Integrated approach to determine highway flooding and critical points of drainage

Among the natural hazards that threaten transportation infrastructure, flooding represents a major hazard to highways as it challenges their design, operation, efficiency and safety. In extreme cases, it may lead to massive obstruction of traffic and direct damages to the road structures themselves and indirect damages to the economic activity and development of the region. To enable the prevention of such consequences, and the proposition of adaptive measures for existing infrastructure, this paper presents an integrated framework to identify the most vulnerable points to flooding along a highway. This is done through the combination of remote sensing information (e.g. LiDAR based Digital Elevation Model, satellite imagery), a high-quality dataset, and a quasi-2D hydrodynamic model. The forcing condition is defined using a hyetograph associated to a storm with duration of 1 day and return period of 100 years. The selected highway is located in the Mexican state of Tabasco, where extreme precipitation events and floods are frequent. Results demonstrate the ability of the methodology to identify critical water levels along the road (h > 1.50 m) at those locations where flooding has been experienced, as well as points of inspection for the highway drainage. These locations were visited in the field and maintenance problems were detected that do increase its level of exposure. We show that this framework is useful for the generation of a flood management strategy to the analyzed highway, which includes an optimum location of adaptive measures to an anticipated more intense future climate.     

桥墩及桩基形式对墩底平转施工转盘设计的影响

以新建福厦(福州—厦门)高速铁路17500 t转体刚构为背景,采用实体有限元方法分析了不同桥墩类型及桩基布置对墩底平转转体中转盘受力的影响,并对桥墩及桩基进行了优化。结果表明:实体墩对上转盘受力最有利,其次是空心墩,最不利的是双薄壁墩;增加墩底实体段能够有效降低空心墩、双薄壁墩上转盘的主拉应力;随着墩底实体段高度的增加,主拉应力降低的幅度逐渐变小;球铰正下方有桩基时对下转盘底部受力更加有利;距离球铰中心越远,桩基受力越小,适当增加中桩桩径,可使各桩基应力状态更加均衡。     

Planning hierarchical urban transit systems for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions

Public transit systems with high occupancy can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions relative to low-occupancy transportation modes, but current transit systems have not been designed to reduce environmental impacts. This motivates the study of the benefits of design and operational approaches for reducing the environmental impacts of transit systems. For example, transit agencies may replace level-of-service (LOS) by vehicle miles traveled (VMT) as a criterion in evaluating design and operational changes. In previous work, we explored the unintended consequences of lowering transit LOS on emissions in a single-technology transit system. Herein, we extend the analysis to account for a more realistic case: a transit system with a hierarchical structure (trunk and feeder lines) providing service to a city where demand is elastic. By considering the interactions between the trunk and the feeder systems, we provide a quantitative basis for designing and operating integrated urban transit systems that can reduce GHG emissions and societal costs. We find that highly elastic transit demand may cancel emission reduction potentials resulting from lowering LOS, due to demand shifts to lower occupancy vehicles. However, for mass transit modes, these potentials are still significant. Transit networks with buses, bus rapid transit or light rail as trunk modes should be designed and operated near the cost-optimal point when the demand is highly elastic, while this is not required for metro. We find that the potential for unintended consequences increases with the size of the city. Our results are robust to uncertainties in the costs and emissions parameters.     

Integrated airline planning: Robust update of scheduling and fleet balancing under demand uncertainty

The airline schedule planning problem is defined as the sequence of decisions that need to be made to obtain a fully operational flight schedule. Historically, the airline scheduling problem has been sequentially solved. However, there have already been many attempts in order to obtain airline schedules in an integrated way. But due to tractability issues it is nowadays impossible to determine a fully operative and optimal schedule with an integrated model which accounts for all the key airline related aspects such as competitive effects, stochastic demand figures and uncertain operating conditions. Airlines usually develop base schedules, which are obtained much time in advance to the day of operations and not accounting for all the related uncertainty. This paper proposes a mathematical model in order to update base schedules in terms of timetable and fleet assignments while considering stochastic demand figures and uncertain operating conditions, and where robust itineraries are introduced in order to ameliorate miss-connected passengers. The proposed model leads to a large-scale problem which is difficult to be solved. Therefore, a novel improved and accelerated Benders decomposition approach is proposed. The analytical work is supported with case studies involving the Spanish legacy airline, IBERIA. The presented approach shows that the number of miss-connected passengers may be reduced when robust planning is applied.     

Methods to reduce dimensionality and identify candidate solutions in multi-objective signal timing problems

Adjusting traffic signal timings is a practical way for agencies to manage urban traffic without the need for significant infrastructure investments. Signal timings are generally selected to minimize the total control delay vehicles experience at an intersection, particularly when the intersection is isolated or undersaturated. However, in practice, there are many other potential objectives that might be considered in signal timing design, including: total passenger delay, pedestrian delays, delay inequity among competing movements, total number of stopping maneuvers, among others. These objectives do not tend to share the same relationships with signal timing plans and some of these objectives may be in direct conflict. The research proposes the use of a new multi-objective optimization (MOO) visualization technique—the mosaic plot—to easily quantify and identify significant tradeoffs between competing objectives using the set of Pareto optimal solutions that are normally provided by MOO algorithms. Using this tool, methods are also proposed to identify and remove potentially redundant or unnecessary objectives that do not have any significant tradeoffs with others in an effort to reduce problem dimensionality. Since MOO procedures will still be needed if more than one objective remains and MOO algorithms generally provide a set of candidate solutions instead of a single final solution, two methods are proposed to rank the set of Pareto optimal solutions based on how well they balance between the competing objectives to provide a final recommendation. These methods rely on converting the objectives to dimensionless values based on the optimal value for each specific objectives, which allows for direct comparison between and weighting of each. The proposed methods are demonstrated using a simple numerical example of an undersaturated intersection where all objectives can be analytically obtained. However, they can be readily applied to other signal timing problems where objectives can be obtained using simulation outputs to help identify the signal timing plan that provides the most reasonable tradeoff between competing objectives.     

The symmetric intersection design and traffic control optimization

It is well recognized that the left-turning movement reduces the intersection capacity significantly, because exclusive left turn phases are needed to discharge left turn vehicles only. This paper proposes the concept of Left-Hand Traffic (LHT) arterial, on where vehicles follow left-hand traffic rules as in England and India. The unconventional intersection where a LHT arterial intersects with a Right-Hand Traffic (RHT) arterial is named as symmetric intersection. It is only need three basic signal phases to separate all conflicts at symmetric intersection, while it at least need four signal phases at a conventional intersection. So, compared with the conventional intersection, the symmetric intersection can provide longer green time for the left-turning and the through movement, which can increase the capacity significantly. Through-movement waiting areas (TWAs) can be set at the symmetric intersection effectively, which can increase the capacity and short the cycle length furthermore. And the symmetric intersection is Channelized to improve the safety of TWAs. The Binary-Mixed-Integer-Linear-Programming (BMILP) model is employed to formulate the capacity maximization problem and signal cycle length minimization problem of the symmetric intersection. The BMILP model can be solved by standard branch-and-bound algorithms efficiently and outputs the lane allocation, signal timing decisions, and other decisions. Experiments analysis shows that the symmetric intersection with TWAs can increase the capacity and short the signal cycle length.     

连续配筋混凝土路面的技术应用

介绍连续配筋混凝土路面的基本概念,说明我国CRCP的结构设计理论和设计方法,可为该技术在我国的推广应用提供理论支撑.     

An optimal data-splitting algorithm for aircraft scheduling on a single runway to maximize throughput

In this research, we present a data-splitting algorithm to optimally solve the aircraft sequencing problem (ASP) on a single runway under both segregated and mixed-mode of operation. This problem is formulated as a 0–1 mixed-integer program (MIP), taking into account several realistic constraints, including safety separation standards, wide time-windows, and constrained position shifting, with the objective of maximizing the total throughput. Varied scenarios of large scale realistic instances of this problem, which is NP-hard in general, are computationally difficult to solve with the direct use of commercial solver as well as existing state-of-the-art dynamic programming method. The design of the algorithm is based on a recently introduced data-splitting algorithm which uses the divide-and-conquer paradigm, wherein the given set of flights is divided into several disjoint subsets, each of which is optimized using 0–1 MIP while ensuring the optimality of the entire set. Computational results show that the difficult instances can be solved in real-time and the solution is efficient in comparison to the commercial solver and dynamic programming, using both sequential, as well as parallel, implementation of this pleasingly parallel algorithm.     

基于NFFD 算法的船体几何变形技术

本文以非均匀有理B样条基函数作为参数体属性,并结合非均匀控制点网格,建立了适用于船体几何的NFFD变形技术。重点阐述了NFFD方法的基本原理和变形规则,并以矩阵表示方法为基础构建了数学模型。研究了控制点数量和分布对变形结果的影响,增加了控制点变形几何的能力并获得了更大的设计空间。最后,以某CNG运输船为例完成了球鼻艏、船艏和船艉部分几何的自动变形。本文的工作为船型优化提供了良好的变形工具。