Brittleness analysis and important nodes discovery in large time-evolving complex networks

The brittleness analysis and important nodes detection have been a hot spot in the complex networks. How to get the overall feature of the whole network and how to find out some important nodes are requisites to solve these problems. In this paper, we adopt the trace of the adjacency matrix and the centrality of the complex networks to give a quantitative and qualitative analysis of networks being studied. Results show that the k-shell plays a more important role than the degree centrality and the betweenness in finding important nodes, and it can also be used to give direction on the immunization and maintenance of complex networks.     

The dredging dilemma: Economic development and environmental protection in Oakland Harbor

Abstract

Seaport expansion often generates tensions between the national interest in efficient transport and local interests in water quality and habitat preservation. The governing American permitting system, however, establishes an extraordinarily cumbersome, legalistic, and costly method for balancing environmental and economic considerations. A case study of the Port of Oakland illustrates the tendency. For four years, plans to find an environmentally acceptable site for dredged material have been stymied by a sequence of inconclusive regulatory and judicial proceedings. Meanwhile, large container ships can enter and leave Oakland harbor only at high tide, and not fully loaded. Despite the absence of any authoritative determination concerning environmental risks, the port was compelled to accede to progressively more expensive disposal methods. Such “adversarial legalism”; is not unique to the Oakland harbor case, but recurs in other policy spheres. It stems from a governmental structure that fragments decision‐making power among many agencies, that constrains regulatory discretion with legal demands for scientific certainty, and that by allowing agency decisions to be challenged readily in court, encourages legalistic defensiveness and extortion rather than compromise. The article concludes with a discussion of the conditions under which regional planning bodies might overcome these centrifugal tendencies.     

The cost saving potential of carsharing in a US context

Carsharing is a vehicle sharing service for those with occasional need of private transportation. Transportation planners are beginning to see great potential for carsharing in helping to create a more diversified and sustainable transport system. While it has grown quickly in the US in recent years, it is still far from the level where it can deliver significant aggregate benefits. A key element to the potential growth of carsharing is its ability to provide cost savings to those who adopt it in favor of vehicle ownership. This research seeks to quantify these potential cost savings. The costs of carsharing and vehicle ownership are compared based on actual vehicle usage patterns from a large survey of San Francisco Bay Area residents. The results of this analysis show that a significant minority of Bay Area households own a vehicle with a usage pattern that carsharing could accommodate at a lower cost. Further research is required to indentify how these cost savings translate to the adoption of carsharing.     

An improved formulation for bulk cargo ship scheduling with a single loading port

This paper presents an improved, significantly more efficient formulation of an existing model for bulk cargo or semi-bulk cargo ship scheduling problems with a single loading port. The original model, published by Ronen in 1986, was formulated as a non-linear, mixed integer program. In this work, the authors were able to re-formulate it into a linear one, by eliminating all the non-linearities of the original model. In addition, this model has far fewer integer variables than the original one. A numerical example has been given to illustrate the elimination of non-linearities and how 40 integer variables, in the original model, are reduced to just eight. This example also shows that this model is better at finding exact optimal solutions than the original one. It is also worth observing that the resulting model is a generalization of the ‘capacitated facility location problem’.     

Ecological and economic principles in park planning: The Assateague national seashore model

Abstract

The National Park Service is required by law to conserve nationally significant resources for public benefit. Susceptibility to local short‐term economic pressures and a lack of understanding of resource dynamics can jeopardize mandate compliance. Assateague National Seashore is an example of a dynamic barrier island where early understanding of ecologic factors should have preceded its establishment and must precede its management and development. Research conducted on a similar system has demonstrated the dramatic environmental impacts and high maintenance costs associated with an inappropriate recreation management scheme. Alternatives are available which minimize resource degradation and maintenance costs without restricting visitation. To better ensure incorporation of long‐run ecologic and economic criteria into the decision‐making process, a proposal is put forward which recognizes the need for an expanded research effort and close adherence to early planning steps.     

The design of a terminal for dangerous goods

This paper aims at examining the possibility of setting up a model terminal for the transportation of dangerous goods. It should be designed in such a manner that its use would be possible for any kind of transportation.

This consideration has been prompted by the interface between transportation planning and technology, as well as by the tendency for harmonizing international recommendations pertaining to the transportation and handling of dangerous goods, especially during the last decades where unified transport has gained ground due to the advantages provided for the safe consignment of dangerous cargoes.

Since the large increase in terminal productivity is due to the heavy investments that were effected in terminal installations and to the modernization of the administration‐management of terminals, a mathematical simulation has been adopted to assist the determination of the capacity of a terminal for dangerous goods.

It is evident that different criteria and various assumptions have been taken into account in order to facilitate a deeper analysis, without ignoring the contribution of dangerous goods to the socio‐economic development.

From the outset of the study, it was already clear that the said process will make it possible to present—as a model—a simple but well defined situation for the purpose of drawing useful conclusions.     

Certificateless message recovery signatures providing girault’s level-3 security

A digital signature with message recovery is a signature that the message itself (or partial of the message) is not required to be transmitted together with the signature. It has the advantage of small data size of communication comparing with the traditional digital signatures. In this paper, combining both advantages of the message recovery signatures and the certificateless cryptography, we propose the first certificatelss signature scheme with message recovery. The remarkable feature of our scheme is that it can achieve Girault’s Level-3 security while the conventional certificateless signature scheme only achieves Level-2 security. The security of the scheme is rigorously proved in the random oracle model based on the hardness of the k bilinear Diffie-Hellman inverse (k-BDHI) problem.     

Joint user and antenna selection for multiuser MIMO downlink with block diagonalization

User selection is necessary for multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink systems with block diagonalization (BD) due to the limited free spatial transmit dimensions. The pure user selection algorithms can be improved by performing receive antenna selection (RAS) to increase sum rate. In this paper, a joint user and antenna selection algorithm, which performs user selection for sum rate maximization in the first stage and then performs antenna selection in the second stage, is proposed. The antenna selection process alternately drops one antenna with the poorest channel quality based on maximum determinant ranking (MDR) from the users selected during the first stage and activates one antenna with the maximum norm of projected channel from the remaining users. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the algorithm only performing user selection as well as the algorithm combining user selection with MDR receive antenna selection in terms of sum rate.     

3D human motion tracking by using interactive multiple models

Of different model-based methods in vision based human tracking, many state of the art works focus on the stochastic optimization method to search in a very high dimensional space and try to find the optimal solution according to a proper likelihood function. Seldom works perform a framework of interactive multiple models (IMM) to track a human for challenging problems, such as uncertainty of motion styles, imprecise detection of feature points and ambiguity of joint location. This paper presents a two-layer filter framework based on IMM to track human motion. First, a method of model based points location is proposed to detect key feature points automatically and the filter in the first layer is performed to estimate the undetected points. Second, multiple models of motion are learned by the prior motion data with ridge regression and the IMM algorithm is used to estimate the quaternion vectors of joints rotation. Finally, experiments using real images sequences, simulation videos and 3D voxel data demonstrate that this human tracking framework is efficient.     

Characteristics of premium transit services that affect mode choice

This research seeks to improve the understanding of the full range of determinants for mode choice behavior and to offer practical solutions to practitioners on representing and distinguishing these characteristics in travel demand forecasting models. The principal findings were that the representation of awareness of transit services is significantly different than the underlying assumption of mode choice and forecasting models that there is perfect awareness and consideration of all modes. Furthermore, inclusion of non-traditional transit attributes and attitudes can improve mode choice models and reduce bias constants. Additional methods and analyses are necessary to bring these results into practice. The work is being conducted in two phases. This paper documents the results of Phase I, which included data collection for one case study city (Salt Lake City), research and analysis of non-traditional transit attributes in mode choice models, awareness of transit services, and recommendations for bringing these analyses into practice. Phase II will include data collection for two additional case study cities (Chicago and Charlotte) with minor modifications based on limitations identified in Phase I, additional analyses where Phase I results indicated a need, and a demonstration of the research in practice for at least one case study city.