Regulation of the informal transport sector in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil: welfare impacts and policy analysis

In Brazil, the explosion of informal transport activity during the past decade has had profound effects on formal public transport systems and is a source of great controversy in the urban transportation sector. A variety of policies have been proposed to manage the growth of the sector. This study seeks to understand how proposed policies will impact the users of these systems. A corridor in Rio de Janeiro with substantial informal activity was used as a case study. Measures of welfare changes in a discrete choice framework were used to estimate proposed policies’ impacts on users. Eleven candidate policies were evaluated, ranging from the eradication of the informal modes and investment in formal modes, to the legalization of the informal modes. Benefits were compared with costs and the distribution of benefits across income classes was explored. Net benefits from some policies were found to be substantial. Legalizing the informal sector was found to benefit users slightly but further investments in the sector are probably inefficient. Users benefited most from improvements in formal mass transit modes, at roughly 100–200 dollars per commuter per year. Finally, policies to foster a competitive environment for the delivery of both informal and formal services were shown to benefit users about 100 dollars per commuter per year. Together, the regulation of the informal sector and investments in the formal sector serve to reinforce the movement towards competitive concessions for services and help reduce the impacts of cartelization and costly in-road competition.

Full Duplex Communications for Next Generation Cellular Networks: The Capacity Gain

Full duplex communication highly improves spectrum efficiency of a wireless communication link. However, when it is applied to a cellular network, the capacity gain from this technology remains unknown. The reason is that full duplex communication changes the aggregate interference experienced by each communication link in cellular networks. In this paper, the capacity gain from full duplex communication is studied for cellular networks of 4G and beyond, where the same frequency channel is adopted in each cell. A two-layer Poisson point process (PPP) is adopted to model the network topology, and stochastic geometry is employed to derive the coverage probability and the average capacity of typical link in a cellular network. On the basis of these derived parameters, the capacity gain from full duplex communication is determined. Numerical results reveal that without mutual interference cancellation (MIC), the capacity gain is small under various power levels; with perfect MIC at base stations, the capacity gain can exceed 60%; with imperfect MIC at base stations, the capacity gain decreases quickly even with a slight drop of MIC performance.     

Decomposing and Cluster Refinement Design Method for Application-Specific Network-on-Chips

Along with higher and higher integration of intellectual properties (IPs) on a single chip, traditional bus-based system-on-chips (SoC) meets several design difficulties (such as low scalability, high power consumption, packet latency and clock tree problem). As a promising solution, network-on-chips (NoC) has been proposed and widely studied. In this work, a novel algorithm for NoC topology synthesis, which is decomposing and cluster refinement (DCR) algorithm, has been proposed to minimize the total power consumption of application-specific NoC. This algorithm is composed of two stages: decomposing with cluster generation, and cluster refinement. For partitioning and cluster generation, an initial low-power solution for NoC topology is generated. For cluster refinement, the clustering is optimized by performing floorplan to further reduce power consumption. Meanwhile, a good tradeoff between power consumption and CPU time can be achieved. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the existing work.     

Research on Web Page Classification Method Based on Query Log

Web page classification is an important application in many fields of Internet information retrieval, such as providing directory classification and vertical search. Methods based on query log which is a light weight version of Web page classification can avoid Web content crawling, making it relatively high in efficiency, but the sparsity of user click data makes it difficult to be used directly for constructing a classifier. To solve this problem, we explore the semantic relations among different queries through word embedding, and propose three improved graph structure classification algorithms. To reflect the semantic relevance between queries, we map the user query into the low-dimensional space according to its query vector in the first step. Then, we calculate the uniform resource locator (URL) vector according to the relationship between the query and URL. Finally, we use the improved label propagation algorithm (LPA) and the bipartite graph expansion algorithm to classify the unlabeled Web pages. Experiments show that our methods make about 20% more increase in F1-value than other Web page classification methods based on query log.     

Dynamic Behavior of Two Part Towing Cable System During Turning

An improved numerical method is used to simulate the dynamic behavior of a two part towing cable systems during turnings. In U turns and full turns, periodical heave motions are found both for the towed vehicle and for the depressor. Periodic motions of the subsea units and of the cable surface tension are closely related to the turning parameters, such as turning velocity and turning radius. System parameters, such as length of the second cable and the vehicle hydrodynamics, also damp turning instability.     

Reliability Modeling and Maintenance Policy Optimization for Deteriorating System Under Random Shock

Performance degradation and random shock are commonly regarded as two dependent competing risks for system failures. One method based on effective service age is proposed to jointly model the cumulative effect of random shock and system degradation, and the reliability model of degradation system under Nonhomogeneous Poisson processes (NHPP) shocks is derived. Under the assumption that preventive maintenance (PM) is imperfective and the corrective maintenance (CM) is minimal repair, one maintenance policy which combines PM and CM is presented. Moreover, the two decision variables, PM interval and the number of PMs before replacement, are determined by a multi-objective maintenance optimization method which simultaneously maximizes the system availability and minimizes the system long-run expect cost rate. Finally, the performance of the proposed maintenance optimization policy is demonstrated via a numerical example.     

Optimal Threshold Policies for Robust Data Center Control

With the simultaneous rise of energy costs and demand for cloud computing, efficient control of data centers becomes crucial. In the data center control problem, one needs to plan at every time step how many servers to switch on or off in order to meet stochastic job arrivals while trying to minimize electricity consumption. This problem becomes particularly challenging when servers can be of various types and jobs from different classes can only be served by certain types of server, as it is often the case in real data centers. We model this problem as a robust Markov decision process (i.e., the transition function is not assumed to be known precisely). We give sufficient conditions (which seem to be reasonable and satisfied in practice) guaranteeing that an optimal threshold policy exists. This property can then be exploited in the design of an efficient solving method, which we provide. Finally, we present some experimental results demonstrating the practicability of our approach and compare with a previous related approach based on model predictive control.     

Tool for Predicting the Ultimate Bending Moment of Ship and Ship-Shaped Hull Girders

The present paper presents a historical review associated with the research works on hull girder strength of ship and ship-shaped structures. Then, a new program is developed to determine the ultimate vertical bending moment of hull girder by applying direct method, stress distribution method, and progressive collapse analysis method. Six ships and ship-shaped structures used in the benchmark study of International Ship and Offshore Structures Congress (ISSC) in 2012 are adopted as examples. The calculation results by applying the developed program are analyzed and compared with the existing results. Finally, the roles of the developed program and its further development are discussed.