Scipedia: Documents published in 2019

Electric cars as a new mobility concept complying with sustainable development principles

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:14:51 +0100

The improvement of air pollution issues and excessive road transportation dependence on crude oil is not possible today without the implementation of new mobility concepts, preferably complying with the principles of sustainable social and economic development. The lack of these concepts, as emphasized in the White Paper, Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area – Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system, will preserve transportation dependence on crude oil so deeply that only 10% of energy will be derived from renewable sources. According to this scenario, until 2050 the CO2 emissions in the transportation sector will increase by one third compared to 1990. Moreover, there will be an increase in the costs of traffic congestion until 2050 by ca. 50%. The difference in availability between central and peripheral areas and social costs of accidents and noise pollution will increase as well [1].The improvement of air pollution issues and excessive road transportation dependence on crude oil is not possible today without the implementation of new mobility concepts, preferably complying with the principles of sustainable social and economic development. The lack of these concepts, as emphasized in the White Paper, Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area – Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system, will preserve transportation dependence on crude oil so deeply that only 10% of energy will be derived from renewable sources. According to this scenario, until 2050 the CO2 emissions in the transportation sector will increase by one third compared to 1990. Moreover, there will be an increase in the costs of traffic congestion until 2050 by ca. 50%. The difference in availability between central and peripheral areas and social costs of accidents and noise pollution will increase as well [1].

Brake Maneuver Prediction – An Inference Leveraging RNN Focus on Sensor Confidence

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:14:37 +0100

In recent years, driver behavior analysis has led to countless driver assistance systems. In these systems, earlier detection of a driver’s maneuver intentions offers opportunities to improve driving experience and safety. Especially brake maneuvers are of fundamental importance because they are directly related to the avoidance of potential hazards.Current state-of-the-art brake assistance systems rely on the release speed of accelerator pedal as an indicator whether a brake event is planned. However, this simple and practical algorithm, fails to capture the overall movement pattern of accelerator pedal behaviors and cannot utilize rich information from different vehicle sensors.To address this issue, we propose a novel recurrent neural network architecture for the purpose of brake maneuver prediction. The proposed method exploits the advantages of multiple sensors. Unlike conventional practices where all signals are aggregated to a single neural network, we leverage the confidence of each sensor. We evaluate our approach based on a dataset of 44 drivers, comprising around 500 hours of naturalistic driving data. The evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline method by large margin.

MagTrack

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:14:14 +0100

"Hands on the wheel, eyes on the road" is the central guideline of safe vehicle driving practices. Many advanced driver assistance systems can effectively detect abnormal vehicle motions. However, these systems often leave insufficient time for drivers to respond to complex road situations, especially when the drivers are distracted. To reduce accidents, it is essential to detect whether a driver complies with safe driving guidelines in real time and provide warnings early before any dangerous maneuvers occur. There are vision-based driver distraction monitoring systems which rely on cameras in high-end vehicles, but their performances are heavily constrained by visibility requirements. In this paper, we present MagTrack, a driver monitoring system that is based on tracking magnetic tags worn by the user. With a single smartwatch and two low-cost magnetic accessories: a hand magnetic ring and a head magnetic eyeglasses clip, our system tracks and classifies a driver's bimanual and head movements simultaneously using both analytical and approximation sensing models. Our approach is robust to driver's postures, vehicles, and environmental changes. We demonstrate that a wide range of activities can be detected by our system, including bimanual steering, visual and manual distractions, and lane changes and turns. In extensive road tests with 500+ instances of driving activities and 500+ minutes of road driving with 10 subjects, MagTrack achieves 87% of precision and 90% of recall rate on the detection of unsafe driving activities.

Noise Mapping based on OpenStreetMap data

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:12:19 +0100

International audience

Uma análise da demanda de entregas para abastecimento de um estabelecimento comercial de pequeno porte em São Paulo

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:09:02 +0100

O abastecimento de bens e produtos para estabelecimentos comerciais em grandes cidades e um desafio relevante e atual da logistica. Em metropoles de paises ditos “emergentes” ou “em desenvolvimento”, oambiente urbano onde ocorrem as entregas de produtos e mercadorias pode ser significativamente distinto do encontrado nos paises desenvolvidos, afetando a logistica urbana de distribuicao de carga.Um dos aspectos importantes, quando se buscam medidas a fim de tentar melhorar a circulacao de caminhoes e a distribuicao urbana de carga, em particular nas megacidades, e o conhecimento da demanda de transporte de carga para uma determinada area, a qual pode ser estimada com base nos fluxos de produtos e mercadorias destinados aos estabelecimentos comerciais envolvidos, e que consiste na motivacao deste trabalho.Dessa forma, a partir de pesquisa bibliografica e revisao da literatura cientifica relacionada ao tema, procura-se caracterizar o processo de entregas a estabelecimentos comerciais de pequeno porte e avaliar a aplicacao dos principais modelos de demanda de transportes, mais especificamente aqueles de demanda de transporte de carga, para estudos que envolvam a logistica urbana em um panorama de megacidades. Aplica-se um modelo desenvolvido a um estabelecimento piloto, que se condiciona as caracteristicas logisticas e comerciais definidas, e avaliam-se os resultados obtidos.

Dynamic Distributed Orchestration of Node-RED IoT Workflows Using a Vector Symbolic Architecture

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:06:50 +0100

There are a large number of workflow systems designed to work in various scientific domains, including support for the Internet of Things (IoT). One such workflow system is Node-RED, which is designed to bring workflow-based programming to IoT. However, the majority of scientific workflow systems, and specifically systems like Node-RED, are designed to operate in a fixed networked environment, which rely on a central point of coordination in order to manage the workflow. The main focus of the work described in this paper is to investigate means whereby we can migrate Node-RED workflows into a decentralized execution environment, so that such workflows can run on Edge networks, where nodes are extremely transient in nature. In this work, we demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach by showing how we can migrate a Node-RED based traffic congestion detection workflow into a decentralized environment. The detection algorithm is implemented as a set of Web services within Node-RED and we have architected and implemented a system that proxies the centralized Node-RED services using cognitively-aware wrapper services, designed to operate in a decentralized environment. Our cognitive services use a Vector Symbolic Architecture to semantically represent service descriptions and workflows in a way that can be unraveled on the fly without any central point of control. The VSA-based system is capable of parsing Node-RED workflows and migrating them to a decentralized environment for execution; providing a way to use Node-RED as a front-end graphical composition tool for decentralized workflows.

Individually Optimized Commercial Road Transport: A Decision Support System for Customizable Routing Problems

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:04:26 +0100

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in its manifold variants is widely discussed in scientific literature. We investigate related optimization models and solution methods to determine the state of research for vehicle routing attributes and their combinations. Most of these approaches are idealized and focus on single problem-tailored routing applications. Addressing this research gap, we present a customizable VRP for optimized road transportation embedded into a Decision Support System (DSS). It integrates various model attributes and handles a multitude of real-world routing problems. In the context of urban logistics, practitioners of different industries and researchers are assisted in efficient route planning that allows for minimizing driving distances and reducing vehicle emissions. Based on the design science research methodology, we evaluate the DSS with computational benchmarks and real-world simulations. Results indicate that our developed DSS can compete with problem-tailored algorithms. With our solution-oriented DSS as final artifact, we contribute to an enhanced economic and environmental sustainability in urban logistic applications.

Document type: Article

Formal Semantics of Predictable Pipelines: a Comparative Study

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:03:00 +0100

Computer architectures used in safety-critical domains are subjected to worst-case execution time analysis. The presence of performance-driven microarchitectures may trigger undesired timing phenomena, called timing anomalies, and complicate the timing analysis. This paper investigates pipelines speciﬁcally designed to simplify the worst-case execution time analysis (also called predictable pipelines). We propose formal and executable models of four research-oriented pipelines and one industrial pipeline to validate some of their claims related to their timing behavior. We indeed validate, via bounded model checking, the absence of a type of timing anomalies called ampliﬁcation timing anomalies, or its potential presence by identifying prerequisite to situations where they can occur."br

CORRI-DOOR PROJECT: DID IT REALLY BOOST THE FRENCH ELECTRIC VEHICLE MARKET?

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:02:48 +0100

International audience; The decarbonization of the transportation sector needs a major rise in the electric vehicle (EV) market share in order to totally switch into electromobility. Boosting the electric vehicle market requires a cooperation between automotive industries by developing this technology especially batteries, charging infrastructure by installing more charging points especially fast ones and EV owners by giving them subsidies and offers. We collected data from different sources to analyze PEV sales in French departments and to know the reason that has the highest impact on the client's choice. Based on existing literature, we identified the most important factors and tried to build the French econometrics model using RStudio. Our model found that the vehicle price, autonomy, department's population density, local subsidies and fuel price to be significant and positively correlated to local PEV sales. However, charging infrastructure had negative impact and no significancy on the electromobility market. Results suggest boosting the study on a more detailed concept such as cities and suburbs as well as adding factors that reflect a department's and a client's characteristics in order to conclude with results that are more accurate.

Moderate Responder Committees Maximize Fairness in (NxM)-Person Ultimatum Games

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:58:52 +0100

We introduce and study a multiplayer version of the classical Ultimatum Game in which a group of N Proposers jointly offers a division of resources to a group of M Responders. In general, the proposal is rejected if the (average) proposed offer is lower than the (average) response threshold in the Responders group. A motivation for our work is the exchange of flexibilities between different smart energy communities, where the surplus of one community can be offered to meet the demand of a second community. We find that, in the absence of any mechanism, the co-evolving populations of Proposers and Responders converge to a state in which proposals and acceptance thresholds are low, as predicted by the rational choice theory. This is more evident if the Proposers' groups are larger (i.e., large N). Low proposals imply an unfair exchange that highly favors the Proposers. To circumvent this drawback, we test different committee selection rules which determine how Responders should be selected to form decision-making groups, contingent on their declared acceptance thresholds. We find that selecting the lowest-demanding Responders maintains unfairness. However, less trivially, selecting the highest-demanding individuals also fails to resolve this imbalance and yields a worse outcome for all due to a high fraction of rejected proposals. Selecting moderate Responders optimizes overall fitness.

Environmental life cycle impacts of autonomous e-shuttle busses and consequences for assessing future mobility systems

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:53:37 +0100

The presentations provides LCA results on using autonomous electric shuttle busses in public transportation, highlights specific challenges of conducting such assessments, and draws conclusions for more life cycle and sustainability assessments of future mobility systems that include such vehicles. An attributional LCA study is carried out as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project AVENUE (Autonomous Vehicles to Evolve to a New Urban Experience).Based on these results and on a comprehensive literature review,the requirements and challenges for future mobility system assessments are explored with a consequential LCA mindset. Resultshighlight the importance of including the sophisticated hard-and software landscape for autonomous vehicles into LCA studies, the specific challenges of defining adequate functional units and reference flows in public transportation systems, and the difficulties of incorporating technology (non-)readiness into the assessment. Poster presentation

Environment Modeling Based on Generic Infrastructure Sensor Interfaces Using a Centralized Labeled-Multi-Bernoulli Filter

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:51:37 +0100

Urban intersections put high demands on fully automated vehicles, in particular, if occlusion occurs. In order to resolve such and support vehicles in unclear situations, a popular approach is the utilization of additional information from infrastructure-based sensing systems. However, a widespread use of such systems is circumvented by their complexity and thus, high costs. Within this paper, a generic interface is proposed, which enables a huge variety of sensors to be connected. The sensors are only required to measure very few features of the objects, if multiple distributed sensors with different viewing directions are available. Furthermore, a Labeled Multi-Bernoulli (LMB) filter is presented, which can not only handle such measurements, but also infers missing object information about the objects’ extents. The approach is evaluated on simulations and demonstrated on a real-world infrastructure setup.

A bottleneck with randomly distorted arrival times

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:51:25 +0100

xtabstractWe investigate the impact of random deviations in planned arrival times on user equilibrium in an extension of Vickrey’s celebrated bottleneck model. The model is motivated by the fact that in real life, users can not exactly plan the time at which they depart from home, nor the delay they experience before they join the congestion bottleneck under investigation. We show that the arrival density advocated by the Nash equilibrium in Vickrey’s model, is not a user equilibrium in the model with random uncertainty. We then investigate the existence of a user equilibrium for the latter and show that in general such an equilibrium can neither be a pure Nash equilibrium, nor a mixed equilibrium with a continuous density. Our results imply that when random distortions influence user decisions, the dynamics of standard bottleneck models are inadequate to describe such more complex situations. We illustrate with numerical analysis how the mechanics of a bottleneck with delayed arrivals are unstable for any continuous arrival strategy, thus shedding more light on the non-existence result.

Scalable Traffic Engineering for Higher Throughput in Heavily-loaded Software Defined Networks

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

Existing traffic engineering (TE) solutions performs well for software defined network (SDN) in average cases. However, during peak hours, bursty traffic spikes are challenging to handle, because it is difficult to react in time and guarantee high performance even after failures with limited flow entries. Instead of leaving some capacity empty to guarantee no congestion happens due to traffic rerouting after failures or path updating after demand or topology changes, we decide to make full use of the network capacity to satisfy the demands for heavily-loaded peak hours. The TE system also needs to react to failures quickly and utilize the priority queue to guarantee the transmission of loss and delay sensitive traffic. We propose TED, a scalable TE system that can guarantee high throughput in peak hours. TED can quickly compute a group of maximum number of edge-disjoint paths for each ingress-egress switch pair. We design two methods to select paths under the flow entry limit. We then input the selected paths to our TE to minimize the maximum link utilization. In case of large traffic matrix making the maximum link utilization larger than 1, we input the utilization and the traffic matrix to the optimization of maximizing overall throughput under a new constrain. Thus we obtain a realistic traffic matrix, which has the maximum overall throughput and guarantees no traffic starvation for each switch pair. Experiments show that TED has much better performance for heavily-loaded SDN and has 10% higher probability to satisfy all (" 99.99%) the traffic after a single link failure for G-Scale topology than Smore under the same flow entry limit.

Comment: The 8 pages double column version of the paper is submitted to NOMS 2020 technical session

Towards Scalable Geospatial Remote Sensing for Efficient OSM Labeling

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:42:17 +0100

Zhang et al. (2019). Towards Scalable Geospatial Remote Sensing for Efficient OSM Labeling In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 27-28. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387715

3D Modeling of Earth’s Surface: Study of the Antarctica

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:38:52 +0100

The evolution of the antarctic ice cap is a subject of the utmost importance for the climate science. For this reason exploiting the historic archive of SPOT 5 HRS binocular stereo imagery over the Antarctica has gained interest. However, estimating surface models of Antarctica from optical satellite imagery is a challenging task. Different factors contribute to its difficulty: the reduced contrast of the snow, the abrupt changes in elevation, and the persistent cloud cover that is often indistinguishable from the snowy ground, or is translucent, or projects shadows on the ground; all of them hinder stereo matching. For these reasons the direct application of existing satellite stereo pipelines on these images often yields unsatisfactory results. In this study we explore strategies to address these problems and improve 3D modeling on these regions. We adapt the S2P [1] pipeline and incorporate a new multiscale strategy that allows to deal with incorrect geometry estimation due to clouds or lack of texture. In addition, integrating existing very low resolution DSM (1 km per pixel) of the Antarctica allows to further filter the model to produce a cleaner 3D model.

Ship-iceberg detection & classification in sentinel-1 SAR images

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:36:49 +0100

The European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites provide good resolution all weather SAR images. We describe algorithms for detection and classification of ships, icebergs and other objects at sea. Sidelobes from strongly reflecting objects as large ships are suppressed for better determination of ship parameters. The resulting improved ship lengths and breadths are larger than the ground truth values known from Automatic Identification System (AIS) data due to the limited resolution in the processing of the SAR images as compared to previous analyses of Sentinel-2 optical images. The limited resolution in SAR imagery degrades spatial classification algorithms but it is found that the backscatter horizontal and vertical polarizations can be exploited to distinguish icebergs in the Arctic from large ships but not small boats or wakes.

Behind the Scenes of Coproduction of Smart Mobility: Evidence from a Public Values’ Perspective

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:33:18 +0100

Part 5: Smart Cities; International audience; The advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have extended the applicability of citizen coproduction in government service delivery and have entailed transformative changes, especially at the city level. City governments around the globe increasingly rely on the private sector to set ICT-based urban innovations, like initiatives to involve citizens in the coproduction of smart mobility. Although there are many benefits of ICT-based coproduction, there is nevertheless the potential for tension between private companies and the government with whom they are cooperating. Those tensions are built on the differences in interests and values of private and public actors, and the way of realizing them, and they can compromise the vision and duty of the government. We, therefore, aim to understand the potential impact of private companies’ involvement on the expectations and perceptions of coproducing actors towards social-oriented and service-oriented public values. We conducted an exploratory in-depth case study of the smart bike-sharing system in one of the major cities in Flanders, Belgium. Data were collected through official documents and 27 semi-structured interviews with key coproducing actors. These data were then qualitatively analyzed using Nvivo software. Our exploratory case study indicated that the private actor upholds the realization of values such as efficiency, reliability, and ease of access by bringing in resources and expertise to coproduce smart mobility. However, certain social-oriented values like citizen empowerment and engagement, and (digital) inclusiveness are not part of the private partner’s vision. The study highlights the potential assets and risks for the realization of public values when dealing with conflicting interests between coproducing actors, and in this way considers a different angle on private companies’ involvement in the coproduction of public services.

Document type: Conference object

Airport Size and Urban Growth

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:32:54 +0100

This paper studies how airports affect economic growth in US metropolitan areas. The main finding is that airport size has a positive effect on local employment, with an elasticity of 0.04. The effect appears to be mostly due to a positive effect on services employment and to be concentrated in parts of the metropolitan area nearer the airport. To further understand how an airport affects the local economy, the effects on several other variables are estimated. Airport size is found to have positive effects on the number of firms, the population size, the rate of employment, and GDP in the local area. The magnitudes of the effects on population and employment suggest that airport expansion creates jobs for both existing residents and migrants to the area. The estimation uses a novel technique to identify the effects of airport infrastructure. It applies instruments for changes in airport size that are calculated from overall changes in air traffic in a set of categories: the airlines, the types of aircraft, or the distances flown. The technique could be adapted to study the effects of other types of infrastructure.

Improving of transitway operating properties

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:32:29 +0100

Modern public transport systems are increasingly seen as an important means of promoting the safe mobility of the population, especially in urban areas suffering from growing traffic jams. The Transitway or the new bus system “Bus Rapid Transport” (BRT) is the result of the development of a bus public transport network. In comparison with the subway, this project has obvious advantages: lower cost of network creation, lower cost of rolling stock, mobility, etc. These advantages are manifested, first of all, with the maximum use of passenger capacity of transitways, that is, with the application of three-axles transitways and with their motion on the maximum possible speeds. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings of the transitway motion stability research, which was based on the analysis of solutions of motion differential equations. These equations were compiled with respect to the variables of the longitudinal and transverse velocities of the center of the bus mass and the angular velocities of the bus and of two couplings. As a result of the research, the critical velocity of the three-axles transitway has been determined and factors influencing its numerical value have been analyzed. It has been shown that during the operation of the transitway it is necessary to maintain such pressure in the tires so that, for the selected load on the wheels of the axes of the auto-train, the coefficient of resistance to the lateral separation of the wheels of the steered wheels of the bus and the trailer is smaller than the wheels of uncontrolled axes. The practical value of the research is that this finding will be used for increasing the critical speed "em"v"sub"cr"/sub""/em" of the auto-train.

Needs, restrictions and priorities for the development and installation of a multifunctional C-ITS solution on existing road pavement

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:26:27 +0100

The scope of this paper is to recognize the needs, restrictions and priorities in developing effort of a breaking through technology that will achieve to enable Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS) applications in existing road infrastructure, to make roads self-explanatory and forgiving for all road users and all vehicle generations with reduced maintenance cost, full recyclability and added value services, as well as supporting real-time predictive road maintenance functions. The enhanced broad functionality of the system on multiple levels imposes emerging needs and demands that will constitute the groundwork of the Use Cases for the implementation of the project, which are extracted through an iterative user-centered methodology approach and correspond to the target applications of the system. More particularly, the needs, views and priorities of all the relevant stakeholders have been captured through the outputs of 431 respondents participated from 10 countries in on-line and in-depth surveys. From the infrastructure point of view, the complementary investigation of relevant accident/incident and gaps/priorities was based on literature while the legal/operational limitations have been based on the study of relevant Directives and the view of experts. These sources provided important qualitative as well as quantitative outcomes, the aggregation of which led to the prioritisation of the target applications, two of which (last in ranking) are considered to be secondary in the sense that can be implemented with some flexibility.

Standalone and RTK GNSS on 30,000 km of North American Highways

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:25:11 +0100

There is a growing need for vehicle positioning information to support Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), Connectivity (V2X), and Automated Driving (AD) features. These range from a need for road determination ("5 meters), lane determination ("1.5 meters), and determining where the vehicle is within the lane ("0.3 meters). This work examines the performance of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) on 30,000 km of North American highways to better understand the automotive positioning needs it meets today and what might be possible in the near future with wide area GNSS correction services and multi-frequency receivers. This includes data from a representative automotive production GNSS used primarily for turn-by-turn navigation as well as an Inertial Navigation System which couples two survey grade GNSS receivers with a tactical grade Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to act as ground truth. The latter utilized networked Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GNSS corrections delivered over a cellular modem in real-time. We assess on-road GNSS accuracy, availability, and continuity. Availability and continuity are broken down in terms of satellite visibility, satellite geometry, position type (RTK fixed, RTK float, or standard positioning), and RTK correction latency over the network. Results show that current automotive solutions are best suited to meet road determination requirements at 98% availability but are less suitable for lane determination at 57%. Multi-frequency receivers with RTK corrections were found more capable with road determination at 99.5%, lane determination at 98%, and highway-level lane departure protection at 91%.

Comment: Accepted for the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019), Miami, Florida, September 2019

Development after displacement: Using OSM data to measure Sustainable Development Goal indicators at informal settlements

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:21:33 +0100

Van Den Hoek et al. (2019). Development after Displacement: Using OSM data to measure SDG indicators at informal settlements In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 11-12. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387675

Deep recommender engine based on efficient product embeddings neural pipeline

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:20:10 +0100

Predictive analytics systems are currently one of the most important areas of research and development within the Artificial Intelligence domain and particularly in Machine Learning. One of the "holy grails" of predictive analytics is the research and development of the "perfect" recommendation system. In our paper, we propose an advanced pipeline model for the multi-task objective of determining product complementarity, similarity and sales prediction using deep neural models applied to big-data sequential transaction systems. Our highly parallelized hybrid model pipeline consists of both unsupervised and supervised models, used for the objectives of generating semantic product embeddings and predicting sales, respectively. Our experimentation and benchmarking processes have been done using pharma industry retail real-life transactional Big-Data streams.

Comment: 2018 17th RoEduNet Conference: Networking in Education and Research (RoEduNet)

Unified power converters for battery charging and traction drive systems for electric vehicles: cost and performance analysis

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:18:23 +0100

Electric vehicles (EVs) are a promising solution to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases and atmospheric pollution. Although EVs existence spans from more than one century, only in the recent years there has been a considerable development in the electric mobility paradigm. This development is also verified in the operation modes for the EV, giving it an important role in smart grids. Moreover, the implementation of unified power converters for battery charging and traction drive systems is also a key topic about EVs, allowing at the same time a hardware reduction and an increasing in its functionalities. However, no economic studies about the practical feasibility of these unified systems for EVs have been reported in the literature. In this context, this paper presents a cost assessment of unified battery charging and traction drive systems for EVs focusing on practical aspects. An economic comparison is performed between a traditional EV and a unified system in order to attain a cost/performance analysis for the unified power converters that can be used in EVs. This work has been supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UID/CEC/00319/2019. This work has been supported by FCT within the Project Scope DAIPESEV – Development of Advanced Integrated Power Electronic Systems for Electric Vehicles: PTDC/EEI-EEE/30382/2017. This work is part of the FCT project 0302836 NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-030283. Mr. Tiago Sousa is supported by the doctoral scholarship SFRH/BD/134353/2017 granted by the Portuguese FCT agency.

Routing Algorithms in Connected Cars Context

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:17:48 +0100

Most of the existing navigation solutions compute individual routes based on map topology and traffic data but, without considering the route effect on the entire navigation ecosystem. Traffic data usage and sharing in the context of connected cars is a key element for route planning. Such solutions require efficient implementation and deployment in order to reduce any kind of risk. Following a smart driving methodology, we run different route search algorithms on connected cars traffic scenarios in order to avoid traffic congestion and minimize total driving time on the entire navigation ecosystem. The experiments in this work proved that connected cars data usage and sharing reduce the total driving time of the navigation ecosystem and also that specific routing algorithms are more suitable for specific connected cars scenarios in order to obtain relevant results.

Manufacturing process data analysis pipelines: a requirements analysis and survey

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:10:51 +0100

Smart manufacturing is strongly correlated with the digitization of all manufacturing activities. This increases the amount of data available to drive productivity and profit through data-driven decision making programs. The goal of this article is to assist data engineers in designing big data analysis pipelines for manufacturing process data. Thus, this paper characterizes the requirements for process data analysis pipelines and surveys existing platforms from academic literature. The results demonstrate a stronger focus on the storage and analysis phases of pipelines than on the ingestion, communication, and visualization stages. Results also show a tendency towards custom tools for ingestion and visualization, and relational data tools for storage and analysis. Tools for handling heterogeneous data are generally well-represented throughout the pipeline. Finally, batch processing tools are more widely adopted than real-time stream processing frameworks, and most pipelines opt for a common script-based data processing approach. Based on these results, recommendations are offered for each phase of the pipeline.

Document type: Article

A Proposed surveillance model in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS)

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:07:40 +0100

Progress in the complexity of large cities, highly complex systems, and intelligence science, in particular, smart city technology, has shown great ability in helping to reduce traffic congestion in developing cities. All ideas from the development of intelligent transportation to a town that wants to build and want to change into a smart city, especially in the field of ACP (system created, computing developed), based on parallel management and control system (PTMS). PTMS is considered to be enlarged to a new generation of an intelligent transportation system, and its essential component of architecture then make the hardware and software that will support a new architecture in a developing city to a smart city. The case in a lift is a communication system on a car that uses peer to peer networks and smart cards, with a communication system in a vehicle is expected to control congestion in a developing city through an original town with a connected system. This paper proposed four aspects of surveillance such as Traffic surveillance, vehicle Surveillance, passenger surveillance and driver surveillance. The combination of these surveillances will create best applied Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) or can be called as Smart Transportation Systems(STS).

INTERNALIZATION OF EXTERNAL COSTS AND ITS IMPACT ON MODAL SPLIT IN THE FREIGHT TRANSPORT MARKET

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:07:14 +0100

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of internalization of external costs on modal split in the freight transport market. It is expected that the internalization of transport externalities will contribute to the redistribution of freight volumes in favor of non-road transport modes, especially railway. To answer this expectation, the break-even distances between intermodal rail-road and unimodal road are calculated. The calculation is based on the costs, as the most important factor that influences the mode choice in the freight transport market. In order to establish as general as possible a model, independent of a certain transport corridors, the model relies on a Monte Carlo simulation that takes account of a randomly generated shipper and receiver?s locations in two separated market areas. The model consists of a submodule for calculating drayage distances and costs in a circular market area and another submodule for calculating the distances and costs between two separated market areas, taking different distance metrics into account. The results confirm the importance of internalization of external costs on the mode choice and its contribution to the more sustainable transport system. Additionally, the results show there is not only one but, in fact, many break-even distances between the two modes. They vary considerably depending on different travel plans, and shipper/receiver locations within market areas. Despite the inevitable assumptions made in such general analysis, the results reveal that intermodal rail-road transport can provide a good alternative to unimodal road transport, even over relatively very short distances if the drayage costs are not too high and if external cost of transport are included in the price of all transport modes. We believe the research helps better understand competitiveness in the freight transport sector and may also be useful for policy- and other decision-makers to decide the priority of policy options, such as providing subsidies to stimulate intermodal rail-road transport. Increasing truck rates, e.g., by adding taxes, has been found to be effective policy to increase the intermodal rail-road mode share.

Dynamic analysis of gas flow through the ICE ring seal

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:02:11 +0100

(1) Purpose: The effect of axial movement of piston rings in the piston grooves is estimated by calculation and experimentally for the passage of gases in an internal combustion engine (ICE). (2) Methodology: When modeling the effect of axial movement of piston rings in the piston grooves for the passage of gases in the ICE, theoretical positions are used. It is based on the fundamental theory of heat engines, thermodynamics and hydraulics. Running was investigated using theoretical and theoretical research methods; (3) Results: The effect of axial movement of piston rings in the piston grooves on the passage of gases in the ICE is established. This creates prerequisites for a more accurate assessment of their sealing ability and the search for ways to further improve them. Calculated dependences are obtained for calculating the pass of gases depending on the relative position of the rings in the piston grooves. The dependences of gas escapes on the engine crankshaft rotation speed are obtained, which is especially important for idling modes, by which one can judge the dynamic stability of the ring seal and solve the problems of improving its operational properties; (4) Practical implications: This paper proposes the practical method for estimating the dynamic stability of an annular seal based on gas escape dependencies on the crankshaft rotation speed in ICE is proposed. In addition, this study contributes to the development of practical recommendations for the further improvement of engine ring seal designs.

Economic Value and User Remuneration for EV Based Distribution Grid Services

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 16:01:59 +0100

This paper describes a method to estimate the monetary remuneration for the EV user support in distribution grids. The economic expenses of the conservative reinforcement solution are used for developing the methodology which is first derived and afterwards applied to a piece of Danish distribution grid consisting of 127 customers. In the conservative scenario the DSO should invest approx. 388718 DKK (52000e ) on new upgraded components. With EV support service the potential"br/"available money for the EV support remuneration is evaluated to be 187 DKK/week (25e /week). Considering a customer with an average EV load consumption, the annual remuneration would be 77 DKK (10e ). It is concluded that, if the components are severely overloaded, for the DSO it is more cost effective to invest in components upgrade. Conversely if the components are barely overloaded or close to their limit, the EV user support can benefit both the DSO and the users."br

New perspectives for cemented hydraulic fill with chemical technologies

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:59:33 +0100

Hydraulic fill (HF) made a breakthrough in the mining industry around the turn of the 20th century and by the 1950s, with the addition of cement, it became a major backfill technique that significantly changed mining operations and output. Cemented hydraulic fill (CHF), was a major step forward compared to the existing bulk backfill techniques of the day. Cemented hydraulic fill provided better continuity in the backfill production and placement, improved reliability of the backfilling process, increased backfill production and mine production in general, simpler scheduling processes and start-up operation. However, CHF started to lose favour to newer backfilling technologies, such as paste backfill due to a number of difficulties. These were high water content requirements (large amounts of water needed for transportation), loss of binder during drainage, presence of slimes in drained water, costly dewatering, barricade safety, and non-uniform properties of the placed fill. Recent studies done by BASF have shown that, with the help of admixtures, it is possible to improve the flowability and uniformity of the placed fill, stabilise the CHF against segregation in the pipelines, increase solids content and improve dewatering of the placed fill. Also admixtures can assist in retaining the binder particles within the fill and get a more reliable and uniform cemented fill. This initial internal study identifies some of the major mechanisms behind the CHF behaviour and aims to provide a better understanding of rheological and in situ properties of cemented hydraulic fill material. It will be shown that by introducing a suitable new chemical technology the flowability and uniformity of the placed fill was greatly improved. Finally, an external case study from Neves Corvo Mine in Portugal is presented, along with the transitional steps from the laboratory investigation to the actual field application. It is clearly demonstrated, based on laboratory and in situ test results, that the mine’s CHF, when treated with a suitable admixture, can be rheologically stabilised, and the placement improved. It is also shown that the in situ properties can be significantly improved, the solids content can be increased (close to that of paste backfill) and the water management requirements can be decreased, thus making CHF a more favourable backfilling technique.

MeshPipe: a Python-based tool for easy automation and demonstration of geometry processing pipelines

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:57:05 +0100

The popularization of inexpensive 3D scanning, 3D printing, 3D publishing and AR/VR display technologies have renewed the interest in open-source tools providing the geometry processing algorithms required to clean, repair, enrich, optimize and modify point-based and polygonal-based models. Nowadays, there is a large variety of such open-source tools whose user community includes 3D experts but also 3D enthusiasts and professionals from other disciplines. In this paper we present a Python-based tool that addresses two major caveats of current solutions: the lack of easy-to-use methods for the creation of custom geometry processing pipelines (automation), and the lack of a suitable visual interface for quickly testing, comparing and sharing different pipelines, supporting rapid iterations and providing dynamic feedback to the user (demonstration). From the user's point of view, the tool is a 3D viewer with an integrated Python console from which internal or external Python code can be executed. We provide an easy-to-use but powerful API for element selection and geometry processing. Key algorithms are provided by a high-level C library exposed to the viewer via Python-C bindings. Unlike competing open-source alternatives, our tool has a minimal learning curve and typical pipelines can be written in a few lines of Python code. Peer Reviewed

Cyber Reliability, Resilience, and Safety of Physical Infrastructures

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:47:06 +0100

The paper considers the problem of constructing a full group of failure scenarios for physical infrastructures when subjected to cyber attacks (CAs). Physical infrastructures actually are systems of systems, or network of networks [1]. The main idea of the research rests on the assumption, that in order to damage any physical infrastructure by a cyber attack, it has to be able to produce a powerful enough physical impact on the most vulnerable part(s) of the infrastructure. Only civil engineering and industrial structures and installations connected to Internet and World Wide Web are considered. Hence, all infrastructures discussed below have to be elements of the Enterprise IoT or IoT, namely: electrical grids, oil, gas and product pipeline systems, water supply and disposal (waste) systems, rail networks, air traffic control and telecommunications (finance, commerce, business) networks, etc. The paper discusses how to construct a full group of scenarios of physical impacts on an infrastructure and how to calculate reliability, resilience and safety of infrastructures exposed to CAs. This paper should calm down the legitimate concerns of lay people about disclosing vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures, because it raises the awareness and offers infinitely much more to the armor/shield than to the canon/spear. © 2019 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.

Business models for flexibility of electric vehicles: evolutionary computation for a successful implementation

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:46:42 +0100

The electrical grid is undergoing an unprecedented evolution driven mainly by the adoption of smart grid technologies. The high penetration of distributed energy resources, including renewables and electric vehicles, promises several beneits to the diferent market actors and consumers, but at the same time imposes grid integration challenges that must adequately be addressed. In this paper, we explore and propose potential business models (BMs) in the context of distribution networks with high penetration of electric vehicles (EVs). The analysis is linked to the CENERGETIC project (Coordinated ENErgy Resource manaGEment under uncerTainty considering electrIc vehiCles and demand lexibility in distribution networks). Due to the complex mechanisms needed to fulill the interactions between stakeholders in such a scenario, computational intelligence (CI) techniques are envisaged as a viable option to provide eicient solutions to the optimization problems that might arise by the adoption of innovative BMs. After a brief review on evolutionary computation (EC) applied to the optimization problems in distribution networks with high penetration of EVs, we conclude that EC methods can be suited to implement the proposed business models in our future CENERGETIC project and beyond. This research has received funding from FEDER funds through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020), under Project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028983; by National Funds through the FCT Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology, under Projects PTDC/EEI-EEE/28983/2017 (CENERGETIC), UID/EEA/00760/2019; and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), under Projects 2018/08008-4 and 2018/20355- 1

The analysis of influence of a nozzle form of the Bernoulli gripping devices on its energy efficiency

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:45:27 +0100

This article presents the advantages of using Bernoulli gripping devices in the transport and loading systems of the automated production. It provides the modeling of air flow dynamics in a nozzle and in a radial interval between the interacting surfaces of Bernoulli gripper and object of transportation. For this purpose we use averaging on RANS equation of dynamics of viscous gas, SST-model of turbulence and γ-model of laminar and turbulent transition. As a result of the study, this paper offers options of constructive improvement of a nozzle form and conditions for the analysis of energy efficiency of Bernoulli gripper. The theoretical contribution of this paper is that, as a result of numerical modeling in the program Ansys-CFX environment, the influence of the nozzle form in the Bernoulli gripping devices’ on its carrying power, account characteristics, and energy efficiency has been determined.

International regulation of vehicle emissions control rules and its influence on academic engine development experimental study and vehicle manufacturing

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:39:14 +0100

In this century, global on-road passenger vehicles raised rapidly with concerns regarding of air pollutions, greenhouse, climate change, economical and human life safety. However, what are the new vehicles emission standards implementation regulation involved? How can new emission regulation impact vehicle performance and environment pollution reductions? What is (Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicle Test Procedure - WLTP)? How can (WLTP) regulation promote improvement to vehicle quality in reduction of emission to lower level possible and add more performance to the vehicles for open market? What is the real-world on-road (Real world Drive Emission- RDE) test new emission regulation and its demand? Why vehicle manufactures should present both emission level of laboratorial engine emission level and vehicle (RDE) emission level in EU? Presenting an accurate vehicle pollutant determination due to new EU regulation procedure of (WLTP) will help the consumer identifying the regulation cost fee and tax in registration the vehicle. Methodology based on comparative EU regulation assessment and (WLTP) regulation vehicle emission control technologies assessment. The paper focus on viewing, the potential of pollution regulation (WLTP) for vehicle emissions reductions. Provide an outline of the status of the EU vehicle pollution emission regulations information and identify priorities options and recommendations to the introduction of the (WLTP). Offering information gridline data for researchers in future study for the strict pollution regulation adopted by European countries and its impact on future academic study of vehicle emission experimental process in non-applicable countries, contribute the procedure process of (RDE) emission implementation test within (WLTP) to be familiar by researchers for future intended joining the regulation. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd. The author would like to thank University Putra Malaysia and Universiti Malaysia Pahang (www.ump.edu.my) for providing research facilities and grant. The study is supported by GP-IPS research grant from UPM with project code GP-IPS 9525100 and FRGS grant under MOE-UMP RDU160152.

Response-based methods to measure road surface irregularity: a state-of-the-art review

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:37:22 +0100

"jats:sec" "jats:title"Purpose"/jats:title" "jats:p"With the development of smart technologies, Internet of Things and inexpensive onboard sensors, many response-based methods to evaluate road surface conditions have emerged in the recent decade. Various techniques and systems have been developed to measure road profiles and detect road anomalies for multiple purposes such as expedient maintenance of pavements and adaptive control of vehicle dynamics to improve ride comfort and ride handling. A holistic review of studies into modern response-based techniques for road pavement applications is found to be lacking. Herein, the focus of this article is threefold: to provide an overview of the state-of-the-art response-based methods, to highlight key differences between methods and thereby to propose key focus areas for future research."/jats:p" "/jats:sec" "jats:sec" "jats:title"Methods"/jats:title" "jats:p"Available articles regarding response-based methods to measure road surface condition were collected mainly from “Scopus” database and partially from “Google Scholar”. The search period is limited to the recent 15 years. Among the 130 reviewed documents, 37% are for road profile reconstruction, 39% for pothole detection and the remaining 24% for roughness index estimation."/jats:p" "/jats:sec" "jats:sec" "jats:title"Results"/jats:title" "jats:p"The results show that machine-learning techniques/data-driven methods have been used intensively with promising results but the disadvantages on data dependence have limited its application in some instances as compared to analytical/data processing methods. Recent algorithms to reconstruct/estimate road profiles are based mainly on passive suspension and quarter-vehicle-model, utilise fewer key parameters, being independent on speed variation and less computation for real-time/online applications. On the other hand, algorithms for pothole detection and road roughness index estimation are increasingly focusing on GPS accuracy, data aggregation and crowdsourcing platform for large-scale application. However, a novel and comprehensive system that is comparable to existing International Roughness Index and conventional Pavement Management System is still lacking."/jats:p" "/jats:sec

Document type: Article

Universal Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (UNILM) Using Filter Pipelines, Probabilistic Knapsack, and Labelled Partition Maps

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:34:28 +0100

Being able to track appliances energy usage without the need of sensors can help occupants reduce their energy consumption to help save the environment all while saving money. Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) tries to do just that. One of the hardest problems NILM faces is the ability to run unsupervised -- discovering appliances without prior knowledge -- and to run independent of the differences in appliance mixes and operational characteristics found in various countries and regions. We propose a solution that can do this with the use of an advanced filter pipeline to preprocess the data, a Gaussian appliance model with a probabilistic knapsack algorithm to disaggregate the aggregate smart meter signal, and partition maps to label which appliances were found and how much energy they use no matter the country/region. Experimental results show that relatively complex appliance signals can be tracked accounting for 93.7% of the total aggregate energy consumed.

Introduction to Automation and to Its Potential for Interactive Systems Design

Scipedia content — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 15:28:23 +0100

Part 7: Courses; International audience; Automation is pervasive and polymorph but still usually not considered as a design option per se when designing interactive systems. This course takes a practical approach to introduce automation, its principles and how this can be used for the design of interactive systems. This one unit course introduces the automation from a Human Factors perspective (such as Levels of Automation) to highlight its foundations, its limitations and how recent research contributions demonstrate the high potential of automation as a design option for interaction and interactive systems designers. The course highlights success stories from various domains such as aviation, power plants and air traffic management. Beyond, it highlights limitations and failures from automotive, aviation (MCAS) and everyday life products (e.g. public spaces appliances). Course attendees will learn what is automation and how this high-level concept can be decomposed into practical elements that can be fruitfully used in interactive systems designs.

Document type: Conference object

Impact of Non-Systematic Electric Vehicle Charging Behaviour on a Distribution Substation

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:42:14 +0100

International audience; Massive integration of electric vehicles (EV) into power systems will pose significant challenges, in particular to distribution systems. Additional peak demand by EV charging can induce congestion or voltage issues, which would require costly infrastructure investments. However, these impacts can be reduced by using smart charging mechanisms. The impacts of EV charging and the efficacy of smart charging algorithms will depend on user behavior (namely travel and charging patterns). This study analyses the impact of non-systematic EV charging on base load, at the HV/MV substation level, and on smart charging potential. Case studies on realistic substations, based on real travel and grid data from France, exemplify the results.

Influence of a system "vehicle – driver – road – environment" on the energy efficiency of the vehicles with electric drive

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:37:29 +0100

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an investigation as to the interconnection between main exterior factors which can influence the power consumption during the vehicle movement in the conditions of real operation. According to the results of theoretic researches, there was determined an influence of every factor on the power consumption during vehicle movement in the modes typical for Lutsk city. There was established a contribution of the factors into the total power consumption on micro and macro levels. As a result of the study it was evaluated that an influence of a driver on a power consumption is situated within 50…80 %, an influence of an air resistance is up to 10 %, an influence of a longitudinal profile and a road resistance varies within 20…35 %. According to the results of experiments, there were determined the bus driving modes in urban conditions, and according to their results, there was built an average graph of bus movement in Lutsk city. There was made a mathematic modelling of electric vehicle movement, along with that there was taken into account the most probable range of change of the exterior factors, namely vehicle acceleration, road resistance, air resistance. It was proved that while speed is growing, the influence of road resistance and of air resistance is growing up and has a parabolic character, along with that the contribution of a driver is decreasing. The contribution of the study consists in that, There were proposed the coefficients of taking into consideration the influence of exterior factors on the power consumption by the vehicle and there was built a mathematic model for their determination. These coefficients of taking into consideration the influence of exterior factors on the power consumption give a possibility to evaluate the critical influences and to make an operative decision about the minimization of power consumption as for some specific vehicles, and for an enterprise. Further researches will focus on the plotting of telemetric means of informing, in a mode of real time, of the drivers of the vehicles, of the controllers of an enterprise about the exterior influences, that will give a possibility to make the appropriative decisions instantly. Besides, the given results can be used in order to determine the level of qualification of a driver, the state of road pavement, will give a possibility to find some more rational layout of bus stops, traffic lights, to optimize the routes of vehicles movement.

MULTI-X, a State-of-the-Art Cloud-Based Ecosystem for Biomedical Research

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:24:14 +0100

With the exponential growth of clinical data, and the fast development of AI technologies, researchers are facing unprecedented challenges in managing data storage, scalable processing, and analysis capabilities for heterogeneous multisourced datasets. Beyond the complexity of executing data-intensive workflows over large-scale distributed data, the reproducibility of computed results is of paramount importance to validate scientific discoveries. In this paper, we present MULTIX, a cross-domain research-oriented platform, designed for collaborative and reproducible science. This cloud-based framework simplifies the logistical challenges of implementing data analytics and AI solutions by providing pre-configured environments with ad-hoc scalable computing resources and secure distributed storage, to efficiently build, test, share and reproduce scientific pipelines. An exemplary use-case in the area of cardiac image analysis will be presented together with the practical application of the platform for the analysis of ~20.000 subjects of the UK-Biobank database.

Risks Associated with Aircraft Maintenance in European Commercial Air Transport

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:23:58 +0100

In the 2016 EASA Annual Safety Report, 1318 incidents were categorised as involving a safety issue related to aircraft maintenance. All the Key Risk Areas, or most frequent outcomes, for aircraft maintenance as a safety issue were shown to be related but associated Rulemaking Tasks have not yet appeared in the 2017-2021 European Plan for Aviation Safety. Categorising EU-wide incident reports appears to be difficult due to the use and construction of the ‘Event Types’, or contributing causes, taxonomy used in the reporting tool. Previously developed taxonomies are either limited in the number of categories due to limited information in reports, or they are aimed more at an investigation than straight reporting. As a result, these taxonomies are not suited for use in a reporting tool, and these taxonomies lack the detail for focused feedback to the maintenance industry. Thus, a two-level taxonomy has been developed within this study, using a high-level overview of the maintenance process as a basis for the first level and a variation of descriptions, both specific and more broad-spectrum, for the second level. A set of 3910 incident reports from the central repository were analysed, causing 2677 incidents to be excluded for a variety of reasons such as a lack of information (the narrative was empty in 1100 reports or 28%), or the use of a language other than English (814 incidents, 21%). The remaining 1232 incident reports were categorised using the new taxonomy. Of these, 361 incidents occurred during installation of components (29%) and 308 incidents were related to maintenance control (25%). The increased level of detail from the new taxonomy allows for identification of procedure types that are more susceptible to errors, such as installing or removing components or deferral of a defect so that an aircraft can be dispatched. This will hopefully lead to increased vigilance as well as further measures to increase safety.

Document type: Article

Feasibility study of multi-phase machine winding reconfiguration for fully electric vehicles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:13:58 +0100

This paper presents a feasibility study towards a control technique for a multi-phase machine with independent windings, so-called winding reconfiguration, for application in fully electric vehicles. The goal is to shift the point where field weakening is necessary and avert its dangers, extend the constant-torque region of the machine, and eliminate the torque-pulsations associated with gear shifts. The winding reconfiguration technique is modeled, and compared with measurement data obtained on a test setup featuring a six-phase machine.

Status and development trends of paste disposal technology with ultra-fine unclassified tailings in China

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:07:04 +0100

Currently, China mostly deals with ultra-fine unclassified tailings using surface low-concentration discharge or underground backfilling. The former requires too much time for tailings slurry to consolidate, and creates poor stability for the tailings dam, and the latter has concentration problem, which can cause segregation. At the present time, China is trying to develop surface paste discharge and paste filling technologies. The paper describes the evolution of surface paste disposal in China, analyses the application requirements and technical characteristics of surface paste disposal, and describes the progress of paste filling technologies in terms of tailings dewatering and thickening, mixing and preparation, and pipeline transport. Both the Wushan Copper Mine and Huize lead-zinc mine are typical of the mines in China to use relevant technology to deal with ultra-fine unclassified tailings. These mines have the largest scale of production and higher automisation respectively in surface paste disposal and paste filling, and achieve great application success. The paper analyses the problems existing in the application of paste disposal technology with ultra-fine unclassified tailings in China, which mainly include the limitation of equipment manufacturing ability and high investment in the surface paste stacking and filling, and the key technology is developing. It puts forward the development trends of paste disposal technology, which will make breakthroughs in terms of basic theories and specific equipment for unclassified paste disposal, the spread of qualification to adopt paste disposal technology, and co-disposal technology of tailings and rock dumps.

Automatic feature extraction to support Mountains Mapping in OSM

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:05:43 +0100

Nahime Torres et al. (2019). Automatic feature extraction to support Mountains Mapping in OSM In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 31-32. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387719

Workforce Development and YouthMappers: Understanding perceptions of students in humanitarian mapping

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:05:22 +0100

Solis and Rajagopalan (2019). Workforce Development and YouthMappers: Understanding perceptions of students in humanitarian mapping In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 29-30. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387717

Approach to increase flexibility in automobile body shops through component-integrated fixture functions

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 08:03:31 +0100

Due to shorter product life-cycles, increasing product customization and the co-existence of electric and combustion engine vehicles, variant flexibility is gaining importance in the automobile production. The automobile body shop is characterized by inflexible, rigid fixture systems dedicated to meet the geometrical requirements of specific body parts. Changes in part geometry or dimension require the development of new fixture systems, thus increasing product variety results in higher fixture costs. This paper presents an approach for a fixtureless body shop based on component-integrated fixture-functions, increasing variant flexibility and reducing fixture costs. The approach is implemented using a body part assembly of an electric vehicle.

Document type: Article

Efficient Ridesharing Order Dispatching with Mean Field Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:58:38 +0100

fundamental question in any peer-to-peer ridesharing system is how to, both effectively and efficiently, dispatch user's ride requests to the right driver in real time. Traditional rule-based solutions usually work on a simplified problem setting, which requires a sophisticated hand-crafted weight design for either centralized authority control or decentralized multi-agent scheduling systems. Although recent approaches have used reinforcement learning to provide centralized combinatorial optimization algorithms with informative weight values, their single-agent setting can hardly model the complex interactions between drivers and orders. In this paper, we address the order dispatching problem using multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), which follows the distributed nature of the peer-to-peer ridesharing problem and possesses the ability to capture the stochastic demand-supply dynamics in large-scale ridesharing scenarios. Being more reliable than centralized approaches, our proposed MARL solutions could also support fully distributed execution through recent advances in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and the Vehicle-to-Network (V2N). Furthermore, we adopt the mean field approximation to simplify the local interactions by taking an average action among neighborhoods. The mean field approximation is capable of globally capturing dynamic demand-supply variations by propagating many local interactions between agents and the environment. Our extensive experiments have shown the significant improvements of MARL order dispatching algorithms over several strong baselines on the accumulated driver income (ADI), and order response rate measures. Besides, the simulated experiments with real data have also justified that our solution can alleviate the supply-demand gap during the rush hours, thus possessing the capability of reducing traffic congestion.

OpenStreetMap as Space

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:51:22 +0100

Sarkar and Kay (2019). OpenStreetMap as Space In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 19-20. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387699

Expert Competitive Traffic Light Optimization with Evolutionary Algorithms

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:48:36 +0100

We present a complete system to optimize traffic lights green phases and temporal offsets based on a combination of microscopic simulation and black box, evolutionary algorithms. We also report the outcome of an AI versus experts comparison workshop conducted with our algorithm and seasoned experts from a specialized traffic engineering office. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithmic scheme significantly outperforms expert efforts. Our system entails a memetic (genetic+gradient) calibration module to adapt the Origin/Destination (O/D) matrix to current traffic conditions, an inoculation procedure to incorporate existing traffic light programs, genetic multi-objective optimization capabilities and sound metrics. Experiments are conducted over several real world datasets of operational sizes from the Paris outskirts and various other French urban areas. Our experimental outcome is threefold. First, we report the success of the memetic calibration module in adjusting the simulator’s O/D matrix to a point with variation levels corresponding to recorded sensor data. Second, we confirm the ability of the system to obtain significant gains on that sound basis: gains ranging from 15% to 35% are consistently reached on both traffic jams reduction and pollutant emissions. Most importantly, we report the outcome of the comparison workshop: a formalized methodology followed by experts to manually optimize traffic lights, iterative experimental logs tracing the application of that methodology to two real world cases and comparable results obtained by the algorithm on the same cases. Results indicate that the AI module performs significantly better than experts in both speed and final solution quality.

Analysis of OpenStreetMap data quality at different stages of a participatory mapping process: Evidence from informal urban settings

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:44:59 +0100

Yeboah et al. (2019). Analysis of OpenStreetMap data quality at different stages of a participatory mapping process: Evidence from informal urban settings In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 7-8. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3386563

Research on the Construction of Urban Logistics Performance Evaluation Index System from the Perspective of Green Development Based on Entropy Weighting Method

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:39:43 +0100

COUPLING OF THE BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD WITH A HYBRID METHOD FOR INVERSE STRESS ANALYSIS OF PIPELINES

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:39:14 +0100

Friction losses of cemented unclassified iron tailings slurry based on full-scale pipe-loop test

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:38:59 +0100

Friction losses is a key parameter in the design of pipeline transportation in paste backfill. A full-scale pipeloop test was conducted in the JCHX Paste Backfilling laboratory to investigate the friction losses of cemented unclassified iron tailings slurry. Friction losses in upward sloping pipe, vertical downward pipe, vertical upward pipe, 90° long radius elbow, horizontal straight pipe and downward sloping pipe were tested simultaneously under different solid fractions. The results indicated that friction losses always increase with flow rate and solid fraction. Friction losses in the elbows are about 1.55–2.16 times that in the horizontal straight pipe, which is about 2.7–10.0 kPa·m-1. The pipe-loop test data can be used to analyse the rheological priorities of cemented unclassified tailings slurry. Based on the Buckingham rheological equation, an empirical formula for friction losses was established and applied to a pipe with the optimal diameter of DN 150 mm. It can be concluded that the full-scale pipe-loop test is an effective way to investigate friction losses and the economics of design pipeline transportation.

Improving financial conditions of ATEs in the city of Dnipro basing upon optimal assignment of vehicle fleet to the routes

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:37:57 +0100

The purpose of this paper is multifold: 1) to substantiate the topicality of the problem solution concerning optimal assignment of vehicles to municipal routes for auto-transport enterprises (ATE) in the city of Dnipro. 2) to present technological and economic evaluation of DATP 11255 PJSC enterprise, 3) to provide an overview of the available models to assign buses to routes with the determination of their sphere of use, specifying their key advantages and disadvantages, and 4) to propose a model for optimal assignment of buses to the routes where target function is represented by maximization of ATE income, and the restriction is represented by non-exceedance of maximum admissible values of traffic interval and coefficients of bus capacity use. Passenger flow in terms of DATP 11255 PJSC routes during morning rush hour has been studied by means of table method. Basic technical-operational and economic parameters of the operation of DATP 11255 PJSC routes have been evaluated. Microsoft Excel SOLVER add-in has been applied to obtain optimal assignment of bus departures. The application value of the study is that it will make it possible to: 1) increase DATP 11255 PJSC income by 2.62 times (from 462.8 UAH/hour up to 1 211.8 UAH/hour); 2) improve quality of transportation process owing to the reduced maximum coefficient of the bus capacity use; and 3) ensure non-exceedance of maximum admissible bus traffic interval.

Application of AI in the NAS – the Rationale for AI-Enhanced Airspace Management

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:37:04 +0100

This paper extends on the initial findings of “APPLICATION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE NATIONAL AIRSPACE SYSTEM - A PRIMER” (Stroup & Niewoehner: Herndon, VA; ICNS-2019), and looks at why the current technologies, enterprise architecture, and future program plans may not be enough to address persistent operational challenges. This paper further explores why emergent operational concepts, business models, and demand profiles may necessitate Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced Communications, Navigation and Communications (CNS) infrastructure to disrupt current operational impediments. European airspace, as well as the NAS, has similar challenges. Key challenges explored in this study include: traffic flow management of diverse users; VAS Traffic Management - Air Traffic Management (UTM-ATM) airspace integration; equitable access to airspace; information exchange networks and airborne-ground interoperability of AI applications. Finally, we examine why trustworthiness and resiliency will be key mileposts on the regulatory pathway to AI certification.

Mixed-Variable Bayesian Optimization

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:35:23 +0100

The optimization of expensive to evaluate, black-box, mixed-variable functions, i.e. functions that have continuous and discrete inputs, is a difficult and yet pervasive problem in science and engineering. In Bayesian optimization (BO), special cases of this problem that consider fully continuous or fully discrete domains have been widely studied. However, few methods exist for mixed-variable domains and none of them can handle discrete constraints that arise in many real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce MiVaBo, a novel BO algorithm for the efficient optimization of mixed-variable functions combining a linear surrogate model based on expressive feature representations with Thompson sampling. We propose an effective method to optimize its acquisition function, a challenging problem for mixed-variable domains, making MiVaBo the first BO method that can handle complex constraints over the discrete variables. Moreover, we provide the first convergence analysis of a mixed-variable BO algorithm. Finally, we show that MiVaBo is significantly more sample efficient than state-of-the-art mixed-variable BO algorithms on several hyperparameter tuning tasks, including the tuning of deep generative models.

Comment: IJCAI 2020 camera-ready; 17 pages, extended version with supplementary material

SmartDashCam

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:30:17 +0100

Dashboard camera installations are becoming increasingly common due to various Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) based services provided by them. Though deployed primarily for crash recordings, calibrating these cameras can allow them to measure real-world distances, which can enable a broad spectrum of ADAS applications such as lane-detection, safe driving distance estimation, collision prediction, and collision prevention Today, dashboard camera calibration is a tedious manual process that requires a trained professional who needs to use a known pattern (e.g., chessboard-like) at a calibrated distance. In this paper, we propose SmartDash-Cam, a system for automatic and live calibration of dashboard cameras which always ensures highly accurate calibration values. Smart-DashCam leverages collecting images of a large number of vehicles appearing in front of the camera and using their coarse geometric shapes to derive the calibration parameters. In sharp contrast to the manual process we are proposing the use of a large amount of data and machine learning techniques to arrive at calibration accuracies that are comparable to the manual process. SmartDashCam implemented using commodity dashboard cameras estimates realworld distances with mean errors of 5.7 % which closely rivals the 4.1% mean error obtained from traditional manual calibration using known patterns.

Videostrates: Collaborative, Distributed and Programmable Video Manipulation

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:27:53 +0100

International audience; We present Videostrates, a concept and a toolkit for creating real-time collaborative video editing tools. Videostrates supports both live and recorded video composition with a declarative HTML-based notation, combining both simple and sophisticated editing tools that can be used collaboratively. Videostrates is programmable and unleashes the power of the modern web platform for video manipulation. We demonstrate its potential through three use scenarios: collaborative video editing with multiple tools and devices; orchestration of multiple live streams that are recorded and broadcast to a popular streaming platform; and programmatic creation of video using WebGL and shaders for blue screen effects. These scenarios only scratch the surface of Videostrates’ potential, which opens up a design space for novel collaborative video editors with fully programmable interfaces.

Civil aero-engine performance prediction using a low-order code and uncertainty quantification estimation

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:22:50 +0100

In the last decades, the attention for pollutant emissions in the civil air transport field has grown up continuously. Especially considering the performances of current turbofan engines, even a modest increase in overall efficiency can lead to great benefits in terms of emissions reduction. Therefore, dedicated performance prediction tools are mandatory in order to carry out an estimation of such outputs. The aim of the present study is to develop a procedure devoted to a preliminary output prediction of an aero engine for civil transportation and an uncertainty quantification analysis based on main performance parameters. For the first step, following the strategy already adopted in previous work on this topic [1], the GEnX, a high-bypass turbofan engine, has been considered as the reference cases. The main design characteristics available from the constructor for this engine have been employed to model the engine with a 0-D numerical tool (ESMS), developed by the University of Florence [2]. Great effor...

Some components of safety and comfort of a car

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 07:08:58 +0100

This paper addresses the need to minimize of vibration levels of unsprung weight of elements of vehicles suspension are considered. In the study design, some methods of parametric optimization with dynamic vibration absorbers (DVA) in elements of a nonlinear suspension with dynamic mechanical properties have been applied. To determine the low frequency components of vibration of laminated composite plates with the DVA system numerical estimates of the vibration of the equivalent plate of Timoshenko used. One structural version for ensuring the preservation of the residual space of the passenger cabin of the bus during the rollover according to norms 66 is considered. The energy-absorbing structure of the roof of the bus is made in the form of tubular space-frame made of composite materials.

FREQUENCY AND TIME-DOMAIN ANALYSES OF PIPELINES ANCHORED AGAINST LONGITUDINAL MOVEMENT

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:57:05 +0100

Fast Stereo Disparity Maps Refinement By Fusion of Data-Based And Model-Based Estimations

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:49:49 +0100

International audience; The estimation of disparity maps from stereo pairs has many applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Stereo matching has first been solved using model-based approaches, with real-time considerations for some, but to-day's most recent works rely on deep convolutional neural networks and mainly focus on accuracy at the expense of computing time. In this paper, we present a new method for disparity maps estimation getting the best of both worlds: the accuracy of data-based methods and the speed of fast model-based ones. The proposed approach fuses prior disparity maps to estimate a refined version. The core of this fusion pipeline is a convolutional neural network that leverages dilated convolutions for fast context aggregation without spatial resolution loss. The resulting architecture is both very effective for the task of refining and fusing prior disparity maps and very light, allowing our fusion pipeline to produce disparity maps at rates up to 125 Hz. We obtain state-of-the-art results in terms of speed and accuracy on the KITTI benchmarks. Code and pre-trained models are available on our github: https://github.com/ ferreram/FD-Fusion.

Self-Adapting Trajectory Segmentation

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:48:53 +0100

Identifying the portions of trajectory data where movement ends and a significant stop starts is a basic, yet fundamental task that can affect the quality of any mobility analytics process. Most of the many existing solutions adopted by researchers and practitioners are simply based on fixed spatial and temporal thresholds stating when the moving object remained still for a significant amount of time, yet such thresholds remain as static parameters for the user to guess. In this work we study the trajectory segmentation from a multi-granularity perspective, looking for a better understanding of the problem and for an automatic, parameter-free and user-adaptive solution that flexibly adjusts the segmentation criteria to the specific user under study. Experiments over real data and comparison against simple competitors show that the flexibility of the proposed method has a positive impact on results.

SEAR: A Polynomial- Time Multi-Robot Path Planning Algorithm with Expected Constant-Factor Optimality Guarantee

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:46:39 +0100

We study the labeled multi-robot path planning problem in continuous 2D and 3D domains in the absence of obstacles where robots must not collide with each other. For an arbitrary number of robots in arbitrary initial and goal arrangements, we derive a polynomial time, complete algorithm that produces solutions with constant-factor optimality guarantees on both makespan and distance optimality, in expectation, under the assumption that the robot labels are uniformly randomly distributed. Our algorithm only requires a small constant-factor expansion of the initial and goal configuration footprints for solving the problem, i.e., the problem can be solved in a fairly small bounded region. Beside theoretical guarantees, we present a thorough computational evaluation of the proposed solution. In addition to the baseline implementation, adapting an effective (but non-polynomial time) routing subroutine, we also provide a highly efficient implementation that quickly computes near-optimal solutions. Hardware experiments on the microMVP platform composed of non-holonomic robots confirms the practical applicability of our algorithmic pipeline.

Features of stress resistant personality of dispatchers, air traffic controllers and registration agents in the airport system

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:37:10 +0100

Area-wide real-world test scenarios of poor visibility for safe development of automated vehicles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:34:36 +0100

Introduction Automated vehicles in everyday real-world traffic are predicted to be developed soon (Gasser et al., Rechtsfolgen zunehmender Fahrzeugautomatisierung, Wirtschaftsverlag NW, Berichte der Bundesanstalt für Straßenwesen F83, 2012). New technologies such as advanced object detection and artificial intelligence (AI) that use machine or deep-learning algorithms will support meeting all the maneuvering challenges involved in different degrees of automation (Society of Automotive Engineers - SAE international, Levels of driving automation for on road vehicles, Warrendale, PA., 2014; National Highway Traffic Safety Administration – NHTSA, Preliminary statement of policy concerning automated vehicles, Washington, DC, 2018). For automated series production, these vehicles of course must be safe in real-world traffic under all weather conditions. Therefore, system validation, ethical aspects and testing of automated vehicle functions are fundamental basics for successfully developing, market launching, ethical and social acceptance. Method In order to test and validate critical poor visibility detection challenges of automated vehicles with reasonable expenditure, a first area-wide analysis has been conducted. Because poor visibility restricts human perception similar corresponding to machine perception it was based on a text analysis of 1.28 million area-wide police accident reports – followed by an in-depth case-by-case analysis of 374 identified cases concerning bad weather conditions (see chap. 1.3). For this purpose the first time ever a nationwide analysis included all police reports in the whole area within the state of Saxony from the year 2004 until 2014. Results Within this large database, 374 accidents were found due to perception limitations – caused by “rain”, “fog”, “snow”, “glare”/“blinding” and “visual obstruction” – for the detailed case-by-case investigation. All those challenging traffic scenarios are relevant for automated driving. They will form a key aspect for safe development, validation and testing of machine perception within automated driving functions. Conclusions This first area-wide analysis does not only rely on samples as in previous in-depth analyses. It provides relevant real-world traffic scenarios for testing of automated vehicles. For the first time this analysis is carried out knowing the place, time and context of each accident over the total investigated area of an entire federal state. Thus, the accidents that have been analyzed include all kinds of representative situations that can occur on motorways, highways, main roads, side streets or urban traffic. The scenarios can be extrapolated to include similar road networks worldwide. These results additionally will be taken into account for developing standards regarding early simulations as well as for the subsequent real-life testing. In the future, vehicle operation data and traffic simulations could be included as well. Based on these relevant real-world accidents culled from the federal accident database for Saxony, the authors recommend further development of internationally valid guidelines based on ethical, legal requirements and social acceptance.

Document type: Article

ROAD TRAFFIC ACCIDENTS: REVIEWING THE EFFICACY OF ROAD SAFETY MEASURES IN NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:08:35 +0100

The Statistical Analysis of the Live TV Bit Rate

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:06:34 +0100

This paper studies the statistical nature of TV channels streaming variable bit rate distribution and allocation. The goal of the paper is to derive the best-fit rate distribution to describe TV streaming bandwidth allocation, which can reveal traffic demands of users. Our analysis uses multiplexers channel bandwidth allocation (PID) data of 13 TV live channels. We apply 17 continuous and 3 discrete distributions to determine the best-fit distribution function for each individual channel and for the whole set of channels. We found that the generalized extreme distribution fitting most of our channels most precisely according to the Bayesian information criterion. By the same criterion tlocationscale distribution matches best for the whole system. We use these results to propose parameters for streaming server queuing model. Results are useful for streaming servers scheduling policy design process targeting to improve limited infrastructural resources, traffic engineering through dynamic routing at CDN, SDN.

‘A dreadful phenomenon described and improved’: Reverend John Fletcher’s account of the Buildwas earthquake of 1773.

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

Earthquakes are of interest to geologists and physical geographers, yet rarely attract historical geographers’ attention. This paper uses contrasting representations of the Buildwas, Shropshire, ‘earthquake’ of 1773 to reconstruct the course of the event and its immediate aftermath. The contemporary mapping of the scene records the changes in the physical landscape, with the hillside slippage blocking the River Severn, a vital inland navigation route, forcing a new channel to be cut. This paper examines the role of Reverend John Fletcher, a prominent theologian and leading figure in the Methodist movement, who preached on the site immediately following the event drawing Biblical parallels from a providentialist perspective. However, Fletcher was the epitome of an eighteenth-century ‘clerical naturalist’ and his account provides equal attention to the moral and physical causes of the event, including numerous personal testimonies. Reviewing the evidence and its interpretation, this paper questions why contemporaries who debated the precise causes referred to it as an ‘earthquake’, or alternatively a landslip, contextualising their discussions in the wider intellectual movement of the Enlightenment and debates about the relationship between ‘science’ and ‘religion’. It shows how this local event was compared with other well documented earthquakes at London and Lisbon in 1750 and 1755 respectively, influencing how contemporaries understood what happened at Buildwas. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that it was not an ‘earthquake’, but rather a landslip following a period of prolonged precipitation combined with high river levels which probably undermined the slope.

Suspension of a car with nonlinear elastic characteristics based on a four-link lever mechanism

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 06:02:15 +0100

This paper shows the possibility of creating a suspension of a car with a nonlinear elastic characteristic based on a four-link lever mechanism. It also presents the kinematics and dynamics of the mechanical suspension system. As a result of the study, the kinematic laws and distribution of forces in the nodes of the suspension have been found. The dependence of general rigidity on the stiffness of the main and additional elastic elements have been determined for obtaining the required nonlinear elastic characteristic. An example of a given nonlinear elastic characteristic is presented.

The Airbus Air Traffic Control speech recognition 2018 challenge: towards ATC automatic transcription and call sign detection

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:55:51 +0100

In this paper, we describe the outcomes of the challenge organized and run by Airbus and partners in 2018. The challenge consisted of two tasks applied to Air Traffic Control (ATC) speech in English: 1) automatic speech-to-text transcription, 2) call sign detection (CSD). The registered participants were provided with 40 hours of speech along with manual transcriptions. Twenty-two teams submitted predictions on a five hour evaluation set. ATC speech processing is challenging for several reasons: high speech rate, foreign-accented speech with a great diversity of accents, noisy communication channels. The best ranked team achieved a 7.62% Word Error Rate and a 82.41% CSD F1-score. Transcribing pilots' speech was found to be twice as harder as controllers' speech. Remaining issues towards solving ATC ASR are also discussed.

Comment: 5 pages, 4 tables, 1 figure

Exploring Variability in IoT Data for Human Activity Recognition

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:33:45 +0100

International audience; Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is a well-studied scientific area that has gained much traction with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT). Despite the interest in HAR for a wide spectrum of domains (technological, medical, etc.) only a few works exist, which study the variability in IoT data. To correctly perceive this variability, it is essential to dynamically model the evolving context of daily-life activities. Additionally, it is required to reduce the calculation cost of HAR, which is crucial for security and real-time applications. For the purpose of dynamically modeling, three context-aware approaches are formalized along with a context-free baseline. This study demonstrates improvements in terms of both of accuracy and calculation cost by considering variability in IoT data; our experimental study on real datasets reduced calculation cost by 20% while increasing accuracy by 20%.

Adaptive Traffic Control Algorithm Based on Back-Pressure and Q-Learning

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:30:39 +0100

Nowadays traffic congestion has increasingly been a significant problem, which results in longer travel time and aggravates air pollution. Available work showed that backpressure based traffic control algorithms can effectively reduce traffic congestion. However, those work control traffic based on either inaccurate traffic information or local traffic information, which causes inefficient traffic scheduling. In this paper, we propose an adaptive traffic control algorithm based on backpressure and Q-learning, which can efficiently reduce congestion. Our algorithm controls traffic based on accurate real-time traffic information and global traffic information learned by Q-learning. As verified by simulation, our algorithm significantly decreases average vehicle traveling time from 16% to 36% when compared with state-of-the-art algorithm under tested scenarios.

Estimating the Driver Status Using Long Short Term Memory

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:22:02 +0100

International audience; Driver distraction is one of the leading causes of fatal car accidents. Driver distraction is any task that diverts the driver attention from the primary task of driving and increases the driver’s cognitive load. Detecting potentially dangerous driving situations or automating some repetitive tasks, using Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), and using autonomous vehicles to reduce human errors while driving are two suggested solutions to diminish driver distraction. These solutions have some advantages, but they suffer from their inherent inability to detect all potentially dangerous driving situations. Besides, autonomous vehicles and ADAS depend on sensors. As a result, their accuracy diminishes significantly in adverse conditions. Analyzing driver behavior using machine learning methods and estimating the distraction level of drivers can be used to detect potentially hazardous situations and warn the drivers. We conducted an experiment in eight different driving scenarios and collected a large dataset from driving data and driver related data. We chose Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) as our machine learning method. We built and trained a stacked LSTM network to estimate the driver status using a sequence of driving data vectors. Each driving data vector has 10 driving related features. We can accurately estimate the driver status with no external devices and only using cars Can-Bus data.

Document type: Conference object

UAS Education at the French Civil Aviation University

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:20:57 +0100

International audience; The French Civil Aviation University's (ENAC, Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile) main objectives are to train personnel specialised in air transport, and to help these specialists adapt to civil aviation's evolution, such as the advent of Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) in our skies. This paper shows that in ENAC, education in UAS is carried out in the same way than education in manned aviation topics. The training is divided in main subjects, which are then allocated to each student population according to their future roles: engineers, air traffic controllers, technicians, etc. Teaching is led by skilled personnel and backed up by modern facilities and equipment. This allows ENAC to provide a competent, specialised work force, ready to work on all aspects of the emerging and disruptive UAS-based operations.

Exploration of Optimal Powertrain Design Using Realistic Load Profiles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:20:19 +0100

The electrification of bus-based public transportation contributes to the goal of reducing the adverse environmental impacts caused by urban transportation. However, the penetration of electric vehicles has been slow due to their lower vehicle range and total costs in comparison to vehicles driven by internal combustion engines. By improving the powertrain efficiency, the total costs can be reduced for the same vehicle range. Therefore, this paper proposes a holistic design exploration approach to investigate and identify the optimal powertrain concept for electric city buses based on the component costs and energy consumption costs. The load profiles of speed, slope, and passenger occupancy profiles are derived for a selected bus route in Singapore, which is used in a powertrain design exploration for a 30-passenger vehicle. Six different powertrain architectures are analyzed, together with single and multi-speed gearbox configurations, to identify the optimal powertrain architecture and the resulting component sizes. The powertrain configurations are further analyzed in terms of their influence on the vehicle characteristics and total costs. Multi-motor configurations were found to have better vehicle characteristics and lower total costs in comparison to single rear motor configurations. Concepts with motors on the front and a rear axle could shift the load points to a higher efficiency region, resulting in lower energy consumption and energy costs. The optimal powertrain concept was a fixed-speed two-motor configuration, with a booster motor on the front axle and a motor on the rear axle.

Document type: Article

Establishment on Evaluation Index System for Urban Logistics Center Location Scheme

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:12:59 +0100

Pipe loop tests at Codelco pilot plant

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 05:12:33 +0100

The pipeline transport of high density thickened tailings presents interesting design challenges in considering the implementation of a tailings disposal system. The project must define the type and level of the tests to be performed in order to obtain sufficient good quality data to be incorporated in the project design basis. This was the case of the Codelco Norte Future Tailings feasibility engineering project, where a pilot plant was constructed and operated on the mine site. The Codelco Norte project considered a tailings tonnage of 230,000 tpd (metric tonnes per day) with an available tailings dam surface area of 50 km2. The design basis established from the pilot plant tests has two significant impacts on the project: The pilot test program included the design and construction of a pipe loop for conducting tests related with the pipeline transport of high density thickened tailings. A centrifugal slurry pump was used and 75 and 100 mm pipe loops, both with transparent sections, were installed. This paper describes the general configuration of the pilot plant, specifically the pipe loop tests. The most important and interesting findings are presented, with a focus on aspects related to the tailings rheology, deposition velocity, laminar flow segregation and pump performance derating.

CONFERENCE PAPERS Year 3 (4/2019 to 9/2019)

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:52:17 +0100

ong"Year 3 (4/2019 to 9/2019) Conference Papers from the University Transportation Center for Underground Transportation Infrastructure (UTC-UTI)."/strong

Flow-based air traffic control: Human-machine interface for steering a path-planning algorithm

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:50:11 +0100

In the near future, air traffic controllers are expected to adhere to stringent time and position constraints in controlling traffic. For this new task, new decision-support tools are required which include higher levels of automation, whilst letting humans remain to be the ultimate responsible for the safety of operations. In previous research, an advanced human-machine interface was designed and evaluated that allows controllers to manipulate four-dimensional flight plans of each individual aircraft. In this research, a higher level of automation is explored by designing a new interface prototype that enables controllers to manipulate multiple flows of traffic by facilitating interaction with a path-planning algorithm. A first evaluation of this interface, in which five participants were asked to structure a perturbed airspace as they saw fit, showed that the participants were able to influence the algorithm as they desired and were supported by the interface that visualized the inner workings of the algorithm. However, human influence did not improve the solutions in terms of sector robustness and efficiency, as compared the previously designed interface for aircraft. Therefore, improvements and its use case warrant further research.

Client-side route planning: preprocessing the OpenStreetMap road network for Routable Tiles

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:48:51 +0100

Delva et al. (2019). Client-side route planning: preprocessing the OpenStreetMap road network for Routable Tiles In: Minghini, M., Grinberger, A.Y., Juhász, L., Yeboah, G., Mooney, P. (Eds.). Proceedings of the Academic Track at the State of the Map 2019, 23-24. Heidelberg, Germany, September 21-23, 2019. Available at https://zenodo.org/communities/sotm-2019 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3387705

Environmental and energetic characterization between an intercity corridor: a case study

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:48:03 +0100

This paper aims at evaluating road transport externalities in an intercity corridor taking into account the energetic and economic characterization of the available road transport modes: intercity bus, individual transport and shared mobility. One of the purposes of this analysis is to identify the external costs (EC) and private costs (PC) of each mode/route and to which extent the best environmental option can be also considered as the best economical option. Results show the intercity bus at full or half occupancy is the best option in terms of EC, followed by the shared mobility. Regarding the PC, results suggest that the best option is the shared mobility along route 1 (motorway), followed by the intercity bus. When comparing both routes, route 1 has less PC than route 2 (national road). In order to reduce the overall environmental impacts of a transport system, one solution might be the reduction of the EC through an optimization of the PC, ensuring that the option with less EC is also the option with less PC, so that it can encourage users to choose routes and transport modes with less environmental impacts. in publication

Paste pipeline transportation for Chambishi Copper Mine

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:46:13 +0100

Due to its stability, fluidity, pumpability, energy-efficiency and environment-friendliness, paste filling has attracted an increasingly amount of attention in filling field worldwide. As one of the core technologies for paste filling system, pipeline transportation is affected by a number of factors. This paper mainly focuses on two, i.e. paste concentration and rheological characteristics. Based on the study of paste rheological properties and the industrial annulus test, the critical concentration of unclassified tailing is 69.1% and the recommended pipeline resistance is 4.0 MPa/km on pipeline design and equipment selection for Chambishi Copper Mine. This paper aims at providing a reference for similar paste backfilling design in other mines.

Next generation polymeric flocculants for thickening and dewatering

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:45:17 +0100

The management of tailings streams has taken an increasingly important role in the minerals industry in recent years. The global issue of water scarcity and tightening of regulations governing the disposal of waste waters has significantly contributed to a focus on the development of thickener technologies that is not only widely accepted but also economically advantageous. The operational desire for high density paste thickeners involves dewatering (water re-use), underflow density (pipeline transport), and stacking (deposition processes), all of which are governed by rheology. Although thickener technology has proved to be effective, in many cases, it is not efficient by itself. The addition of chemical agents known as rheology modifiers or flocculants has shown to be instrumental in improving the overall performance efficiency of the thickening process. These flocculants are generally high molecular weight water soluble polymers that adsorb onto particle surfaces and bridge them together to form large aggregates, thus facilitating flocculation. Most of the commercially available flocculants are generically designed to perform across a broad range of mineral solids (mineralogy), but are not capable of targeting multiple performance criteria. However, a range of next-generation flocculants has been developed; these excel at multiple performance criteria for a particular mineralogy. This paper discusses the dewatering performance, stacking capability, and changes in the underflow rheology of processed gold tailings when treated with various flocculants (traditional versus next-generation).

Simulation of the tribological properties of motor oils by the results of laboratory tests

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:41:39 +0100

The purpose of this paper is to present a study aimed at creating a calculation-experimental method for calculating the wear of lubricated friction units of machines based on a two-factor wear model (contact pressure – sliding velocity) with identification of their wear resistance parameters. To achieve this purpose it was necessary to obtain theoretical dependences for identification of wear resistance parameters in the wear models based on laboratory tests with various geometrical contact diagrams of lubricated samples. Analysis of known studies has shown that existing approaches required solution of complex systems of integral-differential equations or numerical methods that are unacceptable in the engineering practice. In this study a model of the wear of lubricated friction units of machines in conditions of boundary friction was obtained in a form of dependence of the wear rate on the dimensionless complexes of contact pressure and sliding velocity. The basis was the solution of the inverse wear of the contact problem for various geometrical schemes of contact. The contact diagrams corresponded to the actual forms of contact of the friction units of the machines: rolling bearings and sliding bearings, gears and others. The following equations were taken as the defining equations: the equilibrium equation in the contact, the continuity equation in the contact, and the approximating experimental dependence for the wear of materials. As a result of the solution, simple algebraic formulas for calculating and identifying the parameters of the patterns of wear have been obtained. It was found that the installation has been developed for tests by means of program Solid Works and the numerical algorithm of the decision of a task on the basis of program MathCad. The findings of the study contribute explain the influence of determining factors of sliding velocity and load on bearing wear. The practical value of the research is that the obtained results were recommended for predicting wear of lubricated friction units of engines at the design stage and optimizing their design and operational parameters.

User interface research in the age of new digital realities

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:31:24 +0100

Even though many aspects of automated driving have not yet become reality, many human factors issues have already been investigated. However, recent discussions revealed common misconceptions in both research and society about vehicle automation and the levels of automation levels. This might be due to the fact that automated driving functions are misnamed (cf. Autopilot) and that vehicles integrate functions at different automation levels (L1 lane keeping assistant, L2/L3 traffic jam assist, L4 valet parking). The user interface is one of the most critical issues in the interaction between humans and vehicles -- and diverging mental models might be a major challenge here. Today's (manual) vehicles are ill-suited for appropriate HMI testing for automated vehicles. Instead, virtual or mixed reality might be a much better playground to test new interaction concepts in an automated driving setting. In this workshop - motivated by the conference theme - we will look into the potential of new digital realities for concepts, visualizations, and experiments in the car, e. g., by replacing all the windows with displays or transferring the entire environment into a VR world. We are further interested in discussing novel forms of interaction (speech, gestures, gaze-based interaction) and information displays to support the driver/passenger.

Alternative fuels in internal combustion engines

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:28:50 +0100

utomobile industry is one of the most developed industries in Ukraine and in the world today. The ever-increasing demand for transportation leads to an increase in demand for fuel, which in turn increases its deficit and value. Therefore, the high cost of traditional hydrocarbon fuels and the constant reduction of their world reserves compels scientists to find renewable biofuels. The objective of this paper is to present results of a study aimed at investigating the possibility of using alternative fuels derived from the alcohol industry waste, in pure form and as additives to hydrocarbon fuels. According to the results, the main technical and operational properties of alternative fuels received on the basis of A-92 petrol and fusel oils, experimental values of density, viscosity, distillation temperature on the ENGLER machine, temperature of formation steam congestion, their optimal percentages in the mix for different types were obtained in internal combustion engines. The findings of the research also indicate that an addition of fusel oils to A-92 gasoline leads to improvement of the viscosity-temperature characteristics of formed mixtures and increase in the temperature of formation steam cork, which ultimately reduces the consumption of fuels by 10-12% and also contributes to solving the problem of recycling fusel oils.

FEATURES OF STRESS-STRAIN STATE MODELING OF PIPELINES WITH GAS-LIQUID CHEMICALLY ACTIVE MIXTURES

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:26:42 +0100

Visus: An Interactive System for Automatic Machine Learning Model Building and Curation

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:22:35 +0100

While the demand for machine learning (ML) applications is booming, there is a scarcity of data scientists capable of building such models. Automatic machine learning (AutoML) approaches have been proposed that help with this problem by synthesizing end-to-end ML data processing pipelines. However, these follow a best-effort approach and a user in the loop is necessary to curate and refine the derived pipelines. Since domain experts often have little or no expertise in machine learning, easy-to-use interactive interfaces that guide them throughout the model building process are necessary. In this paper, we present Visus, a system designed to support the model building process and curation of ML data processing pipelines generated by AutoML systems. We describe the framework used to ground our design choices and a usage scenario enabled by Visus. Finally, we discuss the feedback received in user testing sessions with domain experts.

Comment: Accepted for publication in the 2019 Workshop on Human-In-the-Loop Data Analytics (HILDA'19), co-located with SIGMOD 2019

SIMNORAT - Final Conference - Presentations

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:17:01 +0100

ong"The Final Conference of the SIMNORAT project took place in Brest (France) on 29-30 January 2019."/strong" On the first day, presentations introduced the Atlantic setting, informed about the national MSP implementation, gave an overview of the project results and shared the perspectives on MSP of other EU MSP projects. The activities and outcomes of the case studies were presented in a poster session (Bay of Biscay and North western marine waters of Iberian Coast case studies). On the second day, workshops were held on Ecosystem-based management, data needs and information on MSP as well as on Stakeholder engagement. "strong"Here you can find the presentations of the plenary sessions of the first day."/strong" The different documents of the conference have their own dedicated entries on Zenodo:"br" • Agenda and Minutes"br" • Case study posters"br" • Workshops --- "strong"PRESENTATIONS"/strong" 9.30 – 10.00: "strong"OPENING ADDRESSES"/strong""br" Facilitated by Dominique Carval, SIMNORAT Project Coordinator, Shom The SIMNORAT Final conference was opened by representatives of the city, the region, the European Commission as well as the Shom. Michel Gourcay, Vice-president, Brest Métropole Forough Salami-Dadkhah, Vice-President, Brittany Region David Sanmiguel, Project Adviser, Executive Agency for SMEs (EASME), European Commission Bruno Frachon, Director of Shom, SIMNORAT project leader The speeches were given without presentations. --- 10.00 – 10.30: "strong"SETTING THE ATLANTIC FRAME"/strong""br" Moderated by Corine Lochet, Deputy Director for international Relations, in charge of EU Affairs"br" Coordination, Shom The sessions on Setting the Atlantic frame and the State of Play of the national MSP implementations brought together a number of speakers from the national competent authorities from France, Spain, Portugal and the UK as well as from non-governmental bodies. Angela Schultz-Zehden, Project Leader, EU MSP Platform Claude Wohrer, Secretariat General to the Sea, France Damien Périssé, Director in Charge of Maritime Affairs, Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR) --- 14.30 – 15.45: "strong"LESSONS LEARNT FROM SIMNORAT"/strong""br" Facilitated by Dominique Carval, SIMNORAT Project Coordinator, Shom Representatives of each project partner introduced their work on the different components, presented results and shared what they learnt from their involvement in the project. Lise Guennal, CPMR, The Role of the Regions in MSP Julien Dilasser, CEREMA, Marine Sectors Neil Alloncle & Fanny Bliard, AFB, Marine Conservation Ana Lloret, CEDEX, Organising Implementation of MSP Adriano Quintela, University of Aveiro, MSP Implementation Methodology Ronan Jarno, Shom, Data Needs and Gaps Denis Bailly, UBO, AMURE, Improving Stakeholder Engagement --- 16.15 – 17.45: "strong"PERSPECTIVES ON MSP"/strong""br" Moderated by Corine Lochet, Deputy Director for international relations, in charge of EU Affairs"br" Coordination, Shom Representatives of other European MSP projects shared their experience with the attendees of the SIMNORAT conference. A set of questions made the various perspectives on MSP comparable. Round table with the participation of: Niccolò Bassan, Università Iuav di Venezia, SUPREME Project Andrea Barbanti, Research Manager, ISMAR CNR, SIMWESTMED Project Ingela Isaksson, Project Manager, Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management, Coordinator of the Pan Baltic Scope Project Kirsty Wright, Marine Scotland Science, NorthSEE project Gaël Potin, Research Engineer at La Réunion University, OCEAN METISS Project Cathal O'Mahony, EU Grant Coordinator, University College Cork, SIMCelt Project David Sanmiguel, Project Adviser, Executive Agency for SMEs (EASME), European Commission

DCNN-Based Screw Detection for Automated Disassembly Processes

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:15:54 +0100

utomation of disassembly processes in electronic waste recycling is progressing but hindered by the lack of automated procedures for screw detection and removal. Here we specifically address the detection problem and implement a universal, generalizable, and extendable screw detector which can be deployed in automated disassembly lines. We selected the best performing state-of-the-art classifiers and compared their performance to that of our architecture, which combines a Hough transform with a novel integrated model of two deep convolutional neural networks for screw detection. We show that our method outperforms currently existing methods, while maintaining the high speed of computation. Data set and code of this study are made public.

The tribology of the car: Research methodology and evaluation criteria

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:07:35 +0100

From a position of structural and power theory of friction and wear, it is possible to apply the method of Contact Electrical Resistance (CER) for a complex research of the processes in a-zone of frictional contact. The purpose of this paper is to present a construction of friction node and drive mechanism of friction machine. As a result of the reported study the regularities of changes the CER and tribomechanical indices for non-metal friction couples in dependence on loading parameters and lubricating media were received. Also, the method of determination the range and level of normal wear and critical points of transmission to damage in accordance with kinetics of wear changes is proposed. The interrelation between geometrical, physical and mechanical properties, processes of formation, transformation and destruction of secondary structures, tribotechnical indices and CER in dependence on operation regimes of friction couples.

Inverse Optimal Planning for Air Traffic Control

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 04:07:16 +0100

We envision a system that concisely describes the rules of air traffic control, assists human operators and supports dense autonomous air traffic around commercial airports. We develop a method to learn the rules of air traffic control from real data as a cost function via maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning. This cost function is used as a penalty for a search-based motion planning method that discretizes both the control and the state space. We illustrate the methodology by showing that our approach can learn to imitate the airport arrival routes and separation rules of dense commercial air traffic. The resulting trajectories are shown to be safe, feasible, and efficient.

The Implementation of Regional Policy of One-Way Urban Road Networks in Addressing Traffic Congestion

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:59:37 +0100

Are Internet Tunnels Worthwhile?

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:40:19 +0100

Despite a significant increase in capacity of the Internet regional congestion remains an issue at certain times of day. Dimensioning the system to provide minimal delay under these transient conditions would be uneconomical, particularly as various forms of application data are more or less sensitive to these delays, as are different end-users. We therefore investigate a scheme that allows end-users to selectively exploit a sequence of mini tunnels along a path from their origin to a chosen destination. We assume the availability of such tunnels is advertised centrally through a broker, with the cooperation of the Autonomous System (AS) domain operators, allowing end-users to use them if so desired. The closest analogy this scheme is that of a driver choosing to use one or more toll roads along a route to avoid potential congestion or less desirable geographic locations. It thus takes the form of a type of loose source routing. Furthermore, the approach avoids the need for inter-operator cooperation, although such cooperation provides a means of extending tunnels across AS peers. In this paper we ascertain the benefit in terms of delay for a given degree of tunnel presence within a portion of the Internet. The expectation is that a relatively small number of tunnels may be sufficient to provide worthwhile improvements in performance for some users at least.

On the Analysis of Machine Learning Classifiers to Detect Traffic Congestion in Vehicular Networks

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:39:51 +0100

Problems related to traffic congestion and management have become common in many cities. Thus, vehicle re-routing methods have been proposed to minimize the congestion. Some of these methods have applied machine learning techniques, more specifically classifiers, to verify road conditions and detect congestion. However, better results may be obtained by applying a classifier more suitable to domain. In this sense, this paper presents an evaluation of different classifiers applied to the identification of the level of road congestion. Our main goal is to analyze the characteristics of each classifier in this task. The classifiers involved in the experiments here are: Multiple Layer Neural Network (MLP), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Trees (J48), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naive Bayes and Tree Augment Naive Bayes.

Human-inductively powered lightweight electric vehicles: Sustainable transportation for the smart city

Scipedia content — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 03:29:43 +0100

n increasing interest in inductive lanes for dynamic wireless power transfer, as a mean of on-the-road charging of electric vehicles, has been observed in recent times. Most of current related research and development efforts have so far been guided by the presumption of a future large-scale adoption of electric vehicle types whose payload and power train characteristics are compatible with the standard internal combustion engine vehicles they are supposed to replace in the coming years. The quest for energy conservation and more sustainable personal transportation, however, opens new possibilities for hybrid human-powered lightweight electric vehicles, such as e-bikes, electric rickshaws and similar lower mass, lower power and lower speed vehicles. These vehicles, when combined with dynamic inductive wireless power transfer lanes are predicted to deliver unprecedented transportation services at low granularity, constituting an alternative to heavier personal cars and even to public transports in some contexts. To allow this modal shift, some urban policies must be implemented, and new architectural guidelines should be adopted to include the inductive electrification of lightweight vehicle lanes. The expected result is a better conservation of energy and the promotion of a safer and healthier lifestyle in the cities of tomorrow. This research was supported by FCT –“Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia”, the Portuguese funding agency supporting science, technology and innovation, grant SFRH/BD/52349/2013, project scope UID/CEC/00319/2019 and the MIT-Portugal Program. It was also financed by the ERDF –European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalization ‐ COMPETE 2020 Programme, within project ESGRIDS –Enhancing Smart GRIDs for Sustainability, SAICTPAC/0004/2015‐ POCI‐01‐0145‐FEDER‐016434. The authors are also grateful to the Portuguese National Association of theTwo-Wheeled Industries (ABIMOTA), for providing access to recent statistics collected by the Confederation of the European Bicycle Industries (CONEBI).