A combined assessment of air and noise pollution on the High Line,New York City

The High Line is an elevated public park in New York City, transformed from an unused freight rail line. Pedestrians walking through Manhattan’s West Side can walk either on the High Line or on a footpath below. Using Manhattan as a laboratory, this paper offers a combined assessment of noise and particulate matter pollution for its pedestrians. Noise and PM_2.5 levels were recorded simultaneously for two cases (i) pedestrians walking on a footpath alongside road traffic and (ii) pedestrians walking on the elevated High Line. Testing took places over three days in autumn 2014. Results were analysed to investigate if pedestrians using the High Line would have a lower pollution exposure to those using the footpath below. Results showed statistically significant differences between the upper and lower levels in exposure to both pollution types. In order to quantify the overall impact, results are expressed through a combined air–noise pollution index. This index indicates that the average reduction in PM_2.5 and noise pollution along the High Line compared to the footpath below is approximately 37%.     

集美大学教学实习船“育德”轮总体设计

"育德"轮是上海船舶研究设计院为集美大学设计的用于航海专业教学实习、科学研究兼顾货物运输的教学实习船。该船是目前世界吨位最大的教学实习船,配备了功能齐全的教学设施、先进的科研设备以及舒适的学习生活环境。该船还具有安全性高、绿色环保和经济性优异等特点。     

Privacy-preserving MaaS fleet management

On-demand traffic fleet optimization requires operating Mobility as a Service (MaaS) companies such as Uber, Lyft to locally match the offer of available vehicles with their expected number of requests referred to as demand (as well as to take into account other constraints such as driver’s schedules and preferences). In the present article, we show that this problem can be encoded into a Constrained Integer Quadratic Program (CIQP) with block independent constraints that can then be relaxed in the form of a convex optimization program. We leverage this particular structure to yield a scalable distributed optimization algorithm corresponding to computing a gradient ascent in a dual space. This new framework does not require the drivers to share their availabilities with the operating company (as opposed to standard practice in today’s mobility as a service companies). The resulting parallel algorithm can run on a distributed smartphone based platform.     

Strain prediction for critical positions of FPSO under different loading of stored oil using GAIFOA-BP neural network

FPSO (floating, production, storage and offloading) units are widely used in the offshore oil and gas industry. Generally, FPSOs have excellent oil storage capacity owing to their huge oil cargo holds. The volume and distribution of stored oil in the cargo holds influence the strain level of hull girder, especially at critical positions of FPSO. However, strain prediction using structural analysis tools is computationally expensive and time consuming. In this study, a prediction tool based on back-propagation (BP) neural network called GAIFOA-BP is proposed to predict the strain values of concerned positions of an FPSO model under different oil storage conditions. The GAIFOA-BP combines BP model and GAIFOA which is a combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and an improved fruit fly optimization algorithm (IFOA). Results from three benchmark tests show that the GAIFOA-BP model has a remarkable performance. Subsequently, a total of 81 sets of training data and 25 sets of testing data are obtained from experiment using fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensors installed on the surface of an FPSO model. The numerical results show that the GAIFOA-BP is capable of predicting the strain values with higher accuracy as compared with other BP models. Finally, the reserved GAIFOA-BP model is utilized to predict the strain values under the inputs of a 10-day time series of volume and distribution of stored oil. The predicted strain results are further used to calculate the fatigue consumption of measurement points.     

横梁端部节点优化

通过有限元计算,对比几种常见的横梁端部连接方式,综合考虑结构整体强度、钢材使用量、舱室空间利用率、施工便利性等方面的影响因素,确定较优的连接过渡方式和过渡结构的参数尺寸,为船舶设计横梁端部节点形式的确定提供参考。     

智能网联车环境下高速匝道汇入车流轨迹优化模型

为了解决传统匝道控制车流汇入时车辆需要减速至停止，从而造成延误时间过长的问题，提出了一种智能网联车环境下的高速匝道汇入车辆轨迹优化的两阶段优化模型，其中，第1 阶段优化车辆进入匝道口的时序；第2 阶段基于第1 阶段的最优时序，优化车辆轨迹. 根据所构建的模型设计了一种启发式算法优化车辆通过匝道冲突区域的时序，然后结合 GPOPS工具优化车辆的轨迹.为了验证所提出方法的有效性，将所提出的方法应用到20 min 随机到达的车流，进行仿真实验.实验结果表明，与先进先出的方法相比，本文所提出的方法能够使总延误减少59.7%，总油耗减少10.5%，说明该方法能够实现车辆以较高的速度通过匝道冲突区域，有效地减少了车辆汇入延误，同时也节约了油耗.     

A cost-competitiveness analysis of charging infrastructure for electric bus operations

This study investigates the cost competitiveness of different types of charging infrastructure, including charging stations, charging lanes (via charging-while-driving technologies) and battery swapping stations, in support of an electric public transit system. To this end, we first establish mathematical models to investigate the optimal deployment of various charging facilities along the transit line and determine the optimal size of the electric bus fleet, as well as their batteries, to minimize total infrastructure and fleet costs while guaranteeing service frequency and satisfying the charging needs of the transit system. We then conduct an empirical analysis utilizing available real-world data. The results suggest that: (1) the service frequency, circulation length, and operating speed of a transit system may have a great impact on the cost competitiveness of different charging infrastructure; (2) charging lanes enabled by currently available inductive wireless charging technology are cost competitive for most of the existing bus rapid transit corridors; (3) swapping stations can yield a lower total cost than charging lanes and charging stations for transit systems with high operating speed and low service frequency; (4) charging stations are cost competitive only for transit systems with very low service frequency and short circulation; and (5) the key to making charging lanes more competitive for transit systems with low service frequency and high operating speed is to reduce their unit-length construction cost or enhance their charging power.     

A real-time adaptive signal control in a connected vehicle environment

The state of the practice traffic signal control strategies mainly rely on infrastructure based vehicle detector data as the input for the control logic. The infrastructure based detectors are generally point detectors which cannot directly provide measurement of vehicle location and speed. With the advances in wireless communication technology, vehicles are able to communicate with each other and with the infrastructure in the emerging connected vehicle system. Data collected from connected vehicles provides a much more complete picture of the traffic states near an intersection and can be utilized for signal control. This paper presents a real-time adaptive signal phase allocation algorithm using connected vehicle data. The proposed algorithm optimizes the phase sequence and duration by solving a two-level optimization problem. Two objective functions are considered: minimization of total vehicle delay and minimization of queue length. Due to the low penetration rate of the connected vehicles, an algorithm that estimates the states of unequipped vehicle based on connected vehicle data is developed to construct a complete arrival table for the phase allocation algorithm. A real-world intersection is modeled in VISSIM to validate the algorithms. Results with a variety of connected vehicle market penetration rates and demand levels are compared to well-tuned fully actuated control. In general, the proposed control algorithm outperforms actuated control by reducing total delay by as much as 16.33% in a high penetration rate case and similar delay in a low penetration rate case. Different objective functions result in different behaviors of signal timing. The minimization of total vehicle delay usually generates lower total vehicle delay, while minimization of queue length serves all phases in a more balanced way.     

Robust weekly aircraft maintenance routing problem and the extension to the tail assignment problem

In this paper, we study two closely related airline planning problems: the robust weekly aircraft maintenance routing problem (RWAMRP) and the tail assignment problem (TAP). In real life operations, the RWAMRP solution is used in tactical planning whereas the TAP solution is implemented in operational planning. The main objective of these two problems is to minimize the total expected propagated delay (EPD) of the aircraft routes. To formulate the RWAMRP, we propose a novel weekly line-of-flights (LOF) network model that can handle complex and nonlinear cost functions of EPD. Because the number of LOFs grows exponentially with the number of flights to be scheduled, we propose a two-stage column generation approach to efficiently solve large-scale real-life RWAMRPs. Because the EPD of an LOF is highly nonlinear and can be very time-consuming to accurately compute, we propose three lower bounds on the EPD to solve the pricing subproblem of the column generation. Our approach is tested on eight real-life test instances. The computational results show that the proposed approach provides very tight LP relaxation (within 0.6% of optimal solutions) and solves the test case with more than 6000 flights per week in less than three hours. We also investigate the solutions obtained by our approach over 500 simulated realizations. The simulation results demonstrate that, in all eight test instances, our solutions result in less EPDs than those obtained from traditional methods. We then extend our model and solution approach to solve realistically simulated TAP instances.     

How the environmental impact affects the design of logistics networks based on cost minimization

The degree of centralization of the logistics network is one of the important strategic decisions to take. This issue has often been studied but mainly from a cost minimization focus. This research studies the influence of incorporating the environmental impact in logistics network design models, comparing the results with those obtained considering cost minimization only. A fuzzy biobjective optimization model is used to carry out a number of experiments. By weighting the relative importance of the two objectives, the differences with respect to the base cost minimization solution can be ascertained. Our results show that in general more material is moved through warehouses when the environmental impact is considered and more decentralized facilities are opened.