Temporal and spatial variation in allocating annual traffic activity across an urban region and implications for air quality assessments

Patterns of traffic activity, including changes in the volume and speed of vehicles, vary over time and across urban areas and can substantially affect vehicle emissions of air pollutants. Time-resolved activity at the street scale typically is derived using temporal allocation factors (TAFs) that allow the development of emissions inventories needed to predict concentrations of traffic-related air pollutants. This study examines the spatial and temporal variation of TAFs, and characterizes prediction errors resulting from their use. Methods are presented to estimate TAFs and their spatial and temporal variability and used to analyze total, commercial and non-commercial traffic in the Detroit, Michigan, U.S. metropolitan area. The variability of total volume estimates, quantified by the coefficient of variation (COV) representing the percentage departure from expected hourly volume, was 21%, 33%, 24% and 33% for weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, respectively. Prediction errors mostly resulted from hour-to-hour variability on weekdays and Saturdays, and from day-to-day variability on Sundays and holidays. Spatial variability was limited across the study roads, most of which were large freeways. Commercial traffic had different temporal patterns and greater variability than non-commercial vehicle traffic, e.g., the weekday variability of hourly commercial volume was 28%. The results indicate that TAFs for a metropolitan region can provide reasonably accurate estimates of hourly vehicle volume on major roads. While vehicle volume is only one of many factors that govern on-road emission rates, air quality analyses would be strengthened by incorporating information regarding the uncertainty and variability of traffic activity.     

Generation and recovery of airborne delays in air transport

The analysis of the causes behind the appearance and propagation of delays is one of the major topics inside Air Transport Management research. Existing research focuses by and large on Air Traffic Flow Management regulations and reactionary delays; less attention has been devoted to the study of the mechanisms governing the generation and absorption of delays while airborne, in spite of their important economical and environmental consequences. Here we present a methodology to detect delay-generating events, based on the comparison of planned and real trajectories; these events are then used to characterise several aspects of the dynamics of the system, e.g. its resilience. We apply this methodology to a historical data set of flights crossing the European airspace during 2011, and observe an overall resilient system, able to absorb as much delays as it generates; yet resilience is not constant, but strongly depends on the phase of the flight, and shows high spatial and temporal heterogeneities. We anticipate the proposed methodology to open new doors for the development of a better systemic performance, by enabling the characterisation and understanding of this fundamental type of delay.     

A ‘sustainability window’ of urban form

With global environmental change and the rise of global megacities, environmental and social externalities of urban systems, and especially of urban form, become increasingly prevalent. The question of optimal urban form has been debated and investigated by different disciplines in numerous contexts, including those of transport costs, land consumption and congestion. Here we elucidate theoretically how urban form and the urban transport system systematically modifies sustainability concerns, such as greenhouse gas emissions, local air pollution and congestion. We illustrate our analytical considerations with empirical analysis. Denser urban form would almost unambiguously mitigate climate change, but it would also lead to undesired effects, such as a higher proportion of urban dwellers affected by air pollution. Our study presents a ‘sustainability window’ by highlighting trade-offs between these sustainability concerns as a function of urban form. Only a combination of transportation policies, infrastructure investments and progressive public finance enables the development of cities that perform well in several sustainability dimensions. We estimate that a residential population density between 50 and 150 persons/ha and a modal share of environmental modes above at least 50% corresponds to the sustainability window of urban form. The parameters of the sustainability window of urban form is subject to policy changes and technological progress.     

Route structures in air transportation—the situation in the federal republic of Germany

This paper deals with route structures in air transportation in general and describes the derivation of such structures. Based on an extensive analysis of scheduled air traffic in Germany, an overview of the situation in domestic and international air travel is given. In particular, relationships were found which permit—in connection with a number of influencing factors—to derive from the present situation route structures, which are also valid for a future year.

This approach was used for the assignment of origin‐destination‐passenger flows to air network routes in a forecast of demand and services in commercial air transportation of the Federal Republic of Germany for the year 1995.     

The time slot allocation problem under uncertain capacity

This paper presents two stochastic programming models for the allocation of time slots over a network of airports. The proposed models address three key issues. First, they provide an optimization tool to allocate time slots, which takes several operational aspects and airline preferences into account; second, they execute the process on a network of airports; and third they explicitly include uncertainty. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first models for time slot allocation to consider both the stochastic nature of capacity reductions and the problem’s network structure. From a practical viewpoint, the proposed models provide important insights for the allocation of time slots. Specifically, they highlight the tradeoff between the schedule/request discrepancies, i.e., the time difference between allocated time slots and airline requests, and operational delays. Increasing schedule/request discrepancies enables a reduction in operational delays. Moreover, the models are computationally viable. A set of realistic test instances that consider the scheduling of four calendar days on different European airport networks has been solved within reasonable – for the application’s context – computation times. In one of our test instances, we were able to reduce the sum of schedule/request discrepancies and operational delays by up to 58%. This work provides slot coordinators with a valuable decision making tool, and it indicates that the proposed approach is very promising and may lead to relevant monetary savings for airlines and aircraft operators.     

Interactive image-based information visualization for aircraft trajectory analysis

Objectives: The objective of the presented work is to present novel methods for big data exploration in the Air Traffic Control (ATC) domain. Data is formed by sets of airplane trajectories, or trails, which in turn records the positions of an aircraft in a given airspace at several time instants, and additional information such as flight height, speed, fuel consumption, and metadata (e.g. flight ID). Analyzing and understanding this time-dependent data poses several non-trivial challenges to information visualization.Materials and methods: To address this Big Data challenge, we present a set of novel methods to analyze aircraft trajectories with interactive image-based information visualization techniques.As a result, we address the scalability challenges in terms of data manipulation and open questions by presenting a set of related visual analysis methods that focus on decision-support in the ATC domain. All methods use image-based techniques, in order to outline the advantages of such techniques in our application context, and illustrated by means of use-cases from the ATC domain.Results: For each considered use-case, we outline the type of questions posed by domain experts, data involved in addressing these questions, and describe the specific image-based techniques we used to address these questions. Further, for each of the proposed techniques, we describe the visual representation and interaction mechanisms that have been used to address the above-mentioned goals. We illustrate these use-cases with real-life datasets from the ATC domain, and show how our techniques can help end-users in the ATC domain discover new insights, and solve problems, involving the presented datasets.     

负离子发生器车内微颗粒净化效率研究

由于汽车的普及,车内的空气质量引发消费者越来越多的关注。糟糕的车内空气质量会增大人们罹患某种特定疾病的概率,因此控制与减少车内空气污染成为汽车生产设计商所追求的目标。微颗粒污染物,即PM2.5是车内空气污染物的重要来源之一。负离子因能有效沉降空气中的微颗粒,成为车内快速去除微颗粒污染的重要手段。在文章中,我们通过在车内进行微颗粒沉降实验,记录微颗粒物浓度在负离子仪以及车内空调内/外循环净化模式下的变化,并通过SPSS与MATLAB对污染物浓度进行数学建模分析。结果表明:单独使用负离子仪器并无法有效降低车内空气的颗粒浓度,而必须配合车内空气循环系统。在负离子作用下,结合车内空气循环系统,微颗粒浓度迅速下降,下降速度与空气交换速度和微颗粒在空气中的迁移速度相关。     

Experimental and numerical investigations on laser-welded corrugated-core sandwich panels subjected to air blast loading

Experimental investigations on the laser-welded triangular corrugated core sandwich panels and equivalent solid plates subjected to air blast loading are presented. The experiments were conducted in an explosion tank considering three levels of blast loading. Results show that the maximum deflection, core web buckling and core compaction increased as the decrease of stand-off distance. Back face deflections of sandwich panels were found to be nearly half that of equivalent solid plates at the stand-off distances of 100 mm and 150 mm. At the closest stand-off distance of 50 mm, the panel was found to fracture and fail catastrophically. Autodyn-based numerical simulations were conducted to investigate the dynamic response of sandwich panels. A good agreement was observed between the numerical calculations and experimental results. The model captured most of the deformation/failure modes of panels. Finally, the effects of face sheet thickness and core web thickness on the dynamic response of sandwich panel were discussed.     

轻型客车驾驶室除霸分析

随着我国汽车安全法规的完善,国家对汽车风窗玻璃除霜系统的性能要求及试验方法做了严格规定。运用Fluent软件,采用k-ε的RNG数学模型对某轻型客车前除霜系统进行了流场和温度场的模拟,找出了除霜风道设计上的不足,给出了相关的改进建议。改进后的除霜性能高于相关的国家标准,虚拟分析结果与实际环模试验结果比较吻合,该分析方法的应用有效地缩短了空调系统的设计开发周期．     

考虑改航策略的终端区到达航班优化调度模型及算法研究

在恶劣天气条件下,仅采用调速与空中等待等传统的流量管理方法将导致终端区到达航班大量延误.为此,需要研究恶劣天气下航班改航策略,并将其与传统流量管理方法结合起来.文章引入改航航班等待时间这一决策变量,建立了考虑改航策略的到达航班优化调度模型,并根据航班实际改航情况,对模型进行了简化处理,采用改进遗传算法对模型进行求解.对...