Factors Affecting Knowledge,Perceptions, and Attitudes Regarding North Carolina Coastal Reserve Management

During the period May 25–October 28, 2007, we collected data in face-to-face interviews on four sites in the North Carolina Research Reserve system. We subsequently conducted analyses on the effects of education, income, length of visitation, and frequency of visitation on visitor knowledge, perceptions, and attitudes regarding management. Visitors to the sites were well-educated, listed incomes above the state median, and were racially homogeneous. At the overall level, the majority (63%) knew who owned the sites, but only 43% correctly identified the managing agency. The majority also believed that overall conditions at the sites were stable, although those that had been visiting longer perceived conditions as deteriorating. Education was positively correlated with knowledge of ownership and management, and with support for additional rules and enforcement. Neither income, nor frequency of visitation showed any correlation with any of the dependent variables at the overall level. Some site-specific findings differed from the overall findings and varied from site to site. These differences were addressed individually.     

Reverse time-restricted shortest paths: Application to air traffic management

In this paper, we consider a particular class of network flow problems that seeks a shortest path, if it exists, between a source node s and a destination node d in a connected digraph, such that we arrive at node d at a specified time τ while leaving node s no earlier than a lower-bounding time LB, and where the availability of each network link is time-dependent in the sense that it can be traversed only during specified intervals of time. We refer to this problem as the reverse time-restricted shortest path problem (RTSP), and it arises, for example, in the context of generating flight plans within air traffic management approaches under severe convective weather conditions. We show that this problem is NP-hard in general, but is polynomially solvable under a special regularity condition. A pseudo-polynomial time dynamic programming algorithm is developed to solve Problem RTSP, along with an effective heap implementation strategy. Computational results using real flight generation test cases as well as random simulated problems are presented.