstructions in early stages, avoids to take binding decisions, delivers a progressive output and yet maintains the capabilities of existing pipelines. We demonstrate and evaluate our method on diverse challenging public and dedicated datasets including those with highly symmetric structures and compare to the state of the art.

Testing Demand Responsive Shared Transport Services via Agent-Based Simulations

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:16:26 +0100

In this paper, an agent-based model is presented to test the feasibility of different configurations of Demand Responsive Shared Transport (DRST) services in a real context. DRST services provide âjust-in-timeâ mobility solutions by dynamically assigning a fleet of vehicles to passenger booking requests taking advantages of Information and Communication Technologies. First results show the impact of different route choice strategies on the system performance and can be useful to help the planning and designing of such services.

Flexible Control for Local Heating and Transportation Units in Low Voltage Distribution System

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:12:43 +0100

The Optimal Mix of Pricing and Infrastructure Expansions to Alleviate Traffic Congestion and in-bus crowding in grand Casablanca

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:06:09 +0100

Like in many large cities in developing countries, traffic in Grand Casablanca, Morocco, is congested and public buses are crowded. These conditions are alleviated by a combination of supply-side infrastructure expansions, such as more buses and new road capacity, and demand-side pricing instruments, such as parking and fuel taxes. Using an empirical urban transportation mode choice model for Casablanca, this study finds a mix of these expansion policies and pricing instruments to alleviate congestion and maximize aggregate social welfare. The optimal mix is sensitive to the marginal costs of the infrastructure expansions. If the city were to spread out in its periphery where land constraints do not exist and land is available at lower prices, a supply-side instrument, particularly the optimal expansion of roads, would be far more effective in achieving welfare gains than the use of optimal pricing instruments without new roads. By contrast, if the city were to densify in already built-up areas, land and other physical constraints and the high price of land may leave expensive âelevated roadsâ as the only option. In this case, demand-side instruments together with the elevated roads would equally contribute to reduce traffic congestion and in-bus crowding.

Document type: Book

Diverse M-Best Solutions by Dynamic Programming

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:03:13 +0100

Many computer vision pipelines involve dynamic programming primitives such as finding a shortest path or the minimum energy solution in a tree-shaped probabilistic graphical model. In such cases, extracting not merely the best, but the set of M-best solutions is useful to generate a rich collection of candidate proposals that can be used in downstream processing. In this work, we show how M-best solutions of tree-shaped graphical models can be obtained by dynamic programming on a special graph with M layers. The proposed multi-layer concept is optimal for searching M-best solutions, and so flexible that it can also approximate M-best diverse solutions. We illustrate the usefulness with applications to object detection, panorama stitching and centerline extraction. Note: We have observed that an assumption in section 4 of our paper is not always fulfilled, see the attached corrigendum for details.

Earthquake Geotechnics in Offshore Engineering

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:57:10 +0100

This paper presents a number of geotechnical issues encountered in earthquake design of offshore structures and subsea facilities. Parallel with construction of traditional structures such as jackets and gravity-based structures, a considerable effort has recently been put to field developments in deep water. This has brought about other challenges that are largely dependent on geotechnical knowledge. This paper addresses some of the more recent approaches and solutions in geotechnical earthquake design of both shallow water and deep-water structures and facilities such as platforms with large bases, pipelines traversing slopes and seabed installations. It is demonstrated how incorporation of radiation damping and nonlinear soil-structure interaction in offshore installations could optimize the design. Considering the importance of earthquake stability of slopes in deep water development, special attention is given to highlighting several key issues in the earthquake response of submarine slopes including strain softening and three-dimensional shaking.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Developing a behavioural model for modal shift in commuting

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:56:36 +0100

Travel patterns of people across Australian cities have been dominated by private cars. As noted by transport researchers, a sustainable transportation system encourages people to make the shift towards non-motorised transport (i.e. public and active transport) and emerging types of transport (i.e. ride-hailing and shared bikes). Using an online questionnaire survey (n = 410), this research reports on the determinants of peopleâs transition to more sustainable modes of transport in Adelaide, Australia. Further analysis undertaken using a discrete choice model, found that home relocation and job changes were strongly associated with the modal shift of respondents. Younger cohorts were likely to shift away from car usage despite the significant influence in the change in participantsâ family composition (i.e. birth of a child), level of education, driving license, dwelling tenure, perceived safety and costs. The significance of this study is that it determined that car dominance can be reduced since there is a willingness of people to opt for non-motorised transport options and other new shared mobility services. The chapter concludes with a varied set of transport policies and strategies addressing different socio-economic groups to increase the share of sustainable mobility, a critical step in moving towards a âsmarterâ city. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The Routledge Companion to Air Transport Management

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:53:32 +0100

An efficient computational strategy for robust maintenance scheduling: Application to corroded pipelines

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:45:53 +0100

The ability to predict correctly the future remaining life time of components is of paramount importance to improve the safety and reliability of systems and networks via an effective maintenance policy. However, simplifications and assumptions are usually adopted to compensate lack of data, imprecision and vagueness, which cannot be justified completely and may, thus lead to biased results. To overcome these issues, an imprecise probabilities approach is proposed for reliability analysis and risk-based maintenance strategy. A novel efficient computational approach is proposed for identifying robust maintenance strategies. The optimal solution is obtained through only one reliability assessment based on Advanced Line Sampling and reusing the outcome of maintenance activities in a force Monte Carlo approach. The proposed methodology remove the huge computational cost of reliability-base optimization making the analysis of industrial size problem feasible. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by identifying the optimal maintenance policy of buried pipelines and it is shown how this approach can improve the current industrial practice.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Barriers to the Adoption of an Urban Logistics Collaboration Process: A Case Study of the Saint-Etienne Urban Consolidation Centre

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:42:12 +0100

International audience; This volume of three books presents recent advances in modelling, planning and evaluating city logistics for sustainable and liveable cities based on the application of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) and ITS (Intelligent Transport Systems). It highlights modelling the behaviour of stakeholders who are involved in city logistics as well as planning and managing policy measures of city logistics including cooperative freight transport systems in public-private partnerships. Case studies of implementing and evaluating city logistics measures in terms of economic, social and environmental benefits from major cities around the world are also given.

Multi-node Approach for Map Data Processing

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:41:01 +0100

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a popular collaborative open-source project that offers free editable map across the whole world. However, this data often needs a further on-purpose processing to become the utmost valuable information to work with. That is why the main motivation of this paper is to propose a design for big data processing along with data mining leading to the obtaining of statistics with a focus on the detail of a traffic data as a result in order to create graphs representing a road network. To ensure our High-Performance Computing (HPC) platform routing algorithms work correctly, it is absolutely essential to prepare OSM data to be useful and applicable for above-mentioned graph, and to store this persistent data in both spatial database and HDF5 format. Web of Science 897 104 91

Revealing the complexity of road transport with accimaps

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:40:29 +0100

The UK has one of the safest road systems of any country, yet road traffic accidents still represent the 12"sup"th"/sup" leading cause of death. Although casualty and fatality rates have dropped dramatically since the 1980s, there has been little change in the past five years or so, suggesting that roads safety initiatives have plateaued in their effectiveness. Following calls for a new approach to the challenge we adopt a sociotechnical systems viewpoint. Traditionally, road safety has been addressed through the three âEâs of engineering, education, and enforcement; we have added to these with an additional four âEâs, namely economics, emergency response, enablement, and ergonomics. We use the Actor Map representation, the first step in the Accimap approach to accident analysis, to model the road transport system, with the resulting diagram giving an indication of the level of complexity we must face when designing road safety interventions. The research presented in this article represents the first step in a broader project that takes a sociotechnical approach to global road safety, involving partners in five geographically dispersed, and economically, developmentally, and culturally distinct nations.

Applications for sustainable cities and smart infrastructures

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:40:14 +0100

The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge game: Short Sea Shipping (SSS) Edition is a table-top strategy board game, designed for policy-makers and stakeholders involved in MSP, short-sea shipping and the Blue Economy. It is a âserious gameâ, allowing the development of a better understanding of the issues involved in MSP through creative and imaginative role playing, taking into account the relevant professional and personal experience of the players. The authors present and discuss the use of the MSP Challenge board game to test how, and to what extent, the concept can help stakeholders understand Maritime Spatial Planning.

Real Time Monitoring of Water Quality in Supply Pipelines and Industrial Facilities

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:38:36 +0100

SEMPER: A Stateless Traffic Engineering Solution for WAN Based on MP-TCP

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:37:43 +0100

Proceeding of: IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2018) Enterprise Networking has a strong set of requirements in terms of resiliency, reliability and resources usage. With current approaches being based on monolithic and expensive infrastructures using dedicated overlay links, providers are moving to more economical hybrid solutions that encompass private dedicated links with public/regular Internet connections. However, these usually rely on complex, hardware-dependent and/or proprietary Traffic Engineering (TE) solutions, which are computationally costly, in particular for the forwarding nodes. In this paper, we propose SEMPER: a lightweight TE solution based on MP-TCP that, in contrast to other TE solutions, moves the complexity to the endpoints of the connection, and relieves the forwarding elements from complex operations or even maintaining state. As our evaluation shows, SEMPER efficiently makes use of all available paths between the endpoints while maintaining fairness, and properly adapts to variations on the available capacity. This work has been partly supported by the H2020 5GMoNArch project (grant agreement 761445), and by the Madrid Regional Government through the TIGRE5-CM program (S2013/ICE-2919).

Logistics and Transport Modeling in Urban Goods Movement

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:33:27 +0100

International audience; Because it deals with sustainably supplying cities and reducing congestion and pollution related to goods transport in urban areas, city logistics is an important field in transportation sciences. These logistics systems need to be sustainable and reliable to ensure the continued flow of goods.Logistics and Transport Modeling in Urban Goods Movement is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on the main approaches and techniques used in urban goods transport modelling while addressing planning and management issues. Highlighting topics such as urban logistics, vehicle routing, and greenhouse emissions, this book is ideally designed for civil/transport engineers, planners, transport economists, geographers, computer scientists, practitioners, professionals, researchers, and students seeking current research on urban goods modelling.

Residual Stress Simulations of Girth Welding in Subsea Pipelines

Scipedia content — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 10:27:19 +0100

Simulation of the welding of two dissimilar materials, stainless steel and mild steel, has been carried out using finite element together with experiments to validate the method and better understand the transient temperature profiles and the stress distribution in a cladded pipe. The results clearly show that the temperature distribution in the modelled pipe is a function of the thermal conductivity of each weld metal as well as the distance away from the heat source. The outcome of the study has been compared with previous findings.

Mobilitätsatlas 2019: Daten und Fakten für die Verkehrswende

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:46:33 +0100

MobilitÃ¤t ist Ausdruck von Freiheit, Selbstbestimmung und Wohlstand. Bislang. Doch in den letzten Jahrzehnten hat der Verkehr enorm zugenommen: Die MobilitÃ¤tsformen vervielfÃ¤ltigen sich; das bisherige Verkehrssystem stÃ¶Ãt an soziale und Ã¶kologische Belastungsgrenzen. FÃ¼r die Zukunft mÃ¼ssen wir MobilitÃ¤t daher anders organisieren, damit er klimafreundlicher, ressourcenschonender, weniger stressig und wieder komfortabel wird. Der MOBILITÃTSATLAS 2019 ist das Kursbuch fÃ¼r die Verkehrswende. Er prÃ¤sentiert VorschlÃ¤ge und LÃ¶sungen fÃ¼r eine neue MobilitÃ¤t und bietet darÃ¼ber hinaus BeitrÃ¤ge und aussagekrÃ¤ftige Infografiken zu lÃ¤ndlichem Verkehr, autonomem Fahren, ElektromobilitÃ¤t, KlimaschÃ¤den und Gesundheitswirkungen unseres Verkehrs.

Loading/Unloading Space Location and Evaluation: An Approach through Real Data

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:46:09 +0100

This study presents a real-data approach that aims at optimizing the location of urban loading-unloading (L/U) spaces. The originality of this paper is twofold: first, it proposes a data collection methodology in order to integrate real and up-to-date information regarding cartography, L/U parking demand and existing L/U spaces. Second, an optimization model is developed in order to determine the location of new L/U spaces by taking into account real distances, influence radius and physical constraints. Such optimization model can be used to evaluate the relevance of the existing L/U spaces and/or to determine the optimal location of new ones. For this we propose to combine the use of OpenStreetMap, Google Maps APIs, and Open Data portals. This paper provides a framework composed by 3 models, namely: data collection, demand generation and location optimization. The proposed approach is applied to the city of Paris in order to illustrate different case studies and to assess the effectiveness of the framework.

Air Transport Economic Footprint in Remote Tourist Regions

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:39:29 +0100

Urban Consolidation Centres : On Relationships between Customer Needs and Services in City Logistics

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:33:56 +0100

Urban Consolidation Centres (UCCs) are often conceived as an enabler to alleviate negative effects associated with distribution of goods in cities, such as traffic congestion and hazardous emissions. UCCs not only have the potential to reduce these effects but also provide alternative distribution solutions by introducing new transhipment points. Despite their potential, UCCs often fail to be self-supporting and are often dependent on subsides, which is not considered to be sustainable in the long run. In response, this thesis takes its point of departure in the two business models elements value propositions and target customers. A business model is often viewed as an enabler to generate revenue and UCCs have the potential to generate revenue by offering services to their customers, and the customers pay for the services. To understand how customers can benefit from UCCs and provide arguments why they should use these, it is important to understand the relationship between customersâ needs and the services UCCs can provide. The purpose of this thesis is to identify and describe the potential relationship between needs of UCC customers and UCC services. The research in the thesis is both explorative and descriptive, where a first step is to identify customer needs, UCC services, and value propositions. The descriptive part is to describe them and it is also the foundation for understanding the relationship between customer needs and UCC services. Through the analysis and discussion, multiple customer needs are identified and described for seven customer groups and the UCC operator; all of which could be considered customers of UCCs. The thesis also adds to the UCC literature with three new identified UCC services: e-commerce with used products, advertisement, and registration in computer system. The outcome of the analysis also provides illustrations of how customer needs can be matched with UCC services. For the most studied customer group, receiver of goods, a total of 29 different matches were identified, which illustrates the possibilities but also the complexity of the relationships. To understand the relationship, three different types of gaps were also identified that have implications for future research. The main contributions to research and the UCC literature in particular are enlargement of the scope of customers and the illustration of the relationships between customer needs and UCC services. The illustrations include contributions such as identifying, mapping and describing the customer needs, UCC services, and value propositions. An important first step is to understand how customer needs and UCC services can be linked, and this thesis provides examples of how this can be achieved. Viewing every stakeholder as a potential customer opens up the opportunity to fulfil their needs and the potential to generate revenue, which in turn could close the gap in the problem of non-self-supporting UCCs. Furthermore, with self-supporting UCCs, the number of freight vehicles can be reduced and this may lead to more attractive cities with less traffic congestion and lower emissions. "p"I den tryckta versionen Ã¤r det ena serienamnet felaktigt. I den elektroniska versionen Ã¤r detta Ã¤ndrat till korrekt: "LinkÃ¶ping studies in Science and Technology. Licentiate Thesis"

Green Polymer Chemistry: Pipelines Toward New Products and Processes

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:29:54 +0100

Is pricing road transport significantly different to pricing other network infrastructure?

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:26:24 +0100

Prioritizing Infrastructure Investments : A Comparative Review of Applications in Chile

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:23:01 +0100

Governments worldwide face the difficult challenge of deciding which infrastructure projects to prioritize and select for implementation, given the limits of available funding and the need to attain their developmental goals. The key objective of this report is to conduct a comparative exercise between the World Bank's Infrastructure Prioritization Framework, a multicriteria analysisâbased methodology to project prioritization, and a more complex cost-benefit analysisâbased approach. The report focuses on Chile, which has a well-institutionalized evaluation process that uses cost-benefit analysis to assess projects on their quality and ability to generate value for money. The analysis compares the results of the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework alongside Chile's current cost-benefit analysisâbased and multicriteria analysis approaches to the same subsets of projects in the road transport and water reservoir subsectors, respectively. The results show that the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework has application beyond its original proposition and can complement a traditional cost-benefit analysis by directly considering social and environmental policy goals that are otherwise difficult to quantify in a cost-benefit analysis. The analysis also finds that in Chile there is a discrepancy between the stated goals and objectives of the appraisal system and the actual implementation. In the case of transport sector projects, there is an evident deviation between cost-benefit analysisâbased selection policy and actual decisions made for project implementation. In the case of water catchment selection, there is a bias toward projects with higher financial-economic performance as compared to social-environmental performance, despite policy intentions to afford consideration to environmental and social development goals.

Document type: Book

Electric freight vehicles for urban logistics – technical performance, economics feasibility and environmental impacts

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:15:38 +0100

This paper summarises the lessons learned from using electric freight vehicles (EFVs) for urban freight transport in three dimensions. First we look at the technical and operational suitability of using EFVs, including energy efficiency, range and its seasonal variations, and charging and local grid capacity issues. Then we examine all the elements which affect the business case from a carrierâs perspective, including changes of business model by the size of the vehicle, changes in value network and the elements required to enable a transition towards a wider-scale electrification. Finally, we present the environmental impacts from running EFVs at three levels, including direct impact analysis from the project demonstration activities, impact analysis at a wider uptake level by using traffic models and impact monetisation. Data used for this analysis is collected under the European FP7 project FREVUE, where around 80 electric-powered vehicles were deployed in the cities of Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Rotterdam, and Stockholm.

Key performance indicators for assessing the impacts of automation in road transportation:Results of the Trilateral key performance indicator survey

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:11:46 +0100

This report documents the survey, which was designed to investigate views on the importanceof different key performance indicator (KPIs) for expressing the impact of automation in roadtransportation in several impact areas. It documents the rating results and additional KPIsproposed by the 77 experts in Europe, US and Japan who filled in the survey.The Trilateral Impact Assessment Subgroup of ART WG will use these results when decidingthe recommendations for the KPIs to be used in the impact assessment studies. Therecommendations and a full list of potential KPIs (KPI repository) will be added to the version2.0 of their impact assessment framework (expected in April 2018).

Pipeline Fracture due to Compression-Tension Loading Caused by Foreign Object Impact

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:10:35 +0100

In areas frequented by fishing vessels, trawl equipment or anchors may interfere with pipelines and cause damage through impact, potential hooking, and ensuing release of the pipeline. This load sequence of denting followed by global bending and springback results in a complex stress and strain history. Experiments have shown that fracture in an impacted pipe typically arises along the bottom of the dent, where the material suffers high compressive strains in the impact and hooking phase, and a rapid change to tension during the rebound phase. High compressive strains may reduce the strain to failure significantly for a succeeding tensile phase. A common trait of ductile damage models is to account for damage through nucleation, growth and coalescence of voids, which traditionally is thought to occur during tension. In this study, an uncoupled phenomenological Cockcroft-Latham-type fracture model accounting for anisotropic damage is used. The fracture model is implemented in the explicit finite element programme IMPETUS Afea Solver, and calibrated using material tests. Simulations show that the proposed fracture model is able to account for the observed behaviour. Copyright Â© 2018 by ASME

Spatial Heterogeneity, Scale, Data Character and Sustainable Transport in the Big Data Era

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 15:08:23 +0100

In light of the emergence of big data, I have advocated and argued for a paradigm shift from Tobler's law to scaling law, from Euclidean geometry to fractal geometry, from Gaussian statistics to Paretian statistics, and - more importantly - from Descartes' mechanistic thinking to Alexander's organic thinking. Fractal geometry falls under the third definition of fractal - that is, a set or pattern is fractal if the scaling of far more small things than large ones recurs multiple times (Jiang and Yin 2014) - rather than under the second definition of fractal, which requires a power law between scales and details (Mandelbrot 1982). The new fractal geometry is more towards living geometry that "follows the rules, constraints, and contingent conditions that are, inevitably, encountered in the real world" (Alexander et al. 2012, p. 395), not only for understanding complexity, but also for creating complex or living structure (Alexander 2002-2005). This editorial attempts to clarify why the paradigm shift is essential and to elaborate on several concepts, including spatial heterogeneity (scaling law), scale (or the fourth meaning of scale), data character (in contrast to data quality), and sustainable transport in the big data era.

Document type: Article

Urban Transport Projects

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:59:25 +0100

The study consisted of developing a compendium of profiles for all free-standing urban transport projects funded by the Bank in calendar years from 1999 through 2009, followed by a first-pass synthesis of patterns and trends. There were 50 such projects. In addition, profiles were done for several projects from this period which were classified as urban or transport, but with significant urban transport components. Also, profiles were done for several operations approved before 1999 or after 2009, because they formed organic sequences with some operations in the 1999-2009 batches, in the same city or the same country. In all, profiles were done for 56 operations. A list of these projects is in annex one. Full profiles are in annex two, grouped by the geographic region, and in the chronological order according to the date of loan approval. The sources consulted in writing the profiles included project appraisal documents, loan and project agreements, restructuring papers, and implementation completion reports. In addition to this introduction, the synthesis report has four chapters. In the next (second) chapter, a brief overview is provided of the batch of projects for which the profiles were done. Chapter three reviews urban transport programs by region. Chapter four presents outcome ratings for completed projects and issues related to their success or otherwise. Chapter five discusses the fit between the projects and a provisional version of the Bank's urban transport strategy.

Transport-Health Equity Outcomes from mobile phone location data – a case study

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:55:38 +0100

Resumen de la comunicaciÃ³n [EN] The work presented here demonstrates the potential of new generation data arising from innovative policies (based on persuasive technologies) in the transport sector. Improved understanding of the spatial distribution of health impacts arising from the introduction of new travel initiatives will support more targeted and efficient policy development across both the transport and health sectors. Typical health impacts include those arising from changes in levels of personal activity with alternative mode choices. With a sectoral approach to policy development, positive impacts for one sector (i.e. improved transport services) may be negated by dis-benefits in another (e.g. low levels of active travel choice and increased obesity related disease burden). The horizontal notion of equity (Thomopoulos, Grant-Muller and Tight, 2009) is applied using a range of transport-related health outcomes including cancer, heart disease and depression. The research methodology interfaces new generation âTrack and Traceâ information on individuals location and mode choices (detected as mobile phone app-based sensor data) with a new integrated transport and health model (IHITM), finally calculating an equity indicator based on distributional impacts. Grant-Muller, S.; Hodgson, F.; Harrison, G.; Malleson, N.; Redfern, T.; Snowball, R. (2018). Transport-Health Equity Outcomes from mobile phone location data â a case study. En 2nd International Conference on Advanced Reserach Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2018). Editorial Universitat PolitÃ¨cnica de ValÃ¨ncia. 256-256. https://doi.org/10.4995/CARMA2018.2018.8349 OCS 256 256

Smart mobility providing smart cities

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:52:42 +0100

International audience; In a smart city, urban and transport planning should be co-conducted harmoniously in order to create a new transit-supportive city. After defining our vision of smart mobility, we will present and analyse the links between the transport system, disruptive innovation, and the role of public policies in change management. We focus on the way to organise the co-conception of smart mobility, defined as a disruptive eco-innovation, in a local territory. The development and diffusion of innovations within the mobility ecosystem significantly disrupt usages and modify market boundaries. Implementation conditions to achieve a widespread adoption of smart mobility are discussed and the role and decision-making methods of territorial actors are considered.

Pareto Based Bat Algorithm for Multi Objectives Multiple Constraints Optimization in GMPLS Networks

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:42:46 +0100

Modern communication networks offer advance and diverse applications, which require huge usage of network resources while providing quality of services to the users. Advance communication is based on multiple switched networks that cannot be handle by traditional IP (internet protocol) networks. GMPLS (Generalized multiprotocol label switched) networks, an advance version of MPLS (multiprotocol label switched networks), are introduced for multiple switched networks. Traffic engineering in GMPLS networks ensures traffic movement on multiple paths. Optimal path(s) computation can be dependent on multiple objectives with multiple constraints. From optimization prospective, it is an NP (non-deterministic polynomial-time) hard optimization problem, to compute optimal paths based on multiple objectives having multiple constraints. The paper proposed a metaheuristic Pareto based Bat algorithm, which uses two objective functions; routing costs and load balancing costs to compute the optimal path(s) as an optimal solution for traffic engineering in MPLS/GMPLS networks. The proposed algorithm has implemented on different number of nodes in MPLS/GMPLS networks, to analysis the algorithm performance.

The impact of a new public transport system on neighbourhoods surrounding stations: The cases of Bermondsey and West Ham with the Jubilee Line extension in London

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:38:44 +0100

The impact of new public transport system on the towns and suburbs has been widely considered to be a significant aspect of urban development. However, the spatial configurations which could stimulate the transformation around the neighbourhoods of the station have not been clearly identified. It could be argued that the implementation of transport systems and the creation of new stations would enhance the mobility of the transport network and the accessibility around the stationâs vicinity. Furthermore, the dynamics of pedestrian flow, generated by the new transport system might transform the social, cultural and economic activities around the stations. Therefore, the aims of this study are to analyse how the spatial configuration and the urban formation are affected by the implementation of stations and understand how the new stations emerge in the urban form. The Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) in East London, which started to operate in 2000, plays an essential role in connecting Central London with the recently developed financial district in the east. This study focuses on two stations located along the JLE, Bermondsey and West Ham, which have different topological and demographic characteristics. To determine whether the stations integrate cohesively with the urban environment, this study applies Space Syntax methods of spatial network analysis to evaluate the spatial characteristics and compares with GIS data of the house prices and land use distribution before and after the JLE. The results demonstrate a strong correlation between pedestrian movement and the distribution of residential and commercial activities within the street network structure. The study also reveals the strength and weakness of the stations, which are embedded within urban structures and suggests urban regeneration strategies through improving the accessibility and public space design.

Air Transport versus High-Speed Rail: From Physics to Economics

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:38:03 +0100

Purpose - This bachelor thesis compares high-speed rail (HSR) transport with air transport. The investigation considers physical fundamentals, energy consumption, environmental impact, infrastructure and investment, market situations, passenger's selection criteria to choose transportation options, and overall economics. --- Methodology - The thesis combines an investigation of physical principles with a literature review. --- Findings - Steel wheels on steel rails show by far less rolling resistance to support the train's weight than drag due to lift (induced drag) to support the aircraft's weight. This leads to less energy consumption. HSR trains use electricity from an overhead line. Hence, the environmental impact of HSR also depends much on how the electricity is produced. Airplanes only need an air traffic control environment to connect airports. In contrast, HSR needs infrastructure to connect stations. The amount of necessary infrastructure depends on the geological conditions. For example, crossing mountains means high investment. Longer passages over water are infeasible for HSR. High-speed rail is superior to air transport when connecting megacities because the trains have higher transport capacity, offer higher service frequencies and mission reliability, shorter total travel time, shorter access time to stations, shorter unproductive waiting time in stations and potentially lower travel costs. HSR is a strong competitor to airline services and has replaced some short range flights. A comparison of HSR in different world regions shows differences in the market situation and in passenger's selection criteria for transportation options. --- Research limitations - The potential of high-speed rail was investigated mainly on busy routes with high service frequencies. A comprehensive network comparison between high-speed trains and airplanes was not done and could lead to somewhat different results. --- Practical implications - The report tries to contribute arguments to the discussion about alternatives to air travel. --- Social implications - With more knowledge people can make an educated choice between transport options, can vote with their feet, and can take a firm position in the public discussion. --- Originality/value - A general comparison of HSR and air transport from physical fundamentals to economics seemed to be missing.

An Innovative Heuristic for Planning-Based Urban Traffic Control

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:27:03 +0100

The global growth in urbanisation increases the demand for services including road transport infrastructure, presenting challenges in terms of mobility. In this scenario, optimising the exploitation of urban road network is a pivotal challenge, particularly in the case of unexpected situations. In order to tackle this challenge, approaches based on mixed discrete-continuous planning have been recently proposed and although their feasibility has been demonstrated, there is a lack of informative heuristics for this class of applications. Therefore, existing approaches tend to provide low-quality solutions, leading to a limited impact of generated plans on the actual urban infrastructure.

Electric vehicles fleet for frequency regulation using a multi-agent system

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:20:24 +0100

International audience; The production of PhotoVoltaic (PV) energy depends on the solar irradiance level. The PV power plant fluctuations may have a significant impact on the frequency regulation in sufficiently small power systems, such as islands. The objective of this paper is to present a method using cooperative multi-agent systems to reduce the frequency fluctuations due to the unpredicted fluctuations of the PV production using electric vehicles as electricity storage units in an isolated power system.

Designing Access Control of a Spatial Decision Support System for Collaborative Maritime Spatial Planning

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:48:37 +0100

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Transforming Karachi into a Livable and Competitive Megacity : A City Diagnostic and Transformation Strategy

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:38:20 +0100

With a population of 16 million, Karachi is the largest megacity in Pakistan. Despite being a large city that is home to many, it has seen a substantial decline in quality of life and economic competitiveness in recent decades. Basic service delivery is very poor, with very low indicators for water supply, sanitation, public transport and public spaces. Pollution levels are high, and the city is vulnerable to disasters and climate change. A highly complex political economy, institutional fragmentation, land contestation, crime and security issues and social exclusion exacerbate these issues and make city management challenging. The Karachi City Diagnostic and Transformation Strategy attempts to present detailed data on the economy, livability and key urban services of the city, by identifying and quantifying the requirements to bridge the services gap in the city. It also proposes pathways towards the transformation of Karachi into a more livable, inclusive and economically competitive city by outlining policy actions that the city can undertake. The first part of the report provides an in-depth review of Karachi and is organized into three themes focused on key aspects of city management: (i) city growth and prosperity â discussing city economy, competitiveness, business environment and poverty; (ii) city livability â discussing urban and spatial planning, urban governance and municipal service delivery (water and sanitation, public transport and solid waste); and (iii) sustainability and inclusiveness â discussing the cityâs long term resilience based on fiscal management, disaster resilience and climate change, and social inclusion. In each section, a diagnostic is provided on the issues, along with possible prioritized actions to resolve them. The second part of the report concludes by identifying four pillars for city transformation. These include: (i) building inclusive, coordinated and accountable institutions; (ii) greening Karachi for sustainability and resilience; (iii) leveraging on the city's economic, social and environmental assets; and (iv) creating a smart city through smart policies and technology.

Forecasting Recharging Demand to Integrate Electric Vehicle Fleets in Smart Grids

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:36:55 +0100

Electric vehicle fleets and smart grids are two growing technologies. These technologies provided new possibilities to reduce pollution and increase energy efficiency. In this sense, electric vehicles are used as mobile loads in the power grid. A distributed charging prioritization methodology is proposed in this paper. The solution is based on the concept of virtual power plants and the usage of evolutionary computation algorithms. Additionally, the comparison of several evolutionary algorithms, genetic algorithm, genetic algorithm with evolution control, particle swarm optimization, and hybrid solution are shown in order to evaluate the proposed architecture. The proposed solution is presented to prevent the overload of the power grid.

Concept Designs of Patient Information Security Using e-Health Sensor Shield Platform on Blockchain Infrastructure

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:35:52 +0100

Innovation in a decentralized blockchain infrastructure can be used by medicine as a prerequisite for the exchange of patient data. Developments in the medical device industry that support the technology of the internet of things and wireless sensor networks also facilitate the examination of patient medical records that no longer require visits to the practice of doctors or hospitals which in some cases takes in a considerable time. Not to mention the consideration of traffic congestion and busy routine in the work. Patients can check their healthcare concerns using only sensors such as e-Health Sensor Shield Platform which then sends recording results through the transmission line to the data lakes. However, this patientâs medical record data is very confidential and may only be accessed by certain parties only. This required the design of the concept of security in the transmission of data so that the data does not leak to parties who are not eligible. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the concept of using encryption with an asymmetric key for securing data from sensors to data lakes before forwarding to a decentralized, interconnected blockchain infrastructure.

From city streets to metropolitan scale in Paris and the île-de-France Region

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:35:24 +0100

International audience; Since the 1990s, the city of Paris and Ãle-de-France region (ie Paris urban region and regional government) have experienced massive and profound changes in transportation policy. Officials in Paris City council, region Ile de France and other local authorities have combined initiatives and programs to expand public transport infrastructure and modify use of street space, promoting strong alternatives to private vehicle use and auto-centric urban design, and increasing accessibility to major economic and financial centers. How did Paris achieve these successes in transport policymaking? How did the city and region establish a new mobility paradigm? We argue that the political objectives, policy innovations, and institutionalized governance changes that connected city and regional actors together behind a more integrated transport system, highlighting the key role that conflict and cooperation among political authorities and parties at various scales played in achieving these transformative transportation outcomes.

Delivery Constraints and Access Policies in City Centers

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:31:14 +0100

International audience; This chapter contributes to the discussion on city access policies via the identification of a set of common beliefs and the relations between vehicle size (related to one of the most popular types of access policy actions) and logistics performance of urban deliveries. First, the author makes an overview of such policies in various European countries, then establishes a non-exhaustive set of common beliefs regarding urban logistics that influence policy making among others. Then, to illustrate the common belief regarding vehicle sizes, the chapter proposes an example of scenario assessment for stating on the usefulness and performance of different vehicles. Results show that there is not a more suitable vehicle type than another, and the use of the different vehicles will depend on the carriers' strategies and choices.

Designing Networks in Cooperation with ACO

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:24:01 +0100

In this paper we present a cooperative game for a network design. The game model adopts for the cooperating players the profit maximizing requirement. Since the players may use different paths, there is the possibility to cooperate and design the optimal network satisfying the requests of all the players and minimizing the cost. The solution of the game is determined by the core concept, well known in cooperative game literature. By means of several examples, both analytical and numerical solutions are proposed. Concerning the computational procedure, in this work an algorithmic approach based on ant colony model is employed. Finally, an application to the airline network design is discussed, providing a numerical example for intercontinental air traffic routes.

Potential Climate Change Mitigation Opportunities in the Energy Sector in Vietnam

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:19:31 +0100

Transit-Oriented Development

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:17:48 +0100

Public transport is touted worldwide not only for its ability to relieve traffic congestion, reduce energy consumption, and cleanse the air but also for its ability to support sustainable patterns of urban development.1 One would be hard-pressed to find a policy document today on climate change, smart growth, or social inclusion that did not enthusiastically support expanding the role of public transit.

Mass Technology Development by means of Ship Handling Simulation

Scipedia content — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 13:11:11 +0100

This paper will stress the importance of Ship Handling Simulation (SHS)-based Maritime Autonomous Surface Ship (MASS) prototype development and aligns it with the IMO Guidelines on Software Quality Assurance and Humancentered Design for e-Navigation. This is demonstrated by means of an implemented semi-autonomous ship concept. This concept envisions a periodically unmanned bridge with an advanced autonomous navigation system taking over in the absence of the officer of the watch. Thus, it is equipped with autonomous monitoring, collision avoidance as well as harsh weather applications embedded within an ECDIS environment, that require sufficient integration and testing. Based on a requirement analyses, the need for SHS-based testing is derived and a technical framework (SMARTframe) enabling connection of MASS prototypes with SHS on the basis of a message-oriented middleware is introduced. Finally, an indication is given how this set-up ensures proper MASS testing and developing for technical as well as Human-centered Design development.

Solución numérica de la ecuación vectorial de Saint-Venant utilizando métodos híbridos

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:12:26 +0100

Las inundaciones y desbordamientos de canales son fenómenos que han venido afectando a la sociedad por muchos años; estos se han incrementado debido a lluvias atípicas provocadas por el cambio climático. Para prevenir las afectaciones es conveniente mejorar nuestra comprensión del fenómeno, el cual está descrito por ecuaciones como las de Saint-Venant. En este trabajo se muestra una alternativa a aproximar numéricamente la solución de tales ecuaciones en dominios como canales.

Develación del dominio de un fluido de Stokes estacionario

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:12:19 +0100

El problema de la develación o reconstrucción de un dominio tiene diversas aplicaciones, que van desde el diseño de piezas mecánicas en ingeniería hasta la detección de obstrucciones parciales en el flujo sanguíneo o tumores en medicina. En este trabajo se prueba que la solución de la ecuación de Stokes estacionaria, con condiciones de frontera de Dirichlet, es continua con respecto a su dominio de definición y no sólo con respecto a fuerzas externas y condiciones de frontera. También se presenta un estudio numérico sobre el problema inverso de flujo sanguíneo: develación de una obstrucción parcial en una cavidad tubular en 2D por donde fluye un fluido estacionario Newtoniano modelado por la ecuación de Stokes.

Resolución de la Ecuación Unidimensional Homogénea de Aguas Someras por el Esquema de Lax-Wendroff

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:12:11 +0100

Se discute la discretización de las ecuaciones de Saint-Venant en una dimención espacial, usando un esquema de Lax-Wendroff explícito para discretizar con respecto al tiempo t y un esquema de diferencia central de segundo orden para discretizar con respecto a la variable espacial x. Asimismo, se discute la implementación del esquema resultante en MATLAB para simular el desplazamiento de una joroba de agua.

Explicit Solution of a Linearly Constrained Infinite Quadratic Problem

Scipedia content — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 15:12:04 +0100

A norm minimization problem posed in K-dimensional finite arrays without non-negativity constraints was efficiently solved by Romero Romero. Going beyond we provide here an explicit, exact solution in case the arrays are replaced by L2-Hilbert spaces. Furthermore, we propose a polynomial procedure yielding an approximate optimal solution when non-negativity constraints must be taken into account for K = 2.

Assessing jetty effectiveness via statistical analysis of ais data

Scipedia content — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 15:35:22 +0100

Document type: Report

Morphology and interactivity of the contents in the applications of Latin American television

Scipedia content — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 13:36:56 +0100

[Resumen] IntroducciÃ³n. Conocer la operativa del sistema audiovisual en la comunicaciÃ³n mÃ³vil, es el objetivo principal de esta investigaciÃ³n. Para ello se analizan los contenidos audiovisuales y la eficacia de las aplicaciones para smartphone iOS y Android de las principales cadenas de televisiÃ³n pÃºblicas y privadas de los cincos primeros paÃses latinoamericanos segÃºn datos del PIB Nominal: Argentina, Brasil, Chile, Colombia y MÃ©xico. MetodologÃa. Se desarrolla un estudio cuantitativo, basado en tÃ©cnicas de anÃ¡lisis de contenido. Resultados y conclusiones. En general, las apps analizadas se pueden descargar desde EspaÃ±a, pero el acceso a sus contenidos audiovisuales es muy limitado, ya que es habitual que no se puedan visualizar desde fuera del paÃs de origen. La mayorÃa de las televisiones estudiadas vuelcan sus programas en la aplicaciÃ³n tal y como fueron emitidos en el canal tradicional. Su principal finalidad es ofrecer contenidos y en pocos casos interactividad. [Abstract] Introduction. The main objective of this research is to learn about the operation of the audiovisual system in mobile communication. In order to do so, there is an analysis of the audiovisual contents and effectiveness of the smartphone apps iOS and Android's of the main public and private television networks of the five first Latin American countries based on the Nominal GDP: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico. Methods. To develop a quantitative study, based on content analysis techniques. Results and conclusions. In general, analysed apps can be downloaded from Spain but access to their audiovisual content is very limited, since in most cases it cannot be accessed from outside the country of origin. Most of television networks studied, dump their programmes into the application as they were broadcasted in the traditional channel. Its main purpose is to offer contents and, in a few cases, interactivity.

Document type: Report

Brazos santiago inlet texas shoaling study

Scipedia content — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 11:18:20 +0100

Document type: Report

Urban mobility: preparing for the future, learning from the past - CREATE project summary and recommendations

Scipedia content — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:14:20 +0200

Transport decisions, and their resulting impacts on land use patterns, fundamentally shape and define a city, both physically and through the daily living patterns of its citizens and visitors. As policy priorities change, so do the types of measures that are introduced, with resulting shifts in travel behaviour and lifestyles. What at one point in a city's history is often seen as the 'inevitable' need to adapt the urban fabric to accommodate the growing use of the motor car, may later be replaced by a focus on people movement and sustainable mobility, and a growing interest in urban quality and vitality - a city of places for people. CREATE (Congestion Reduction in Europe: Advancing Transport Efficiency) charts these changes in policy priorities and travel behaviour through the experiences of five Western European capital cities over the last 50 years, noting the policy tensions and competing city visions, the triggers leading to change and the evolving governance arrangements that have facilitated, or sometimes retarded, such developments. As policy priorities change, so do measures of success; in a car-focused city congestion is the dominant concern, but this becomes less important as more people travel by rail or on foot or by cycle, and when cities put a greater value on high quality places. Alongside this there have been technical changes, in the types of methods used to model behaviour and appraise schemes, and in the ways in which these tools are used. This document provides an introduction to the CREATE project, focusing on findings and lessons of value to practitioners, and those developing or updating their Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. It is underpinned by extensive qualitative and quantitative research, which is fully documented in several deliverables, and summarised in a series of Technical Notes. A more comprehensive set of Guidelines is also available. Document type: Report

Mobility and Congestion in Urban India

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:37:21 +0200

This paper uses a popular web mapping and transportation service to generate information for more than 22 million counterfactual trip instances in 154 large Indian cities. It then develops a methodology to estimate robust indices of mobility for these cities. The estimation allows for an exact decomposition of overall mobility into uncongested mobility and the congestion delays caused by traffic. The paper first documents wide variation in mobility across Indian cities. It then shows that this variation is driven primarily by uncongested mobility. Finally, the paper investigates correlates of mobility and congestion. Denser and more populated cities are slower, in part because of congestion, especially close to their centers. Urban economic development is generally correlated with better uncongested mobility, worse congestion, and overall with better mobility.

Document type: Book

Definition of new human-centred low-cost countermeasures. Deliverable D2.3 of the SAFER-LC project

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:36:50 +0200

This deliverable describes the methods applied and the results achieved during the first phase of Task 2.3 within the SAFER-LC project: the design of new human-centred low-cost measures to improve safety at level crossings (LCs). The European project SAFER-LC Safer level crossing by integrating and optimizing road-rail infrastructure management and design aims to improve safety in road and rail transport by minimising the risk of LC accidents, focusing on both technical solutions and human processes. Within the project, the objective of Work Package 2 (WP2) is to enhance the safety performance of level crossing infrastructures from a human factors perspective, making them more self-explaining and forgiving. Task 2.3 specifically aims to design concepts of human-centred low-cost countermeasures to enhance the safety of current LC infrastructures and, in a later step, to evaluate these countermeasure designs from a human factors perspective. A two-stage process, consisting of a collection phase and a selection phase, was adopted to define the countermeasure concepts presented in this report. In the first phase, a large pool of design ideas was collected from three different sources: (1) a comprehensive review of the research literature, (2) an analysis and selection of theoretical models relevant to explaining and predicting road user behaviour at level crossings, and (3) a design workshop with road and rail experts. In the second phase, three steps were undertaken in order to systemize and prioritize the measures collected: (1) an elimination of measures based on redundancy, feasibility, and expert ratings of their effectiveness and cost, (2) a classification of the remaining measures with respect to their applicability to different LCs and road user types, and their effect mechanism, and (3) a ranking of the measures based on their prospects for accident risk reduction and the need for further research. The design process was based on operational descriptions of different types of road user behaviours observed at LCs that challenge safety and hence need to be defined as the target of safety measures. The presence or absence of active controls and barriers at LCs was identified as a particularly significant factor with regard to what types of behaviour need to be supported or prevented. Therefore, the design thinking process and organization of measures drew upon the basic distinction between passive and active LCs. Measures for passive LCs were mainly to address the problems of road users insufficiently scanning the tracks for trains, insufficiently adapting their approach speed to the need of scanning and the potential need to stop, and road users getting stuck on the rails. Measures for active LCs were mainly to prevent road users from circumventing closed barriers (climbing over / below; swerving around half-barriers), passing the LC in spite of active light signals (e.g. flashing red light), passing the LC after pre-signalling has begun or while barriers are closing, and, again, getting stuck on the rails. Apart from the differences, a range of common possibilities to support safe road user behaviour at both active and passive LCs was identified (e.g. by improving LC conspicuity, using common means of conveying behavioural recommendations adapted to the respective LC type, and helping road users not to enter the tracks when they cannot be sure to leave in good time). In all cases, design considerations included vulnerable (VRU) as well as motorized road users (MRU). The process resulted in a list of 89 design solutions that can be applied in LC design. The complete list is given in Annex A of this report. The ten measures achieving the best ranks in each of the aforementioned use cases were: Passive LCs: Active inverted speed bumps, laser illumination of the crossing, image process warning, blinking peripheral lights drawing driver attention, light markings in the road to highlight the waiting line, speed bumps on approach to the LC, on-road flashing markers, road swivelling, LC attention device, and coloured marking of the danger zone. LCs with barriers: Adapting the timing of LC closure to the actual speed of the passing train, camera based enforcement (prosecution of violations), additional display "Two Trains", second chance zone, sound warning indicating an approaching train, lane separation in front of half barriers, increasing the length of the barrier, audible signal while in the danger zone, information countdown to closing the barrier and complete open / close cycle. All types of LCs: Proximity message via connected device (in- vehicle display, satnav, mobile device), improving train visibility using lights, audible warnings about LC, extended "no stop" zone, message on smartphone / -watch to warn on approaching train (VRU), coloured pavement markings to mark the danger zone (MRU), satnav intelligence, countdown to train arrival, LED enhanced traffic signs and warning sign to avoid blocking back. The next steps within the SAFER-LC project will be to conduct empirical tests on selected measures to evaluate their effects on road user behaviour and LC safety, and to integrate the projects practical results and recommendations in a toolbox to be accessed through a user-friendly interface to support rail and road stakeholders in improving safety at LCs.

Document type: Book

Framing policy on low emissions vehicles in terms of economic gains: Might the most straightforward gain be delivered by supply chain activity to support refuelling?

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:32:07 +0200

The work reported here is a result of the EPSRC Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Research Hub research programme (Grant ref. EP/J016454/1). A core theme of the UK Government's new Industrial Strategy is exploiting opportunities for domestic supply chain development. This extends to a special Automotive Sector Deal that focuses on the shift to low emissions vehicles (LEVs). Here attention is on electric vehicle and battery production and innovation. In this paper, we argue that a more straightforward gain in terms of framing policy around potential economic benefits may be made through supply chain activity to support refuelling of battery/hydrogen vehicles. We set this in the context of LEV refuelling supply chains potentially replicating the strength of domestic upstream linkages observed in the UK electricity and/or gas industries. We use input-output multiplier analysis to deconstruct and assess the structure of these supply chains relative to that of more import-intensive petrol and diesel supply. A crucial multiplier result is that for every £1million of spending on electricity (or gas), 8 full-time equivalent jobs are supported throughout the UK. This compares to less than 3 in the case of petrol/diesel supply. Moreover, the importance of service industries becomes apparent, with 67% of indirect and induced supply chain employment to support electricity generation being located in services industries. The comparable figure for GDP is 42%. Publisher PDF Peer reviewed

Document type: Book

Multimodal Bayesian Network for Artificial Perception

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:31:52 +0200

In order to make machines perceive their external environment coherently, multiple sources of sensory information derived from several different modalities can be used (e.g. cameras, LIDAR, stereo, RGB-D, and radars). All these different sources of information can be efficiently merged to form a robust perception of the environment. Some of the mechanisms that underlie this merging of the sensor information are highlighted in this chapter, showing that depending on the type of information, different combination and integration strategies can be used and that prior knowledge are often required for interpreting the sensory signals efficiently. The notion that perception involves Bayesian inference is an increasingly popular position taken by a considerable number of researchers. Bayesian models have provided insights into many perceptual phenomena, showing that they are a valid approach to deal with real-world uncertainties and for robust classification, including classification in time-dependent problems. This chapter addresses the use of Bayesian networks applied to sensory perception in the following areas: mobile robotics, autonomous driving systems, advanced driver assistance systems, sensor fusion for object detection, and EEG-based mental states classification.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Prioritizing infrastructure investments

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:28:54 +0200

Governments worldwide face the difficult challenge of deciding which infrastructure projects to prioritize and select for implementation, given the limits of available funding and the need to attain their developmental goals. The key objective of this report is to conduct a comparative exercise between the World Bank's Infrastructure Prioritization Framework, a multicriteria analysisbased methodology to project prioritization, and a more complex cost-benefit analysisbased approach. The report focuses on Chile, which has a well-institutionalized evaluation process that uses cost-benefit analysis to assess projects on their quality and ability to generate value for money. The analysis compares the results of the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework alongside Chile's current cost-benefit analysisbased and multicriteria analysis approaches to the same subsets of projects in the road transport and water reservoir subsectors, respectively. The results show that the Infrastructure Prioritization Framework has application beyond its original proposition and can complement a traditional cost-benefit analysis by directly considering social and environmental policy goals that are otherwise difficult to quantify in a cost-benefit analysis. The analysis also finds that in Chile there is a discrepancy between the stated goals and objectives of the appraisal system and the actual implementation. In the case of transport sector projects, there is an evident deviation between cost-benefit analysisbased selection policy and actual decisions made for project implementation. In the case of water catchment selection, there is a bias toward projects with higher financial-economic performance as compared to social-environmental performance, despite policy intentions to afford consideration to environmental and social development goals.

Document type: Book

Managing the Unexpected

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:28:01 +0200

How to react to an unexpected and challenging situation that has never been thought of before it happened? A situation for that no checklist exists and no training could be performed? The EU-funded project Man4Gen, Manual Operations of 4th Generation Airliners, which has been successfully completed in 2016, employed human-in-the-loop simulation as an e?ective tool used to analyze the crew response in unexpected and ambiguous situations. Based on an exploratory simulator study on the crews' behavior during these situations the so-called Risk Information System was developed to support crews in their decision-making and problem solving. The paper gives an overview of the conduction and results of the exploratory simulator study leading to the development of the Risk Information System. The system's new philosophy of displaying failures is explained and the results of its proof-of-concept evaluation are shown.

Document type: Book

Development of a series of 2D backfill ploughing physical models for pipelines and cables

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:27:16 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Maritime Networks, Port Efficiency, and Hinterland Connectivity in the Mediterranean

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:25:42 +0200

International audience; For millennia, the Mediterranean has been one of the most active trading areas, supported by a transport network connecting riparian cities and beyond to their hinterland. The Mediterranean has complex trade patterns and routes--but with key differences from the past. It is no longer an isolated world economy: it is both a trading area and a transit area linking Europe and North Africa with the rest of the world through the hub-and-spoke structure of maritime networks. Understanding how trade connectivity works in the Mediterranean, and elsewhere, is important to policy makers, especially those in developing countries in the Mediterranean, concerned with the economic benefits of large investment in infrastructure. Better connectivity is expected to increase trade with distant markets and stimulate activities in the hinterland. This book is a practical exploration of the three interdependent dimensions of trade connectivity: maritime networks, port efficiency, and hinterland connectivity. Because of the complexity and richness of maritime and trade patterns in the Mediterranean, the research book combines both a regional focus and globally scalable lessons. This book is intended for a wide readership of policy makers in maritime affairs, trade, or industry; professionals from the world of finance or development institutions; and academics. It combines empirical analysis of microeconomic shipping and port data with three case studies of choice of port (focusing on Spain, Egypt, and Morocco) and five case studies on hinterland development (Barcelona; Malta; Marseilles; Port Said East, Egypt; and Tanger Med, Morocco).

Document type: Book

Editorial Preface

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:18:00 +0200

JODE purposes to deliver international readers with high quality peer-reviewed academic articles on a wide variety of issues related to open and distance learning, in areas such as technology-assisted learning, computer based training, computer-aided instruction or computer assisted instruction, internet-based training, web-based training, online training, virtual training, virtual learning environments, m-learning, digital education, education on social networking, massive online open courses, game-based learning, active learning, content design, e-assessment, mobile applications, e-video, the quality of open and distance education and accreditation etc.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Shape Reconstruction Using Volume Sweeping and Learned Photoconsistency

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:17:10 +0200

International audience; The rise of virtual and augmented reality fuels an increased need for contents suitable to these new technologies including 3D contents obtained from real scenes. We consider in this paper the problem of 3D shape reconstruction from multi-view RGB images. We investigate the ability of learning-based strategies to effectively benefit the reconstruction of arbitrary shapes with improved precision and robustness. We especially target real life performance capture, containing complex surface details that are difficult to recover with existing approaches. A key step in the multi-view reconstruction pipeline lies in the search for matching features between viewpoints in order to infer depth information. We propose to cast the matching on a 3D receptive field along viewing lines and to learn a multi-view photoconsistency measure for that purpose. The intuition is that deep networks have the ability to learn local photometric configurations in a broad way, even with respect to different orientations along various viewing lines of the same surface point. Our results demonstrate this ability, showing that a CNN, trained on a standard static dataset, can help recover surface details on dynamic scenes that are not perceived by traditional 2D feature based methods. Our evaluation also shows that our solution compares on par to state of the art reconstruction pipelines on standard evaluation datasets, while yielding significantly better results and generalization with realistic performance capture data.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Improving resilience management for critical infrastructures strategies and practices across air traffic management and healthcare

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:12:42 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Erratum to a novel real time emotion detection system for advanced driver assistance systems

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:11:13 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Firm location transport connectivity and agglomeration economies evidence from liberia

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:06:35 +0200

Transport connectivity is among the most important factors in increasing firm productivity and accelerating economic development. The literature generally supports the idea of agglomeration economies, although there is little evidence of their effectiveness in Africa. There are often empirical challenges, such as spatial externalities and endogeneity of infrastructure development. Using firm registry data in Liberia, this study used the instrumental variable spatial autoregressive model to examine the effects of transport connectivity on firms' decisions on where to locate. The study found significant spatial autocorrelation and possible endogeneity related to transport infrastructure, and that firms are more likely to be located where market accessibility is better. The data indicated strong agglomeration economies, indicating that the primary city, Monrovia, is likely to continue to grow and attract more people and firms, and that secondary cities can also grow with greater transport connectivity between populated areas, such as district centers.

Document type: Book

Erratum to model test of seepage erosion around defective buried pipelines

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

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Slavery and the revival of anti slavery activism

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:58:33 +0200

This chapter sets out the volumes critical approach to the dominant discourse on modern slavery and its impulse to question the assumptions and the politics behind that discourse. It explores the limits of the modern slavery rhetoric for understanding the complicated logics of agency, freedom and belonging, and of past, present and future, for those who are constituted as slaves.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Methodologies to Understand the Road User Needs When Interacting with Automated Vehicles

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:57:48 +0200

Interactions among road users play an important role for road safety and fluent traffic. In order to design appropriate interaction strategies for automated vehicles, observational studies were conducted in Athens (Greece), Munich (Germany), Leeds (UK) and in Rockville, MD (USA). Naturalistic behaviour was studied, as it may expose interesting scenarios not encountered in controlled conditions. Video and LiDAR recordings were used to extract kinematic information of all road users involved in an interaction and to develop appropriate kinematic models that can be used to predict others behaviour or plan the behaviour of an automated vehicle. Manual on-site observations of interactions provided additional behavioural information that may not have been visible via the overhead camera or LiDAR recordings. Verbal protocols were also applied to get a more direct recording of the human thought process. Real-time verbal reports deliver a richness of information that is inaccessible by purely quantitative data but they may pose excessive cognitive workload and remain incomplete. A retrospective commentary was applied in complex traffic environment, which however carries an increased risk of omission, rationalization and reconstruction. This is why it was applied while the participants were watching videos from their eye gaze recording. The commentaries revealed signals and cues used in interactions and in drivers decision-making, that cannot be captured by objective methods. Multiple methods need to be combined, objective and qualitative ones, depending on the specific objectives of each future study.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Distribution and validation of meteorological data for the air traffic management systems

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:55:54 +0200

The main aim of this article is to introduce you our research project which is focused on processing, validation and distribution of meteorological data for the air traffic management systems. We would like to suggest to reader the direction of our research project and present a new perspective on meteorological data processing and distribution for the industries with a high degree of dependency on weather. Usually research projects are focused on data collection in one central datacenter to do the data analysis and simulations but when we think globally, we think is better to have independent localities who talk to each other. And that is what we would like to research, and what we would like to present to reader. We are focusing especially on the air traffic industry where the need for current meteorological data is must. As a result, we would like to develop software solution which will be able to use decentralized and solid architecture for data exchange and analysis without high dependency on central datacenters.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Towards Multi-class Object Detection in Unconstrained Remote Sensing Imagery

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:55:17 +0200

Automatic multi-class object detection in remote sensing images in unconstrained scenarios is of high interest for several applications including traffic monitoring and disaster management. The huge variation in object scale, orientation, category, and complex backgrounds, as well as the different camera sensors pose great challenges for current algorithms. In this work, we propose a new method consisting of a novel joint image cascade and feature pyramid network with multi-size convolution kernels to extract multi-scale strong and weak semantic features. These features are fed into rotation-based region proposal and region of interest networks to produce object detections. Finally, rotational non-maximum suppression is applied to remove redundant detections. During training, we minimize joint horizontal and oriented bounding box loss functions, as well as a novel loss that enforces oriented boxes to be rectangular. Our method achieves 68.16% mAP on horizontal and 72.45% mAP on oriented bounding box detection tasks on the challenging DOTA dataset, outperforming all published methods by a large margin (+6% and +12% absolute improvement, respectively). Furthermore, it generalizes to two other datasets, NWPU VHR-10 and UCAS-AOD, and achieves competitive results with the baselines even when trained on DOTA. Our method can be deployed in multi-class object detection applications, regardless of the image and object scales and orientations, making it a great choice for unconstrained aerial and satellite imagery.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Residual stress simulations of girth welding in subsea pipelines

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:52:55 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Defining an Adaptable Communications System for All Railways

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:50:31 +0200

Within Innovation Program 2 (IP2) of the European Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking, a Technology Demonstrator (TD) “adaptable communications for all railways” activity was created to bring together key stakeholders, to investigate the future communication needs, define and specify key functions and finally develop prototypes to prove the feasibility and capabilities of an adaptable communication subsystem for railways."br" A key aspect of the future adaptable communication system will be the support of multiple access technologies, including but not limited to LTE, 5G, Wi-Fi or SatCom, combined with bearer independence to address availability, resiliency, performance, capacity, security, safety and maintainability requirements of existing and new railway applications."br" The first project within IP2 is named X2Rail-1 and it has already started to"br" • collect, assess and qualify user and system requirements from users and stakeholders, including railway operators, infrastructure managers, regulatory groups and related associations;"br" • undertake business model analysis with the aim to explore new operating and deployment models ranging from dedicated and hybrid networks to “network-as-a-service” approaches;"br" • specify the architecture, subsystems and functions needed to enable an adaptable communication system and"br" • assess key criteria and create guidelines for the selection of appropriate communication technologies or radio network candidates."br" The paper will outline the key findings and will provide an outlook of the prototype developments planned in upcoming X2Rail projects. It will also explain the expected improvements and benefits of the future adaptable communication systems for the different railway domains to support the goals of the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Flight Gate Assignment with a Quantum Annealer

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:49:49 +0200

Optimal flight gate assignment is a highly relevant optimization problem from airport management. Among others, an important goal is the minimization of the total transit time of the passengers. The corresponding objective function is quadratic in the binary decision variables encoding the flight-to-gate assignment. Hence, it is a quadratic assignment problem being hard to solve in general. In this work we investigate the solvability of this problem with a D-Wave quantum annealer. These machines are optimizers for quadratic unconstrained optimization problems (QUBO). Therefore the flight gate assignment problem seems to be well suited for these machines. We use real world data from a mid-sized German airport as well as simulation based data to extract typical instances small enough to be amenable to the D-Wave machine. In order to mitigate precision problems, we employ bin packing on the passenger numbers to reduce the precision requirements of the extracted instances. We find that, for the instances we investigated, the bin packing has little effect on the solution quality. Hence, we were able to solve small problem instances extracted from real data with the D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Detecting change in the urban road environment along a route based on traffic sign and crossroad data

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:46:36 +0200

Occurrences of traffic signs that belong to certain sign categories and occurrences of crossroads of various topologies are utilized in detecting change in the urban road environment that moves past an ego-car. Three urban environment types, namely downtown, residential and industrial/commercial areas, are considered in the study and changes between these are to be detected. In the preparatory phase, the ego-car is used for traffic sign and crossroads data collection. In the application phase, the ego-car hosts an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that captures and analyzes images of the road environment and computes the required input data to the proposed road environment detection (RoED) subsystem. A statistical inference method relying on the minimum description length (MDL) principle was applied to the change detection problem at hand. The above occurrences along a route are seen as a realization of an inhomogeneous marked Poisson process. Page-Hinkley change detectors tuned to empirical data were set to work to detect change in the urban road environment. The process and the quality of the change detection are demonstrated via examples from three urban settlements in Hungary.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Evolving airline and airport business models

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:43:22 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Why are so many african companies uncompetitive on the global stage insights from the global airline industry

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:40:58 +0200

This paper examines the question of why so many African firms are uncompetitive on the global stage. An integrated framework of firm-level and external factors was developed. This paper focuses primarily on the global airline industry and offers an array of external factors including slow implementation of the Yamoussoukro Declaration and protection of state-owned airlines, which have historically distorted the nature of competition and hampered the exposure of many airlines to genuine or fair competition. When shielded from competition, such firms ability to transition to the global stage and outwit rivals is hampered. Furthermore, the study indicates that internal factors such as limited economies of scale and poor quality of services have affected some of the firms ability to compete. With the notable of exception of airlines such as Ethiopian Airlines, South African Airways and Kenya Airways, the preponderance of airlines have struggled to compete. These factors help to account for the fact that African airlines equate to only 20% of all air traffic on inter-African routes. The implications of the findings are examined.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Autonomic Adaptation of Multimedia Content Adhering to Application Mobility

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:39:39 +0200

International audience; Today, many users of multimedia applications are surrounded by a changing set of multimedia-capable devices. However, users can move their running multimedia applications only to a pre-defined set of devices. Application mobility is the paradigm where users can move their running applications (or parts of) to heterogeneous devices in a seamless manner. In order to continue multimedia processing under the implied context changes in application mobility, applications need to adapt the presentation of multimedia content and their internal configuration. We propose the system DAMPAT that implements an adaptation control loop to adapt multimedia pipelines. Exponential combinatorial growth of possible pipeline configurations is controlled by architectural constraints specified as high-level goals by application developers. Our evaluation shows that the pipeline only needs to be interrupted a few tens of milliseconds to perform the reconfiguration. Thus, production or consumption of multimedia content can continue across heterogeneous devices and user context changes in a seamless manner.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Shared Prosperity: Concepts, Data, and Some Policy Examples

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:38:16 +0200

Shared prosperity is a common phrase in current development policy discourse. Its most widely used operational definitionthe growth rate in the average income of the poorest 40% of a countrys populationis a truncated measure of change in social welfare. A related concept, the shared prosperity premiumthe difference between the growth rate of the mean for the bottom 40% and the growth rate in the overall meanis similarly analogous to a measure of change in inequality. This article reviews the relationship between these concepts and the more established ideas of social welfare, poverty, inequality, and mobility."/p" "p"Household survey data can be used to shed light on recent progress in terms of this indicator globally. During 20082013, mean incomes for the poorest 40% rose in 60 of the 83 countries for which we have data. In 49 of them, accounting for 65% of the sampled population, it rose "italic"faster"/italic" than overall average incomes, thus narrowing the income gap."/p" "p"In the policy space, there are examples both of pre-distribution policies (which promote human capital investment among the poor) and re-distribution policies (such as targeted safety nets), which when well-designed have a sound empirical track record of both raising productivity and improving well-being among the poor.

Document type: Book

Piloting the use of network analysis and decision making under uncertainty in transport operations preparation and appraisal of a rural roads project in mozambique under changing flood risk and other deep uncertainties

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

This paper presents a methodology to identify key priority areas for transport investments. The methodology uses a geospatial data-driven approach and then proposes an innovative economic analysis for project appraisal. The two main steps involve (i) prioritization of road interventions based on a set of economic, social, and risk reduction criteria; and (ii) assessment of monetized and nonmonetized costs and benefits of road interventions under many scenarios covering the uncertainty on future risks and other factors. This methodology is used at different stages of project preparation for a rural roads lending operation to the Government of Mozambique. In the two regions of Mozambique considered, the analysis prioritizes regions along the coast when combining agriculture, fisheries, poverty, network criticality, and hazard risk criteria. With a limited budget of US$15 million per district, the results show that investing in repairing and rehabilitating culverts and bridges is the intervention that performs better under most of the scenarios.

Document type: Book

Should i stay or should i go do cash transfers affect migration

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:36:35 +0200

The paper reviews the evidence on a "hot" and yet underexplored question -- that is, whether and how social assistance programs (especially cash transfers) affect domestic and international migration. Out an initial sample of 269 papers, 10 relevant empirical studies examine the question. The programs are classified into three clusters: (i) social assistance that implicitly deters migration centering on place-based programs, (ii) social assistance that implicitly facilitates migration by relaxing liquidity constraints and reducing transaction costs, and (iii) social assistance that is explicitly conditioned on spatial mobility. The paper finds that impacts on migration generally align with the implicit or explicit goals of interventions. Under cluster (i), the likelihood of moving declined between 0.22 and 11 percentage points; among schemes in clusters (ii) and (iii), the probability to move soared between 0.32-25 and 20-55 percentage points, respectively. The analysis also finds spillover effects within households and communities. While social assistance seems not to determine migration decisions per se, it nonetheless enters the broader calculous of mobility decision making. As such, social protection can be an important part of public policy packages to manage mobility. More research is needed to improve understanding of the role of social protection in structural transformation -- a process underpinned by domestic mobility and the performance of which may ultimately affect international migration.

Document type: Book

Orient/East-Med Corridor: Challenges and Potentials

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:34:41 +0200

As defined by the European Commission, the Orient/East-Med Corridor is one of the most significant European transport axes. However, it runs through states with low economic performance and poor infrastructural networks; it coincides with the Western Balkan and eastern Mediterranean migration routes; finally, administrative bottlenecks along the corridor are common practice. Despite such a status, it is one of the key areas for international investments in transport hubs and lines. Therefore, in order to find proper solutions for complex problems along the corridor, an overview of the main conditions that influence the corridor development as well as local requirements is given as follows. First, in order to clarify the strategic position of Europe against transcontinental relations, the main trade, economic and demographic statistical indicators are presented. Second, a brief overview of transport and technical conditions relevant for the countries along the corridor are indicated. Finally, a close interaction between transport and spatial development in the cities along the corridor is briefly presented. Such a multi-scalar perspective gives a hint of the dynamics of transnational cooperation, as well as the cooperation process among many stakeholders from various domains, mainly transport and spatial planning. Gemäß Definition der Europäischen Kommission ist der Orient/East-Med Corridor eine bedeutende Transportachse Europas. Zugleich verläuft er jedoch auch durch Staaten mit vergleichsweise geringer Wirtschaftskraft und unzureichenden Transportinfrastrukturen, außerdem überschneidet er sich mit der Migrationsroute des Westbalkans und des östlichen Mittelmeerraums. Auch Mängel in der administrativen Zusammenarbeit sind durchaus üblich entlang des Korridors. Dessen ungeachtet nimmt diese Achse eine Schlüsselstellung für internationale Investitionen in Verkehrsknoten und -achsen ein. Im Folgenden wird ein Überblick über die wichtigsten Bedingungen, die die Korridorentwicklung beeinflussen, sowie über die lokalen Anforderungen gegeben, um geeignete Strategien für die komplexen Herausforderungen entlang des Korridors aufzuzeigen. Zunächst werden die wichtigsten handels- und wirtschaftsstatistischen sowie demographischen Indikatoren dargestellt, um die strategische Position Europas gegenüber den transkontinentalen Beziehungen zu verdeutlichen. Im Weiteren wird ein kurzer Überblick über die relevanten Verkehrsinfrastrukturen und ihre Zustände in den betreffenden Ländern gegeben. Abschließend wird der enge Zusammenhang zwischen Verkehrs- und Raumentwicklung in den Städten entlang des Korridors erläutert. Diese vielschichtige Perspektive verdeutlicht die Dynamiken der transnationalen Zusammenarbeit sowie die Kooperationsprozesse zwischen vielen Akteuren aus unterschiedlichen Bereichen, hier insbesondere aus den Bereichen Verkehr und Raumplanung.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Smart mobility: a mobile approach

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:31:30 +0200

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the key ingredients for the realization of Smart Cities. IoT devices are essential components of the Smart Cities infrastructure, as they can provide information collected from the environment through sensors or allow other systems to reach out and act on the world through actuators. IoT data collection, however, is not limited to sensors and machines, but to data from social networks, and the web. Social networks have a huge impact on the amount of data being produced daily, becoming an increasingly central and important data source. The exploitation of these data sources, combined with the growing popularity of mobile devices, can lead to the development of better solutions to improve peoples quality of life. This paper discusses how to take advantage of the benefits of mobile devices and the vast range of information sources and services, such as traffic conditions, and narrow, closed or conditioned roads data. The proposed system uses a real-time collection, organization, and transmission of traffic and road conditions data to provide efficient and accurate information to drivers. With the purpose of supporting and improving traffic data collection and distribution, an Android application was developed to collect information about extraordinary events that take place in a city, providing warnings and alternative routes to drivers and helping them to improve their time management. The developed solution also exploits the existing gaps in other applications, implementing a more specific solution for the Madeira Island traffic condition problems. info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Exploring resilience at interconnected system levels in air traffic management

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:28:25 +0200

This chapter raises issues and ideas for exploring resilience, stemming from various research disciplines, projected on the domain of air traffic management and aviation at interconnected system levels. Attempts are made to connect micro, meso, and macro levels in the aviation sector identifying corresponding research challenges. Examples of this ongoing research are given on how theory has already been translated into practical methodological use. Some connections between foci from Resilience Engineering, Disaster Resilience, and other research disciplines are projected on the air traffic management domain to explore how practical benefits can be obtained from these theories and which aspects of operational practice these theories connect to. The chapter shows that the concept of resilience from various research disciplines has a potentially wide application to system levels of air traffic management, and suggests resilience to be addressed from an interconnected systems perspective to provide added value to operations.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Transport Costs, Comparative Advantage, and Agricultural Development: Evidence from Jamuna Bridge in Bangladesh

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:24:54 +0200

This paper studies the effects of a large reduction in transport costs on agricultural development in a developing country, with a focus on the interactions among the comparative advantage and transport costs of a location, and the transport intensity and value of a commodity. The paper extends the von Thunen model of land allocation to incorporate costly technology adoption and comparative advantage based on land productivity. The theoretical analysis predicts spatial non-linearity in cropland allocation. A reduction in transport costs leads to adoption of productivity-enhancing inputs in the newly-connected region, and an increase in the share of land devoted to the high-value transport-intensive crop. The strongest effect is felt in areas that are not too near or too far from the center and have a higher land productivity in transport intensive crop. The empirical context of the analysis is the Jamuna bridge in Bangladesh, which opened in 1998 and reduced the transport costs from the poor hinterland in the northwest to the capital city (Dhaka) by more than 50 percent. Using sub-district level panel data, the paper implements doubly robust estimators in a difference-in-difference design. The analysis finds that the construction of Jamuna bridge led to increased adoption of technology (fertilizer, irrigation, greenness, and cropping intensity) and reallocation of land from low-value and nonperishable rice to high-value crops, pulses, and vegetables. The evidence indicates spatial nonlinearity in the effects on cropping intensity and the reallocation of land in areas with comparative advantage in vegetable production. For cropping intensity, the magnitude of the effect is large in the intermediate distance (130-150 kilometers) from the bridge. In areas with relatively higher vegetable productivity, land allocated to rice declined, and land was reallocated from high-yielding variety rice to vegetables in the intermediate distance (110-150 kilometers). This improved productive efficiency by aligning the cropping pattern more closely with comparative advantage. The bridge thus led to agricultural development through technology adoption, higher cropping intensity, and reducing the spatial mismatch between land suitability and crop choice.

Document type: Book

Infrastructure Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Scorecard

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:21:38 +0200

Infrastructure is viewed as a crucial ingredient to foster growth and productivity. Amid the post -- global financial crisis slowdown, Sub-Saharan Africa is in dire need to continue the growth momentum it experienced during the period of the Africa Rising narrative. An emerging consensus in the empirical literature is that, under the right circumstances, an adequate supply of infrastructure can help foster growth in the region. This paper provides a scorecard on infrastructure development in Sub-Saharan Africa over the past decades along four sectors (telecommunications, electric power, transportation, and water and sanitation) and three dimensions (quantity, quality, and access). First, it documents the existence of a large gap in infrastructure in the regionalthough the magnitude of the gap depends on the sector, dimension, and country/group. Second, the potential growth benefits from closing the infrastructure gap are large. Third, the infrastructure financing needs are very large, and the public sector so far is unable to meet these needs. Other options that involve the private sector may be available for the region. Finally, there is room for improving the efficiency of public infrastructure spending (that is, the quality of public investment management systems and procurement methods), which, in turn, may increase the output multiplier of investment spending.

Document type: Book

Port rail connectivity and agricultural production: evidence from a large sample of farmers in Ethiopia

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:19:44 +0200

Agriculture remains an important economic sector in Africa, employing a large share of the labor force and earning foreign exchange. Among others, transport connectivity has long been a crucial constraint in Africa. In theory, railways have a particularly important role to play in shipping freight and passengers at low cost. However, most African railways were in virtual bankruptcy by the 1990s. Using a large sample of data comprised of more than 190,000 households over eight years in Ethiopia, the paper estimates the impacts of rail transport on agricultural production. Methodologically, the paper takes advantage of the historical event that a major rail line connecting the country to the regional hub, the Port of Djibouti, was abandoned in the 2000s. With spatially highly disaggregated fixed effects and instrumental variables incorporated, an agricultural production function is estimated. The elasticity with respect to port connectivity is estimated at 0.276. The use of fertilizer is also found to increase with transport cost reduction, supporting the fact that a large amount of fertilizer is imported to Ethiopia.

Document type: Book

Ambivalences of Cosmopolitanisms, Elites and Far-Right Populisms in Twenty-First Century Europe

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:15:42 +0200

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Simulation and Optimization for Railway Operations Management

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:09:50 +0200

In the forthcoming decades, railway transport is expected to face a signifcant growth of traffic flows which will mostly have to be accommodated over the existing infrastructures. An increase of capacity utilization is needed to avoid reduction of reliability and punctuality of transport services. Furthermore, energy-efficient operations and multimodality opportunities are also topics of growing interest. Intelligent railway operations management requires accurate modelling and simulation of train and pedestrian traffic fows and optimal management of key decisions at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. This special issue focuses on advanced mathematical modelling and optimal control in the railway domain and related multimodal transport networks. We aim to identify new methods for improving the efectiveness and efciency of railway operations, including the development of advanced algorithmic techniques for timetabling, capacity management, infrastructure management, and trafc and passengers fow management.

Document type: Book

Internal Borders and Migration in India

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 15:06:04 +0200

Internal mobility is a critical component of economic growth and development, as it enables the reallocation of labor to more productive opportunities across sectors and regions. Using detailed district-to-district migration data from the 2001 Census of India, the paper highlights the role of state borders as significant impediments to internal mobility. The analysis finds that average migration between neighboring districts in the same state is at least 50 percent larger than neighboring districts on different sides of a state border, even after accounting for linguistic differences. Although the impact of state borders differs by education, age, and reason for migration, it is always large and significant. The paper suggests that inter-state mobility is inhibited by state-level entitlement schemes, ranging from access to subsidized goods through the public distribution system to the bias for states' own residents in access to tertiary education and public sector employment.

Document type: Book

Heterogeneous Impacts of Main and Feeder Road Improvements: Evidence from Ethiopia

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:59:03 +0200

Rural access is among the most important infrastructure constraints in rural Africa. Using the results from comprehensive household surveys and other data from Ethiopia, the paper recasts light on the heterogeneous impacts of road accessibility on agriculture and nonagricultural growth. It is found that crop production is increased by major and feeder road improvements. Significant synergy is also found. When investigating further into this effect, there are two impacts: farmers' access to the input market, especially fertilizer, was improved mainly by major corridor improvement. And output market access was improved by feeder road improvement. In addition, the household's nonagricultural income is somehow increased by improved road connectivity. There must be secondary effects. The transport demand function estimated with additional data indicates that as the road network improves, people's mobility increases. Furthermore, local business employment is found to increase with road improvements. To meet the increasing demand for mobility, efficiency and frequency of transport services are important.

Document type: Book

Travel Writing in the Age of Globalization

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:38:27 +0200

Globalization and global travel have existed for centuries. It is over the past century in particular, however, that travel has become truly global, in the sense that most and not just some travel can in some way or other be said to globalized. Indeed, with the invention and spread of new technologies of mobility (like jet travel), and new technologies of information (like the internet), as with the increasingly invasive impact of human activity on the planet at large (like global warming), it is difficult to conceive of travel in the 21st century that is purely local. Travel in the age of globalization, then, is at one and the same time both more widespread yet also more irrelevant than ever. As humans, goods, and information move around in ever-increasing quantities, and at ever-greater speed, it seems that mobility is at an all-time high in human history. On the other hand, as a rising number of people and places are interlinked through ever-faster travel and various forms of communication technologies, the local and the global are becoming harder and harder to distinguish."/p" "p"In this, travel "italic"writing"/italic" has faced a range of challenges that are both old and new. With contemporary travel writers facing a global reality that is very different from the colonial legacy of a traditionally Eurocentric genre, travel writers in the age of globalization have been forced to radically reconsider the itineraries, the destinations, the purpose, and the identity of the traveling subject. Traditionally defined as a white (European) male, the global traveler of the 21st century can take on many forms in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality. At the same time, however, a large number of contemporary travel writers have found it hard to break with the mold of old, desperately continuing to pursue the exotic adventure and the untouched otherness of the blank spaces of a map that, in the age of Google Earth, satellite navigation, jet and space travel, global warming, and an explosive growth in human population, are no more.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

South east wales transport model mode destination model estimation

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:34:37 +0200

Document type: Book

Ensemble and fuzzy techniques applied to imbalanced traffic congestion datasets a comparative study

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:33:21 +0200

Class imbalance is among the most persistent complications which may confront the traditional supervised learning task in real-world applications. Among the different kind of classification problems that have been studied in the literature, the imbalanced ones, particularly those that represents real-world problems, have attracted the interest of many researchers in recent years. In order to face this problems, different approaches have been used or proposed in the literature, between then, soft computing and ensemble techniques. In this work, ensembles and fuzzy techniques have been applied to real-world traffic datasets in order to study their performance in imbalanced real-world scenarios. KEEL platform is used to carried out this study. The results show that different ensemble techniques obtain the best results in the proposed datasets.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Model estimation of air traffic control sectors capacity for solving the air traffic flow management problem

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:29:04 +0200

Civil aviation air traffic undergoes many random disturbances. Air traffic controllers watch the real traffic and ensure that it is free from collision hazards in the whole airspace the ATC sector under their control. The ATFM service takes care that the flow capacity in each sector, called capacity of the air traffic sector, is not exceeded. In the paper an original method of model estimation of the capacity of the designed ATC sectors is described. In this method an experimentally established statistical relationship between the random variables of control load and the air traffic density is used. The capacity of a sector was found from the joint probability distribution of such a two-dimensional random variable model determined as a quanti le of adequate order. This method was verified in practice by determining the capacity of the designed new ATC sectors in FIR Warsaw.

Document type: Book

Multi resolution traffic simulation for large scale high fidelity evaluation of vanet applications

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:28:08 +0200

This paper presents an approach for coupling traffic simulators of different resolutions in order to conduct virtual evaluations of advanced driver assistance systems based on vehicular ad hoc networks that are both large scale and a high fidelity. The emphasis is put on the need for such an attempt to satisfy the constraint of performing simulations in real time. Both the methods to accomplish this as well as the resulting performance are described.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

The road to zero a vision for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:27:24 +0200

Imagine that, in 2050, not a single person in the United States dies in a traffic crash. This is the scenario described in this article, in which RAND researchers set forth a vision and strategy for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050. The authors propose that a combination of three approaches can realize this scenario. The first is doubling down on programs and policies that have already been shown to be effective, including laws and enforcement, changes to roadway infrastructure designed to reduce traffic conflicts, reductions in speeds where crashes are likely, improvements to emergency response and trauma care, and more safety education and outreach. The second is accelerating advanced technology, beginning with advanced driver assistance systems (many of which are already in the market) and progressing up to fully automated vehicles. The third is prioritizing safety, which includes both (1) embracing a new safety culture that will lead Americans to think differently about our individual and collective choices and (2) widespread adoption of the Safe System approach, a paradigm shift in addressing the causes and prevention of roadway deaths and injuries. The authors conclude with a list of actions that key stakeholdersincluding professional engineering and planning organizations, public-sector organizations, safety advocates, vehicle manufacturers, technology developers, public health, emergency medical and trauma care organizations, and law enforcement and judicial system representativescan take to bring about the changes needed to achieve zero roadway deaths by 2050.

Document type: Book

Optimal control of compressor stations in a coupled gas to power network

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:26:10 +0200

We introduce a tool for simulation and optimization of gas pipeline networks coupled to power grids by gas-to-power plants. The model under consideration consists of the isentropic Euler equations to describe the gas flow coupled to the AC powerflow equations. A compressor station is installed to control the gas pressure such that certain bounds are satisfied. A numerical case study is presented that showcases effects of fast changes in power demand on gas pipelines and necessary operator actions.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Cfd modelling of pipe erosion due to sand transport

Scipedia content — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:25:44 +0200

Erosion caused by sand particles is a serious problem facing the oil and gas industry. Predicting pipe erosion due to sand transport is a complex process in multiphase flows due to the complex nature of the flow. Existing erosion studies are however focused on single phase flow conditions which are conservative and could lead to under-/over-engineering because actual fluid flow in pipelines is multiphase. There is therefore a need for in-depth analysis of the complex interaction between the multiphase fluid and transported sand particles.

Document type: Part of book or chapter of book