Long-memory characteristics of urban roadside air quality

Carbon monoxide is a major contributor to air pollution in urban cities, particularly at the roadside. Hourly, monthly and seasonal mean carbon monoxide concentration data are collected from a roadside air monitoring station in Hong Kong over 7-years. The station is a few metres from a major intersection surrounded by tall buildings. In particular, hourly patterns of concentrations on different days of the week are investigated. The data show that hourly carbon monoxide concentrations resemble the traffic pattern of the area and tend to be lower in the summer. Using a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average models shows that the daily traffic cycle strongly influences concentrations. Further, it is found that urban roadside carbon monoxide monitoring data exhibits a long-memory process, suggesting that a model incorporating long memory and seasonality effects is needed simulate urban roadside air quality.     

Multi‐criteria analysis for evaluating the impacts of intelligent speed adaptation

Road safety is a policy priority due to the high casualties and costs associated with road accidents. Since speed is a major cause of road accidents, in‐vehicle speed limiters or Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA), seems a promising solution. ISA implementation, however, is hindered by large uncertainties, for example about the impacts of ISA, the way users might respond to ISA, and the relationship between speed and accidents. Traditional Multi‐Criteria Analysis (MCA) has limitations in handling these uncertainties. We present an MCA approach based on exploratory modeling, which uses computational experiments to explore the multiple outcomes of ISA policies (safety, emissions, throughput, and cost) across a range of future demand scenarios, functional relationships for performance criteria, and user responses to ISA. As an illustration, by testing the impacts of different ISA penetration levels on two driver groups, we show that when compliance with ISA is expected to be low, a policy aimed only at novice drivers outperforms other ISA policies on safety improvement.     

Distance and time in intermodal goods transport networks in Europe: A generic approach

This paper is about distance and time as factors of competitiveness of intermodal transport. It reviews the relevance of the factors, evaluates time models in practice, compares network distances and times in alternative bundling networks with geometrically varied layouts, and points out how these networks perform in terms of vehicle scale, frequency and door-to-door time. The analysis focuses on intermodal transport in Europe, especially intermodal rail transport, but is in search for generic conclusions. The paper does not incorporate the distance and time results in cost models, and draws conclusions for transport innovation, wherever this is possible without cost modelling. For instance, the feature vehicle scale, an important factor of transport costs, is analysed and discussed.Distance and time are important factors of competitiveness of intermodal transport. They generate (direct) vehicle costs and – via transport quality – indirect costs to the customers. Clearly direct costs/prices are the most important performance of the intermodal transport system. The relevance of quality performances is less clarified. Customers emphasise the importance of a good match between the transport and the logistic system. In this framework (time) reliability is valued high. Often transport time, arrival and departure times, and frequency have a lower priority. But such conclusions can hardy be generalised. The range of valuations reflects the heterogeneity of situations. Some lack of clarity is obviously due to overlapping definitions of different performance types.The following parts of the paper are about two central fields of network design, which have a large impact on transport costs and quality, namely the design of vehicle roundtrips (and acceleration of transport speed) and the choice of bundling type: do vehicles provide direct services or run in what we call complex bundling networks? An example is the hub-and-spoke network. The objective of complex bundling is to increase vehicle scale and/or transport frequency even if network volumes are restricted. Complex bundling requires intermediate nodes for the exchange of load units. Examples of complex bundling networks are the hub-and-spoke network or the line network.Roundtrip and bundling design are interrelated policy fields: an acceleration of the roundtrip speed, often desirable from the cost point of view, can often only be carried out customer friendly, if the transport frequency is increased. But often the flow size is not sufficient for a higher frequency. Then a change of bundling model can be an outcome.Complex bundling networks are known to have longer average distances and times, the latter also due to the presence of additional intermediate exchange nodes. However, this disadvantage is – inside the limits of maximal vehicle sizes – overruled by the advantage of a restricted number of network links. Therefore generally, complex bundling networks have shorter total vehicle distances and times. This expression of economies of scale implies lower vehicle costs per load unit.The last part of the paper presents door-to-door times of load units of complex bundling networks and compares them with unimodal road transport. The times of complex bundling networks are larger than that of networks with direct connections, but nevertheless competitive with unimodal road transport, except for short distances.     

Geographic information system design for network equilibrium-based travel demand models

Travel demand analyses are useful for transportation planning and policy development in a study area. However, travel demand modeling faces two obstacles. First, standard practice solves the four travel components (trip generation, trip distribution, modal split and network assignment) in a sequential manner. This can result in inconsistencies and non-convergence. Second, the data required are often complex and difficult to manage. Recent advances in formal methods for network equilibrium-based travel demand modeling and computational platforms for spatial data handling can overcome these obstacles. In this paper we report on the development of a prototype geographic information system (GIS) design to support network equilibrium-based travel demand models. The GIS design has several key features, including: (i) realistic representation of the multimodal transportation network, (ii) increased likelihood of database integrity after updates, (iii) effective user interfaces, and (iv) efficient implementation of network equilibrium solution algorithms.     

Modelling dual carriageway lane changing using neural networks

Neural networks offer a potential alternative method of modelling driver behaviour within road traffic systems. This paper explores the application of neural networks to modelling the lane-changing decisions of drivers on dual carriageways. Two approaches are considered. The first, preliminary approach uses a prediction type of neural network with a single hidden layer and the back propagation learning algorithm to model the behaviour of an individual driver. A series of consecutive time-scan traffic patterns, which describe the driver's environment and changes over time as the selected vehicle travels along a link, are input to the neural network, which then predicts the new lane and position of the vehicle. Training data are collected from a human subject using an interactive driving simulation. The trained neural network successfully exhibited the rudiments of driving behaviour in terms of lane and speed changes. A major disadvantage of this approach was the difficulty in recording real-life data, which are required to train the neural network, for individual drivers. The second approach concentrates specifically on lane changing and makes use of a learning vector quantization classification type of neural network. Input to the neural network still consists primarily of time-scan traffic patterns, but the format is changed to facilitate the possibility of data acquisition using image processing. The neural network output classifies the input data by determining the new lane for the vehicle concerned. Performance in both testing and training was very good for data generated by the rule-based driver-decision model of a microscopic simulation. Performance in testing was less satisfactory for data taken directly from a road and highlighted the need for extensive data sets for successful training.     

Air itinerary shares estimation using multinomial logit models

ABSTRACT

The main goal of this study is the development of an aggregate air itinerary market share model. In order to achieve this, multinomial logit models are applied to distribute the city-pair passenger demand across the available itineraries. The models are developed at an aggregate level using open-source booking data for a large group of city-pairs within the US air transport system. Although there is a growing trend in the use of discrete choice models in the aviation industry, existing air itinerary share models are mostly focused on supporting carrier decision-making. Consequently, those studies define itineraries at a more disaggregate level using variables describing airlines and time preferences. In this study, we define itineraries at a more aggregate level, i.e. as a combination of flight segments between an origin and destination, without further insight into service preferences. Although results show some potential for this approach, there are challenges associated with prediction performance and computational intensity.     

Railway Vehicles with Perfect Curving Behaviour Which are Asymptotically Stable at Vanishing Speed

Paper deals with the linear behaviour of a railway vehicle with any arbitrary number of wheelsets, body parts and connecting elements. A vehicle which has both perfect curving properties and asymptotical stability at vanishing speed, has to satisfy a twofold condition, indicated by Wickens in 1978. In the present paper this condition is derived in reliance upon the dimension theorem for linear mappings. How the investigation can be executed in practice, is shown for the case of a two-axled vehicle. At last the behaviour in a transition curve is discussed.     

A Theoretical Analysis of the Ride Vibration of Agricultural Tractor and Trailer Combinations

A six degree of freedom model of an agricultural tractor and trailer combination has been developed. Results from eigenvalue and frequency response calculations indicated that tractor operator vibration levels will be higher when operating with a trailer than for the tractor alone, due mainly to increased tractor pitch motion.

Although minor improvements could be made to present tractor and trailer combinations by moving the hitch forward of the tractor rear axle or providing some damping at a sprung hitch, the scope for a significant improvement in ride lies in changing the configuration. If higher speed specialised transport vehicles prove economical for agriculture, there are some advantages in ride vibration to be gained by changing the layout of the tractor and trailer combination to resemble an off-road version of a commercial articulated lorry.     

Application of Chinese Characters in the Design and Construction of the Badaling Great Wall Station of the Beijing-Zhangjiakou High-Speed Railway北大核心CSCD

The new Badaling tunnel is the longest tunnel on the under-construction Beijing-Zhangjiakou highspeedrailway, with the Badaling Great Wall station to be built in the tunnel. This station, which is under the Badaling Great Wall historic site, is the world’s largest underground high-speed railway station with the most complicated structure and the largest overburden and excavation area. It is therefore a representative project for China’s highspeed railway development strategy, supporting infrastructure facilities for the Beijing Horticultural Expo 2019 and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, and it is important that it be of high quality and completed safely. In the de-sign and construction of the station, the glyphs of the Chinese characters of "中",”国”,”人”and”品”are used, re-spectively, along the station route, in the rescue and evacuation mode, auxiliary adit and partial excavation, which is a way to successfully integrate the art of Chinese characters into tunnel engineering. © 2018, Editorial Office of "Modern Tunnelling Technology". All right reserved.     

On-board aging estimation using half-cell voltage curves for LiFePO<Subscript>4</Subscript> cathode-based lithium-ion batteries for EV applications

The aim of this work is the design of an algorithm for on-board determination of the actual capacity of a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathode-based lithium-ion battery for electric vehicle applications. The presented approach is based on the detection of the predominant aging mechanisms (in terms of loss of lithium and loss of active material in both electrodes) by determining the single electrode voltage curves. The information related to the characteristic length and position of the voltage plateaus, which can be gathered during battery operation, can be used to obtain the actual aging state of the cells. The length of the plateaus depends on the respective position that the voltage curves of the single electrodes have in relation to each other. Relating the change of the plateau characteristics to the possible aging mechanisms allows the determination of the actual battery aging state in terms of total cell capacity. The work presents a possible implementation of an algorithm for capacity determination based on the described methodology. The algorithm is validated with various differently aged LFP cells. Furthermore, the work discusses the ability of the method to detect the actual battery capacity if the characteristics of only part of the quasi-OCV (open circuit voltage) curve are detected. Achieved accuracy and existing limitations are described and discussed in detail.