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.     

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.     

Hardware architecture design of block-matching and 3D-filtering denoising algorithm

Block-matching and 3D-filtering(BM3D) is a state of the art denoising algorithm for image/video,which takes full advantages of the spatial correlation and the temporal correlation of the video. The algorithm performance comes at the price of more similar blocks finding and filtering which bring high computation and memory access. Area, memory bandwidth and computation are the major bottlenecks to design a feasible architecture because of large frame size and search range. In this paper, we introduce a novel structure to increase data reuse rate and reduce the internal static-random-access-memory(SRAM) memory. Our target is to design a phase alternating line(PAL) or real-time processing chip of BM3 D. We propose an application specific integrated circuit(ASIC) architecture of BM3 D for a 720 × 576 BT656 PAL format. The feature of the chip is with 100 MHz system frequency and a 166-MHz 32-bit double data rate(DDR). When noise is σ = 25, we successfully realize real-time denoising and achieve about 10 d B peak signal to noise ratio(PSNR) advance just by one iteration of the BM3 D algorithm.     

Study on Oxidation Activity of CuCeZrO<Subscript><Emphasis Type="Italic">x</Emphasis></Subscript> Doped with K for Diesel Engine Particles in NO/O<Subscript>2</Subscript>

CuCeZrO_x and KCuCeZrO_x catalysts were synthesized and coated on the blank diesel particulate filter (DPF) substrate and a particulate matter (PM) loading apparatus was used for soot loading. The catalytic performances of soot oxidation were evaluated by temperature programmed combustion (TPC) test and characterization tests were conducted to investigate the physicochemical properties of the catalysts. The reaction mechanism in the oxidation process was analyzed with diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy. The results demonstrated that CuCeZrO_x catalyst exhibited high activities of soot oxidation at low temperature and the best results have been attained with Cu_0.9Ce_0.05Zr_0.05O_x over which the maximum soot oxidation rate decreased to 410 °C. Characterization tests have shown that catalysts containing 90% Cu have uniformly distributed grains and small particle sizes, which provide excellent oxidation activity by providing more active sites and forming a good bond between the catalyst and the soot. The low-temperature oxidation activity of soot could be further optimized due to the excellent elevated NO’s conversion rate by partially substituting Cu with K. The maximum particle oxidation rate can be easily realized at such a low temperature as 347°C.     

Vehicle trajectory challenge in predictive active steering rollover prevention

High center of mass vehicles are likely to rollover in extreme maneuvers. Available works present control strategies to prevent rollover. In these works, however, other important parameters such as path trajectory tracking are not a main concern. In this paper conflicts between rollover prevention and trajectory tracking is investigated. Model predictive control (MPC) is adopted to predict and avoid rollover while tracking desired trajectory. For this regard a model based future error estimation is introduced. The control framework predicts both rollover and trajectory error simultaneously. It avoids rollover while tries to track the trajectory. Simulation results for two controllers with and without trajectory tracking are presented. The results indicate that the controllers effectively limit rollover as a hard constraint while the trajectory tracking controller also minimizes and recovers the path error.