A joint flexible econometric model system of household residential location and vehicle fleet composition/usage choices

Modeling the interaction between the built environment and travel behavior is of much interest to transportation planning professionals due to the desire to curb vehicular travel demand through modifications to built environment attributes. However, such models need to take into account self-selection effects in residential location choice, wherein households choose to reside in neighborhoods and built environments that are conducive to their lifestyle preferences and attitudes. This phenomenon, well-recognized in the literature, calls for the specification and estimation of joint models of multi-dimensional land use and travel choice processes. However, the estimation of such model systems that explicitly account for the presence of unobserved factors that jointly impact multiple choice dimensions is extremely complex and computationally intensive. This paper presents a joint GEV-based logit regression model of residential location choice, vehicle count by type choice, and vehicle usage (vehicle miles of travel) using a copula-based framework that facilitates the estimation of joint equations systems with error dependence structures within a simple and flexible closed-form analytic framework. The model system is estimated on a sample derived from the 2000 San Francisco Bay Area Household Travel Survey. Estimation results show that there is significant dependency among the choice dimensions and that self-selection effects cannot be ignored when modeling land use-travel behavior interactions.     

Scrutinizing individuals’ leisure-shopping travel decisions to appraise activity-based models of travel demand

Activity-based models for modeling individuals’ travel demand have come to a new era in addressing individuals’ and households’ travel behavior on a disaggregate level. Quantitative data are mainly used in this domain to enable a realistic representation of individual choices and a true assessment of the impact of different Travel Demand Management measures. However, qualitative approaches in data collection are believed to be able to capture aspects of individuals’ travel behavior that cannot be obtained using quantitative studies, such as detailed decision making process information. Therefore, qualitative methods may deepen the insight into human’s travel behavior from an agent-based perspective. This paper reports on the application of a qualitative semi-structured interview method, namely the Causal Network Elicitation Technique (CNET), for eliciting individuals’ thoughts regarding fun-shopping related travel decisions, i.e. timing, shopping location and transport mode choices. The CNET protocol encourages participants to think aloud about their considerations when making decisions. These different elicited aspects are linked with causal relationships and thus, individuals’ mental representations of the task at hand are recorded. This protocol is tested in the city centre of Hasselt in Belgium, using 26 young adults as respondents. Response data are used to apply the Association Rules, a fairly common technique in machine learning. Results highlight different interrelated contexts, instruments and values considered when planning a trip. These findings can give feedback to current AB models to raise their behavioral realism and to improve modeling accuracy.     

Level of service analysis for airport baggage claim with a case study of the Calgary International Airport

This work presents a methodology to evaluate the level of service (LOS) of an airport baggage claim. A psychometric scaling technique is employed to obtain quantitative data from qualitative data (user responses as a function of five rating categories). Regression analysis is applied to obtain a statistically valid relationship between user responses and observed operational indicators. The proposed model is developed from a case study of the West Jet baggage claim area at the Calgary International Airport – Canada, where 62 passengers have been observed and interviewed. The collected data allowed the proposal of standards, which indicate tolerable limits as a function of various LOS ranges (A–E). The results are useful for managers and designers on assessing the LOS offered in a terminal, but also during the planning and design stages of an airport. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Validation of an approach to analyse and understand ship wave making

This paper discusses a rational and systematic procedure for understanding and analysing steady ship wave patterns and their dependence on hull form. A stepwise procedure is proposed in which the pressure distribution around the hull is invoked to provide a qualitative understanding of the connection between hull form and wave making. In a recent publication it was shown how this understanding explains various known trends and, in combination with wave pattern computations by free-surface potential flow or Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) methods, can often be exploited to reduce wave making by modifying the hull form. The present paper provides support for the guidelines given, validates the decomposition into different steps and indicates the connection with previous theoretical approaches.     

Assessment of work-related risk criteria onboard a ship as an aid to designing its onboard environment

The environment onboard a ship presents a typical example of a severe environment, displaying extreme conditions of temperature and relative humidity, especially in the engine room. Datasheets, the international labour organization, and standards do not provide clear information about the suitable ambience of the engine room, its design conditions, and the role of marine engineers in preventing work-related risk. In this study, air temperature and relative humidity were monitored at several locations onboard a merchant ship. These real monitored data were then compared with the ISO design indications to obtain an effective work risk analysis. From these indoor temperature and relative humidity data, the corresponding parameters of thermal comfort in the engine control room and the heat stress and sweating index of a worker in the engine room were determined. As a function of these indices, the maximum time that a worker can stay in the engine room and the time for which he must rest in the control room were also calculated in the present study. Some design corrections are also proposed herein to improve these environments.     

Open skies and open gates

Airline alliances are a global transportation issue which is the subject of increasing attention in the literature. A simple simulation model of air carrier competition in a network is constructed to examine the economic welfare effects of different levels of alliance between the carriers serving the network. The simulations confirm that consumers derive benefits from improved access to passenger markets. However, in many cases, carriers tend to gain from a limited alliance such as code-sharing. This suggests that closer alliances may be driven by other considerations such as raising barriers to entry or the cross-subsidisation of international routes through greater control of the domestic market.     

Application of BIM Technology in the Construction Management of a Metro Station北大核心CSCD

For the restricted construction site of a Beijing metro station surrounded by many important buildings and characterized by complex staggered underground pipelines, many construction difficulties and a high level of re-quired management, settlement monitoring is necessary for the sake of construction safety. A 3D model of the metro,a model of the specially shaped structure and models of many details of the metro were established using the BIM technique, allowing for: creation of a 3D presentation, extraction of construction quantities, construction conse-quence optimization, guidance of construction endeavors, simulation of the construction process, 4D dynamic con-struction management and 4D dynamic settlement monitoring. © 2018, Editorial Office of "Modern Tunnelling Technology". All right reserved.     

Transportation mode detection – an in-depth review of applicability and reliability

The wide adoption of location-enabled devices, together with the acceptance of services that leverage (personal) data as payment, allows scientists to push through some of the previous barriers imposed by data insufficiency, ethics and privacy skepticism. The research problems whose study require hard-to-obtain data (e.g. transportation mode detection, service contextualisation, etc.) have now become more accessible to scientists because of the availability of data collecting outlets. One such problem is the detection of a user's transportation mode. Different fields have approached the problem of transportation mode detection with different aims: Location-Based Services (LBS) is a field that focuses on understanding the transportation mode in real-time, Transportation Science is a field that focuses on measuring the daily travel patterns of individuals or groups of individuals, and Human Geography is a field that focuses on enriching a trajectory by adding domain-specific semantics. While different fields providing solutions to the same problem could be viewed as a positive outcome, it is difficult to compare these solutions because the reported performance indicators depend on the type of approach and its aim (e.g. the real-time availability of LBS requires the performance to be computed on each classified location). The contributions of this paper are three fold. First, the paper reviews the critical aspects desired by each research field when providing solutions to the transportation mode detection problem. Second, it proposes three dimensions that separate three branches of science based on their main interest. Finally, it identifies important gaps in research and future directions, that is, proposing: widely accepted error measures meaningful for all disciplines, methods robust to new data sets and a benchmark data set for performance validation.