An activity-based approach of investigating travel behaviour of older people

The paper presents the results of an investigation on daily activity-travel scheduling behaviour of older people by using an advanced econometric model and a household travel survey, collected in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Canada in 2011. The activity-travel scheduling model considers a dynamic time–space constrained scheduling process. The key contribution of the paper is to reveal daily activity-travel scheduling behaviour through a comprehensive econometric framework. The resulting empirical model reveals many behavioural details. These include the role that income plays in moderating out-of-home time expenditure choices of older people. Older people in the highest and lowest income categories tend to have lower variations in time expenditure choices than those in middle-income categories. Overall, the time expenditure choices become more stable with increasing age, indicating that longer activity durations and lower activity frequency become more prevalent with increasing age. Daily activity type and location choices reveal a clear random utility-maximizing rational behaviour of older people. It is clear that increasing spatial accessibility to various activity locations is a crucial factor in defining daily out-of-home activity participation of older people. It is also clear that the diversity of out-of-home activity type choices reduces with increasing age and older people are more sensitive to auto travel time than to transit or non-motorized travel time.     

Bicycle mode share in China: a city-level analysis of long term trends

In the past 15 years, cities in China have experienced big changes in socioeconomic and traffic conditions, resulting in a long term change in bicycle use. This study aims to quantify the changes in bicycle mode share in Chinese cities and explore the potential causes. Based on data from 51 cities, it is found that bicycle mode share at the city level decreased gradually in the past. Conventional bicycle mode share decreased with a rate of 3 % per year, but electric bicycle mode share increased with a rate of 2 % per year. The correlations between city features such as demographics and built environments and bicycle mode share at different city sizes are compared. The generalized linear models are estimated to relate the changes in the share of different trip modes to various city-level factors. The results show that the bicycle mode share in a city is impacted by factors including city area size, population density, number of cars, percentage of local road mileage among all roads, and trip purpose. Possible reasons for the changes in bicycle uses in Chinese cities are explored and policy implications are discussed.     

Cost and time damping: evidence from aggregate rail direct demand models

There is a significant body of evidence from both disaggregate choice modelling literature and practical travel demand forecasting that the responsiveness to cost and possibly to time diminishes with journey length. This has, in Britain at least, been termed ‘Cost Damping’, and is recognised in guidance issued by the UK Department for Transport. However, the consistency of the effect across modes and data types has not been established. Cost damping, if it exists, affects both the forecasting of demand and our understanding of behaviour. This paper aims to investigate the evidence for cost and time damping in rail demand using aggregate rail ticket sales data. The rail ticket sales data in Britain has, for many years, formed the basis of analysis of a wide range of impacts of rail demand. It records the number of tickets sold between station pairs, and it is generally felt to provide a reasonably accurate reflection of travel demand. However, the consistency of these direct demand models with choice modelling and highway demand model structures has not been investigated. Rail direct demand models estimated by ticket sales data indicate only slight variation in the fare elasticity with distance, as is evidenced in the largest meta-analysis of price elasticities conducted to date (Wardman in J Transp Econ Policy 48(3):367–384, 2014). This study of UK elasticities shows strong variation between urban and inter-urban trips, presumably a segmentation at least in part by purpose, but less remaining variation by trip length. A lack of variation by length supports the hypothesis of cost damping, because constant cost sensitivity would imply that fare elasticity would increase strongly with distance, because of the increasing impact of higher fares at longer distances. In this paper we indicate that rail direct demand models have some consistency of behavioural paradigm with utility based choice models used in highway planning. We go on to use rail demand data to estimate time and fare elasticities in the context of various cost damping functions. Our empirical contribution is to estimate time elasticities on a basis directly comparable with cost elasticities and to show that the phenomenon of cost damping is strongly present in ticket sales data. This finding implies that cost damping should be included in models intended for multimodal analysis, which may otherwise give incorrect predictions.     

Isolating high-priority metro and feeder bus transfers using smart card data

Fixed-rail metro (or ‘subway’) infrastructure is generally unable to provide access to all parts of the city grid. Consequently, feeder bus lines are an integral component of urban mass transit systems. While passengers prefer a seamless transfer between these two distinct transportation services, each service’s operations are subject to a different set of factors that contribute to metro-bus transfer delay. Previous attempts to understand transfer delay were limited by the availability of tools to measure the time and cost associated with passengers’ transfer experience. This paper uses data from smart card systems, an emerging technology that automatically collects passenger trip data, to understand transfer delay. The primary objective of this study is to use smart card data to derive a reproducible methodology that isolates high priority transfer points between the metro system and its feeder-bus systems. The paper outlines a methodology to identify transfer transactions in the smart card dataset, estimate bus headways without the aid of geographic location information, estimate three components of the total transfer time (walking time, waiting time, and delay time), and isolate high-priority transfer pairs. The paper uses smart card data from Nanjing, China as a case study. The results isolate eight high priority metro-bus transfer pairs in the Nanjing metro system and finally, offers several targeted measures to improve transfer efficiency.     

直升机舰上起降安全的影响因素研究

舰载直升机的起降安全涉及到舰机两方面,且影响因素较多。本文首先对舰载直升机起降安全因素进行了系统分析,梳理了其关键影响因素舰船空气流场中各特性参数对直升机操作性能的影响。然后介绍了用于舰船空气流场测量的三种典型方法,对舰船空气流场的深入研究有重要指导意义,并可为机舰动态配合研究提供参考。     

锌氧化银电池注液激活系统仿真模拟

利用ANSYS Fluent软件对锌氧化银一次电池注液激活系统进行模拟分析,在三种不同特性的点火器匹配注液激活系统条件下,模拟计算各个阀门能否正常开启、开启时间以及开启的顺序。分析计算得出各个阀门开启的时间,能够很好的指导注液系统设计。     

离线船舶机电设备振动采集仪系统设计

设计了离线振动采集仪的硬件系统,通过对传感器电源模块的进行了节电控制设计,优化振动信号的采集策略和采集节奏,提出了振动信号数据处理和存储方法,实现了无人关注下自主对船舶机电设备振动信号连续近百天的采集任务。应用结果显示,采集仪系统结果准确可靠,实现了全工况的实船振动数据的采集设备。     

动力定位船舶全速度路径跟踪CB导引自适应闭环控制

针对仅使用槽道推进器提供横向推力的动力定位船舶路径跟踪控制问题,建立慢变环境干扰影响下的非线性船舶数学模型,设计带有自适应干扰补偿的反步控制算法来消除环境干扰的影响。引入平行目标接近(CB)导引算法为跟踪控制生成期望速度矢量信号,通过与所提出的自适应反步控制算法相结合,得到不受船舶驱动特性限制的全速度范围动力定位船舶导引跟踪控制算法,应用李雅普诺夫稳定性理论证明系统跟踪误差渐进收敛到零。仿真结果表明通过调整导引算法参数可以调节船舶跟踪过程表现,并可以得到较好的控制精度。     

整体推进式桩基码头结构设计与施工

针对在拉美和非洲地区部分码头建设中,存在大型船机设备缺乏和长周期波较为明显、常规打桩船作业和预制构件安装困难的问题,基于一般桩基码头结构,在设计和施工两个方面进行优化,采用桩顶施工行走平台方法施工,利用桩基自身作为支撑结构,大量采用叠合式上部结构,实现将海上施工转化为陆上施工的创新,形成整体推进式桩基码头结构,规避大型船机设备缺乏和长周期波较为明显的问题,具有良好的经济性和对强震区的适应性。     

Analysis of unsteady flow over Offshore Wind Turbine in combination with different types of foundations

Environmental effects have an important influence on Offshore Wind Turbine (OWT) power generation efficiency and the structural stability of such turbines. In this study, we use an in-house Boundary Element (BEM)—panMARE code—to simulate the unsteady flow behavior of a full OWT with various combinations of aerodynamic and hydrodynamic loads in the time domain. This code is implemented to simulate potential flows for different applications and is based on a three-dimensional first-order panel method. Three different OWT configurations consisting of a generic 5 MW NREL rotor with three different types of foundations (Monopile, Tripod, and Jacket) are investigated. These three configurations are analyzed using the RANSE solver which is carried out using ANSYS CFX for validating the corresponding results. The simulations are performed under the same environmental atmospheric wind shear and rotor angular velocity, and the wave properties are wave height of 4 m and wave period of 7.16 s. In the present work, wave environmental effects were investigated firstly for the two solvers, and good agreement is achieved. Moreover, pressure distribution in each OWT case is presented, including detailed information about local flow fields. The time history of the forces at inflow direction and its moments around the mudline at each OWT part are presented in a dimensionless form with respect to the mean value of the last three loads and the moment amplitudes obtained from the BEM code, where the contribution of rotor force is lower in the tripod case and higher in the jacket case and the calculated hydrodynamic load that effect on jacket foundation type is lower than other two cases.