Establishment of Community Managed Fisheries’ Closures in Kenya: Early Evolution of the Tengefu Movement

Community-based management (CBM) could be an essential tool to prevent the depletion of marine resources in the Western Indian Ocean region. In Kenya, political pressure to strengthen local governance, has led to adoption of CBM as a way of reducing over-exploitation and managing the competing uses and impacts on the marine environment. Several communities in Kenya have embraced CBM and have set aside or closed previously fished areas to enhance recovery of fisheries and biodiversity. These community fisheries closures (locally called tengefu), despite being degraded, may recover to finfish abundances and biodiversity levels similar to established MPAs or above thresholds for maintaining some ecological services. Communities see their direct involvement and control of these tengefu as more likely to result in benefits flowing directly to them. Community closures are also important for articulating and resolving community values and strengthening their management capacity. Here, we describe the evolution of the tengefu movement in Kenya and combine information from focus group discussions, interviews, underwater surveys and boundary marking to evaluate the current status, opportunities and challenges facing these tengefu. We show that in some cases community closures suffer from slow and incomplete national and local legislative processes, challenges to compliance, and weak management.     

Socially optimal electric driving range of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

This study determines the optimal electric driving range of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) that minimizes the daily cost borne by the society when using this technology. An optimization framework is developed and applied to datasets representing the US market. Results indicate that the optimal range is 16 miles with an average social cost of $3.19 per day when exclusively charging at home, compared to $3.27 per day of driving a conventional vehicle. The optimal range is found to be sensitive to the cost of battery packs and the price of gasoline. When workplace charging is available, the optimal electric driving range surprisingly increases from 16 to 22 miles, as larger batteries would allow drivers to better take advantage of the charging opportunities to achieve longer electrified travel distances, yielding social cost savings. If workplace charging is available, the optimal density is to deploy a workplace charger for every 3.66 vehicles. Moreover, the diversification of the battery size, i.e., introducing a pair and triple of electric driving ranges to the market, could further decrease the average societal cost per PHEV by 7.45% and 11.5% respectively.     

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.     

大城市中小学周边地区交通拥堵问题分析与解决策略

交通拥堵已经成为我国大城市的一种社会问题,它与每一个人都息息相关,如何更好地处理这种问题,使其减少对人们出行的影响,成为值得每一个人思考的问题。针对大中型城市中的交通拥堵其中的一种现象进行深入的剖析,系统介绍交通拥堵的成因,有针对性地提出如何改善中小学周边地区交通拥堵现象的一些观点和做法。     

Design,analysis and performance evaluation of a third order distributed protocol for platooning in the presence of time-varying delays and switching topologies

This paper is concerned with the problem of designing a decentralized consensus protocol for platooning of non-identical vehicles in the presence of heterogeneous time-varying communication delays. The proposed control protocol makes use of a state feedback and to this aim drivetrain dynamics are modeled as third-order linear systems. Necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence and exponential stability, derived by using an appropriate Krasovskii functional, demonstrate the ability of the platoon in reaching the required regime with an exponentially bounded behavior. The proposed LMI-based approach allows to estimate both delay margin and decay rate. Moreover, convergence is proven under switching communication network topologies by means of a Lyapunov-Razumikhin function, and the assessment of a string stable behavior has been also theoretically investigated. High-fidelity simulations with Plexe show the effectiveness of the theoretical results in different driving conditions and in the presence of external disturbances and communication impairment. Different communication channel models are used in the validation stage to further prove robustness of the proposed methodology with respect hard delay and packets losses.     

Investigating Causal Pathways Linking Site-Level Characteristics,Compliance, and Ecological Performance in Caribbean MPAs

A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence has linked improved ecological performance of social–ecological systems (SES) with better compliance with rules governing human activities. Researchers have proposed several key factors that motivate an individual to comply with resource use rules, including deterrence, social pressures, moral inclinations, and perceived legitimacy of rules and responsible authorities. Much of the research on compliance proposes causal mechanisms at the individual human level, but few studies test causal paths with empirical data particularly at the site level. This study tested a proposed pathway for explaining overall compliance rates and ecological performance in SES using data from structured surveys of community members, key informant interviews, policy documents, and coral reef surveys at marine protected areas (MPAs) and their associated human communities in the wider Caribbean. Findings indicate that compliance and other active MPA management interventions positively affect ecological performance, and site-level contextual factors (level of community development and being part of a political network) positively influence significant predictors of overall compliance rates, which include active MPA management and enforced punishments.     

Plate scanning tools to obtain travel times in traffic networks

The management of vehicle travel times has been shown to be fundamental to traffic network analysis. To collect travel time measurement, some methods focus solely on isolated links or highway segments, and where two measurement points, at the beginning and at the end of a section, are deemed sufficient to evaluate users' travel time. However, in many cases, transport studies involve networks in which the problem is more complex. This article takes advantage of the plate scanning technique to propose an algorithm that minimizes the required number of registering devices and their location in order to identify vehicles candidates to compute the travel times of a given set of routes (or subroutes). The merits of the proposed method are explained using simple examples and are illustrated by its application to the real network of Ciudad Real.     

珠三角科技型小微企业协同创新网络的构建

珠三角地区作为我国重要的城市群之一,拥有众多的小微企业,这些企业的发展模式受到大家重视和关注。文中首先分析了珠三角科技型小微企业协同创新存在的问题,提出协同创新网络的构建是解决当前一些问题的有效措施;其次,在协同创新网络的构建中,分析了构建的主体要素、构建的模式、构建的过程和具体的构建框架;最后分析了构建后的协同创新网络的特征。     

基于神经网络和遗传算法的系泊线长度参数优化

摘 要: 针对多成分系泊线三段长度如何取值的问题,采用一种基于神经网络和遗传算法对深海多成分锚泊系统长度进行优化。应用AQWA软件计算多点系泊FPSO,其时域结果直接用于训练BP神经网络。从而利用神经网络的非线性映射功能构建替代锚泊时域计算网络,大大缩短了优化所需的时间。以FPSO最小平面运动值为目标函数,锚链破断强度作为约束条件,采用遗传算法优化系泊长度。计算结果表明,与传统设计的锚泊长度相比,优化后FPSO在各个浪向下纵荡横荡值均能减少20%以上。 关键词:系泊;神经网络;遗传算法;优化     

基于无线传感器网络的运动目标检测动态聚类图

有效的目标跟踪需要积极的传感器节点对运动目标群实行跟踪。与单目标跟踪相比,聚类在效能上有显著提高。本文提出准确的相干和非相干运动模式下目标的聚类,采用隐式动态时间框架来评估在创建连接组件加权图的目标关系史。该算法采用目标跟踪中定位算法的关键特征,即估计当前和预测的位置来确定移动目标的方向和距离的关系。模拟结果显示,通过动态调整历史窗口大小和预测目标之间的关系,可以显著提高聚类的准确性并减少运算时间。