Transportation and land-use preferences and residents’ neighborhood choices: the sufficiency of compact development in the Atlanta region

This paper analyzes the transportation and land-use preference and actual neighborhood choices of a sample of 1,455 residents of metro Atlanta. We develop a stated-preference scale on which desires for neighborhood type are gauged, from preferences for low-density, auto-oriented environments to desires for compact, walkable, and transit-oriented neighborhoods. This scale is then related to desires for change in one’s own neighborhood characteristics after a hypothetical move. If all neighborhood preferences were equally likely to be satisfied, then neighborhood preferences would not be correlated with a desire for change. By contrast, in the current study, stronger preferences for a more walkable environment are associated with greater desire for change in one’s neighborhood characteristics. This suggests an undersupply of compact, walkable, and transit-friendly neighborhood types relative to current demand.

Numerical modeling of hollow-cone fuel atomization,vaporization and wall impingement processes under high ambient temperatures

In the following paper, a numerical study of the atomization, vaporization and wall impingement processes of hollow-cone fuel spray from high-pressure swirl injectors under various ambient temperature conditions was carried out. Also, the availability of applied models and the effect of ambient temperature on spray characteristics is discussed. The Linearized Instability Sheet Atomization (LISA) model combined with the Aerodynamically Progressed Taylor Analogy Breakup (APTAB) model, the improved Abramzon model and the Gosman model are used to calculate the atomization, vaporization and wall impingement processes of hollow-cone fuel spray, respectively. Spray models are implemented with the modified KIVA code. The calculation results of the spray characteristics under two ambient temperatures, including spray tip penetration, spray structure and radial distance after spray-wall impingement are compared to the experimental results obtained by the Laser Induced Exciplex Fluorescence (LIEF) technique. The droplet size distribution, ambient gas velocity field, vapor phase distribution and fuel film mass generated by spray-wall impingement, measurements which are generally difficult to obtain by experimental methods, are also calculated and discussed. Quantitative discussions on the effect of the ambient temperature on the spray development process are conducted. It is shown that the applied models are applicable even in the high ambient temperature condition.     

Development of fuel cell hybrid powertrain research platform based on dynamic testbed

An experimental research platform based on a dynamic testbed is developed and applied for fuel cell hybrid powertrain integration and control. A driver brake model is added to the dynamic testbed to simulate the braking process of an electric vehicle. Sub-systems of the fuel cell hybrid powertrain are tested, and characteristic parameters are obtained. A simulation platform is constructed in LabVIEW environment, and its validity is verified by dynamic test results. A real time control system is developed with an embedded PC for the function of rapid control prototyping. Using this platform, fuel cell battery hybrid and fuel cell supercapacitor hybrid configurations are investigated. This platform provides a powerful tool for fuel cell powertrain research and development.     

Modeling the flow regime near the source in underwater gas releases

Recent progress in calculating gas bubble sizes in a plume, based on phenomenological approaches using the release conditions is a significant improvement to make the gas plume models self-reliant. Such calculations require details of conditions Near the Source of Plume (NSP); (i.e. the plume/jet velocity and radius near the source), which inspired the present work. Determining NSP conditions for gas plumes are far more complex than that for oil plumes due to the substantial density difference between gas and water. To calculate NSP conditions, modeling the early stage of the plume is important. A novel method of modeling the early stage of an underwater gas release is presented here. Major impact of the present work is to define the correct NSP conditions for underwater gas releases, which is not possible with available methods as those techniques are not based on the physics of flow region near the source of the plume/jet. We introduce super Gaussian profiles to model the density and velocity variations of the early stages of plume, coupled with the laws of fluid mechanics to define profile parameters. This new approach, models the velocity profile variation from near uniform, across the section at the release point to Gaussian some distance away. The comparisons show that experimental data agrees well with the computations.     

Demonstration of vehicular visible light communication based on LED headlamp

With the emergence of LED lighting, IT convergence technology using the visible spectrum of LEDs, such as Visible Light Communication (VLC), has been highlighted. Among the many VLC applications, vehicular VLCs based on LED headlamps and transportation lighting infrastructure, such as street lamps, traffic lights, etc., are considered good alternatives for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) or Active Safety applications. This paper introduces a demonstration system of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) VLC based on LED headlamps. By applying an inverse 4-PPM modulation scheme satisfying a 75 % dimming level under the light distribution regulation of LED headlamp, the proposed system showed its capability for V2V VLC with a 10 kbps data rate for more than 30 m under day time conditions. By measuring the BER performance according to distance, outdoor V2V VLC was possible for more than 30 m even in the day time.     

Developing a Framework to Identify Local Business and Government Vulnerability to Sea-Level Rise: A Case Study of Coastal Virginia

In this article, we develop methods for identifying local business and government vulnerabilities to sea-level rise and the natural hazards associated with it. Unlike the fairly large literature on measuring social vulnerability to natural hazards, there are very few papers that discuss methods for measuring local business or local government vulnerability even though businesses and governments are also differentially affected natural hazards. Our goal is to create measures that are easily replicable using readily available data and that are easy to explain to local planners, policymakers, and citizens. We implement our measures of local business and government vulnerability for our study area, Coastal Virginia. We combine those measures with a physical vulnerability measure to identify the areas in Coastal Virginia where planners and policymakers need to more closely examine the potential impacts of sea-level rise on their local businesses and government. While our methods are tailored to Coastal Virginia, they could be easily applied in other areas threatened by sea-level rise.     

Fundamentals of discrete multimodal choice modelling

Abstract

In this paper an overview is given of the most relevant issues relating to the application of multimodal choice models, with particular emphasis on disaggregate modal split models. The paper considers questions of data, such as type of data, alternative sampling strategies and problems of measurement; and modelling issues, such as model specification and estimation, including a good presentation of the statistical techniques'available. The paper also addresses the aggregation problem, which lies at the heart of one of today's most hotly contested debates: whether to use aggregate or disaggregate models for policy analysis, and in which circumstances.     

Computing dynamic user equilibria for large-scale transportation networks

In this paper, we present an approach for determining dynamic user equilibria. The method is suitable for disaggregated microscopic and mesoscopic simulation-based models. It is a modification of the convex-simplex method, which disposes with the line search step, and controls the subset of travelers to be re-routed at each step while updating the link travel times after each assignment. To guarantee finite termination, a suitable stopping criterion is adopted. The proposed method is implemented within TRANSIMS, the Transportation Analysis and Simulation System, as a two-stage process that employs a combined use of link performance functions and a microsimulator in order to design a framework suitable for application to real transportation systems. To demonstrate this capability, we apply the developed methodology to a large-scale network, Bignet, which is part of the transportation city network of Portland, Oregon; and a medium-scale network, Blacksburg, Virginia; and provide some comparative analyses. Our results exhibit that an improved distribution of travelers is obtained while consuming less than 17–33% of the effort required by the current version of TRANSIMS.     

Dynamic programming-based method for extraction of license plate numbers of speeding vehicles on the highway

In the last decade, vehicle identification systems have become a central element in many applications involving traffic law enforcement and security enhancement, such as locating stolen cars, automatic toll management, and access control to secure areas. As a method of vehicle identification, license plate recognition (LPR) systems play an important role and a number of such techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we describe a method for segmenting the main numeric characters on a license plate by introducing dynamic programming (DP) that optimizes the functionality describing the distribution of the intervals between characters, the alignment of the characters, and the threshold difference used to extract the character blobs. The proposed method functions very rapidly by applying the bottom-up approach of the DP algorithm and also robustly by minimizing the use of environment-dependent image features such as color and edges.