Explaining light vehicle demand evolution in interurban toll roads: a dynamic panel data analysis in Spain

Tolls have increasingly become a common mechanism to fund road projects in recent decades. Therefore, improving knowledge of demand behavior constitutes a key aspect for stakeholders dealing with the management of toll roads. However, the literature concerning demand elasticity estimates for interurban toll roads is still limited due to their relatively scarce number in the international context. Furthermore, existing research has left some aspects to be investigated, among others, the choice of GDP as the most common socioeconomic variable to explain traffic growth over time. This paper intends to determine the variables that better explain the evolution of light vehicle demand in toll roads throughout the years. To that end, we establish a dynamic panel data methodology aimed at identifying the key socioeconomic variables explaining changes in light vehicle demand over time. The results show that, despite some usefulness, GDP does not constitute the most appropriate explanatory variable, while other parameters such as employment or GDP per capita lead to more stable and consistent results. The methodology is applied to Spanish toll roads for the 1990–2011 period, which constitutes a very interesting case on variations in toll road use, as road demand has experienced a significant decrease since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008.     

Impact of family in-home quality time on person travel demand

This paper introduces the concept of Primary Family Priority Time (PFPT), which represents a high priority household decision to spend time together for in-home activities. PFPT is incorporated into a fully specified and operational activity based discrete choice model system for Copenhagen, called COMPAS, using the DaySim software platform. Structural tests and estimation results identify two important findings. First, PFPT has a place high in the model hierarchy, and second, strong interactions exist between PFPT and the other day level activity components of the model system. Forecasts are generated for a road pricing and congestion scenario by COMPAS and a comparison version of the model system that excludes PFPT. COMPAS with PFPT exhibits less mode changing and time-of-day shifting in response to pricing and congestion than the comparison version.     

Precise estimation of connections of metro passengers from Smart Card data

The aim of this study is to estimate both the physical and schedule-based connections of metro passengers from their entry and exit times at the gates and the stations, a data set available from Smart Card transactions in a majority of train networks. By examining the Smart Card data, we will observe a set of transit behaviors of metro passengers, which is manifested by the time intervals that identifies the boarding, transferring, or alighting train at a station. The authenticity of the time intervals is ensured by separating a set of passengers whose trip has a unique connection that is predominantly better by all respects than any alternative connection. Since the connections of such passengers, known as reference passengers, can be readily determined and hence their gate times and stations can be used to derive reliable time intervals. To detect an unknown path of a passenger, the proposed method checks, for each alternative connection, if it admits a sequence of boarding, middle train(s), and alighting trains, whose time intervals are all consistent with the gate times and stations of the passenger, a necessary condition of a true connection. Tested on weekly 32 million trips, the proposed method detected unique connections satisfying the necessary condition, which are, therefore, most likely true physical and schedule-based connections in 92.6 and 83.4 %, respectively, of the cases.     

Travel mode choice and travel satisfaction: bridging the gap between decision utility and experienced utility

Over the past decades research on travel mode choice has evolved from work that is informed by utility theory, examining the effects of objective determinants, to studies incorporating more subjective variables such as habits and attitudes. Recently, the way people perceive their travel has been analyzed with transportation-oriented scales of subjective well-being, and particularly the satisfaction with travel scale. However, studies analyzing the link between travel mode choice (i.e., decision utility) and travel satisfaction (i.e., experienced utility) are limited. In this paper we will focus on the relation between mode choice and travel satisfaction for leisure trips (with travel-related attitudes and the built environment as explanatory variables) of study participants in urban and suburban neighborhoods in the city of Ghent, Belgium. It is shown that the built environment and travel-related attitudes—both important explanatory variables of travel mode choice—and mode choice itself affect travel satisfaction. Public transit users perceive their travel most negatively, while active travel results in the highest levels of travel satisfaction. Surprisingly, suburban dwellers perceive their travel more positively than urban dwellers, for all travel modes.     

Serum levels of RBP4 might not be determined by diabetes mellitus but by kidney function and renal replacement therapy

It has been reported that retinol-binding protein 4(RBP4) is associated to adiposity,insulin resistance,and type 2 diabetes.Meanwhile,circulating RBP4 levels are also affected by renal function.The aim of the present study is to investigate whether serum levels of RBP4 are primarily associated with different stages of chronic kidney disease(CKD) or type 2 diabetes,if there is more potential relevance between RBP4 and renal replacement therapy.The serum levels of RBP4 were assessed by commercial competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay(ELISA)kit in 212 patients with the CKD stages 1—5 and in 24 healthy controls,while its correlation with clinical and metabolic parameters was analyzed.The serum level of RBP4 had a strong correlation with estimated glomerular filtration rate(e GFR)(P 0.001).Stratified by e GFR and treatment,no more differences in RBP4 serum concentration were detected between type 2 diabetic and non-diabetic subjects [CKD stages 1—5,non-dialysis(ND),hemodialysis(HD) and peritoneal dialysis(PD);P 0.05 for all].The elevation of RBP4 become higher in HD than in PD and ND in CKD5 patients(P = 0.008 and P = 0.04,respectively),while there was no significant difference between PD and ND groups.Multivariate linear regression analysis demonstrated three independent predictors of e GFR(β =-0.676,P 0.001),C-reactive protein(CRP)(β =-0.573,P 0.001) and creatine(β = 0.509,P = 0.024) in the study population.The study results demonstrated that the serum level of RBP4 was negatively related to the e GFR,whether diabetes mellitus(DM) affected the blood concentration of RBP4 or not.And the serum level of RBP4 exhibited significant difference in different renal replacement therapies.     

Numerical study for turbulent flow of drag and flow noise with wavy wall

In this paper, a numerical simulation of flow-induced noise by the low Mach number turbulent flow with a sinusoidal wavy wall was presented based on the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and Lighthill’s acoustic analogy. Large eddy simulation (LES) was used to investigate the space-time flow field and the Smagorinsky sub-grid scale (SGS) model was introduced for turbulence model. Using Lighthill’s acoustics analogy, the flow field simulated by LES was taken as near-field sound sources and radiated sound from turbulent flow was computed by the Curle’s integral formulation under the low Mach number approximation. Both spanwise wavy wall and streamwise wavy wall with various wall wave amplitudes were discussed to investigate their effects on reducing the drag and flow noise. The relationship between flow noise and drag on the wavy wall is also studied.     

铁道行业标准《450MHz铁路列车无线电通信最小可用接收电平及其测量方法》问题释义

分析噪声和干扰对车载无线通信设备接收电平的影响,以及电力机车运行产生无线电干扰的机理、电磁辐射的频率特性和横向衰减特性;对铁道行业标准《450MHz铁路列车无线电通信最小可用接收电平及其测量方法》(TB/T1876-2011)修订和标准有关内容进行论述。     

Performance analysis of AF relaying based on water-filling power allocation over Nakagami-<Emphasis Type="Italic">m</Emphasis> fading

This paper investigates exact performance of an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay system based on water-filling power allocation in Nakagami-m fading environment, where m is a nonnegative integer plus one half. We first offer the cumulative distribution function (CDF) and probability density function (PDF) of the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at a destination. Then outage probability, moments of SNR, higher-order statistics of the capacity are explicitly conducted. Especially, average symbol error rate (SER) under an additive white generalized Gaussian noise (AWGGN) is developed for water-filling power allocation scheme. While the average SER subjected by an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) can be regarded as a special case. Finally, all theoretical formulas are truly attested by various simulation results.     

Heuristics for the identical machine scheduling problem with preventive maintenances

In this paper, two mixed integer programming models integrating production scheduling and preventive maintenances are proposed to derive the optimal solutions for the identical machine scheduling problem with unavailability constraints. In the first model, the maintenance activities are performed periodically and the objective is to minimize the makespan. In the second model, the maintenance activities are flexible and the machines’ continuous working time cannot exceed a maximum allowed time T; the objective is to minimize the total completion time of jobs. For the first problem, we propose a heuristic longest batch time (LBT) and prove that the worst case error bound of LBT is 2. For the second problem, we develop a heuristic modified smallest processing time (MSPT) based on some properties of the optimal solutions. Computational experiments show that both of the heuristics are effective and efficient compared with the results obtained by CPLEX and the other algorithms.