scholarly journals Performance of slope stabilization trials on the road network of Laos

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. qjegh2020-064 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Hearn ◽  
J. Howell ◽  
T. Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Slope Stabilization ◽  
The Road ◽  
Engineering Measures ◽  
Ground Conditions ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Bioengineering Techniques ◽  
Future Practice ◽  
Heavy Rains

Landslides pose significant hazards on the road network of Laos. These landslides frequently block access and occasionally result in the subsidence or loss of the carriageway. Several slope stabilization trials focusing on the use of bioengineering techniques and low-cost engineering measures were implemented in 2007 and 2008. Heavy rains in 2018 caused numerous landslides on the road network and a review was undertaken of the performance of the slope stabilization trial sites implemented ten years earlier. The outcome has proved very positive overall and vindicates the efforts made to understand the causes and mechanisms of the observed slope failures and the ground conditions that pertained. The outcomes of this research have been used to strengthen practice in Laos, and further afield, and to provide a valuable basis for future practice.

scholarly journals Raspberry Pi-Based Low-Cost Connected Device for Assessing Road Surface Friction

Electronics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 341 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miha Ambrož ◽  
Uroš Hudomalj ◽  
Alexander Marinšek ◽  
Roman Kamnik
Keyword(s):  
Traffic Safety ◽  
Road Network ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Measurement Data ◽  
Automatic Measurement ◽  
Raspberry Pi ◽  
Measuring Device ◽  
The Road ◽  
Measuring Devices ◽  
On The Road

Measuring friction between the tyres of a vehicle and the road, often and on as many locations on the road network as possible, can be a valuable tool for ensuring traffic safety. Rather than by using specialised equipment for sequential measurements, this can be achieved by using several low-cost measuring devices on vehicles that travel on the road network as part of their daily assignments. The presented work proves the hypothesis that a low cost measuring device can be built and can provide measurement results comparable to those obtained from expensive specialised measuring devices. As a proof of concept, two copies of a prototype device, based on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer, have been developed, built and tested. They use accelerometers to measure vehicle braking deceleration and include a global positioning receiver for obtaining the geolocation of each test. They run custom-developed data acquisition software on the Linux operating system and provide automatic measurement data transfer to a server. The operation is controlled by an intuitive user interface consisting of two illuminated physical pushbuttons. The results show that for braking tests and friction coefficient measurements the developed prototypes compare favourably to a widely used professional vehicle performance computer.

Road Maintenance with Opti-Grade®: Maintaining Road Networks to Achieve the Best Value

2003 ◽  
Vol 1819 (1) ◽  
pp. 282-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Brown ◽  
Steve Mercier ◽  
Yves Provencher
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Travel Speed ◽  
Road Maintenance ◽  
Engineering Research ◽  
The Road ◽  
Road Management ◽  
Lack Of Information ◽  
Degradation Models ◽  
On The Road

Road management systems rely on the availability of quality information to make good decisions. A lack of information on the condition of the Canadian forest industry’s unpaved road network led to inappropriate management decisions. To fill this information gap the Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada (FERIC) developed the Opti-Grade road management system. Opti-Grade is a low-cost tool that provides information about the road roughness and travel speed as the equipped road user’s vehicle travels on the road network. This information can then be used to focus grading activities where they will have the greatest impact on the road condition for the money invested. Further, over time, a history of the behavior of the roads can be built. With this history, degradation models can quickly and easily be produced to see which segments of the road network degrade the quickest and the most frequently. Problem segments can be identified. Valuable road evaluation budgets can then be focused on those sections to determine the cause of the problem. That will allow precious rehabilitation budgets to be focused where they can have the greatest impact. Opti-Grade is currently used by a large sector of FERIC member forest companies with payback periods shorter than 4 months. FERIC continues to improve the software to manage the data from the Opti-Grade system and increase the abilities of the decision support tools in the software.

scholarly journals Politics, industry, and tourism: The conceptual construction of the blue highway

2020 ◽  
pp. 002252662097950
Author(s):  
Fredrik Bertilsson
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Power Plants ◽  
Community Building ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Road ◽  
Conceptual Construction ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Post War

This article contributes to the research on the expansion of the Swedish post-war road network by illuminating the role of tourism in addition to political and industrial agendas. Specifically, it examines the “conceptual construction” of the Blue Highway, which currently stretches from the Atlantic Coast of Norway, traverses through Sweden and Finland, and enters into Russia. The focus is on Swedish governmental reports and national press between the 1950s and the 1970s. The article identifies three overlapping meanings attached to the Blue Highway: a political agenda of improving the relationships between the Nordic countries, industrial interests, and tourism. Political ambitions of Nordic community building were clearly pronounced at the onset of the project. Industrial actors depended on the road for the building of power plants and dams. The road became gradually more connected with the view of tourism as the motor of regional development.

scholarly journals THE PENETRATION OF ENGINEERING BY ECONOMICS: McFADDEN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF ROAD DEMAND ESTIMATION

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-278
Author(s):  
Ariane Dupont-Kieffer ◽  
Sylvie Rivot ◽  
Jean-Loup Madre
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Road Construction ◽  
Demand Estimation ◽  
Demand Modeling ◽  
The Road ◽  
Collective Decisions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
On The Road ◽  
The 1960S

The golden age of road demand modeling began in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in the face of major road construction needs. These macro models, as well as the econometrics and the data to be processed, were provided mainly by engineers. A division of tasks can be observed between the engineers in charge of estimating the flows within the network and the transport economists in charge of managing these flows once they are on the road network. Yet the inability to explain their decision-making processes and individual drives gave some room to economists to introduce economic analysis, so as to better understand individual or collective decisions between transport alternatives. Economists, in particular Daniel McFadden, began to offer methods to improve the measure of utility linked to transport and to inform the engineering approach. This paper explores the challenges to the boundaries between economics and engineering in road demand analysis.

CASA: An Alternative Smartphone-Based ADAS

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-41
Author(s):  
Manolo Dulva Hina ◽  
Hongyu Guan ◽  
Assia Soukane ◽  
Amar Ramdane-Cherif
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Electronic System ◽  
Time Data ◽  
Case Scenario ◽  
Safe Driving ◽  
The Road ◽  
Driving Assistance ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Driving Assistance System

Advanced driving assistance system (ADAS) is an electronic system that helps the driver navigate roads safely. A typical ADAS, however, is suited to specific brands of vehicle and, due to proprietary restrictions, has non-extendable features. Project CASA is an alternative, low-cost generic ADAS. It is an app deployable on smartphone or tablet. The real-time data needed by the app to make sense of its environment are stored in the vehicle or on the cloud, and are accessible as web services. They are used to determine the current driving context, and, if needed, decide actions to prevent an accident or keep road navigation safe. Project CASA is an undertaking of a consortium of industrial and academic partners. A use case scenario is tested in the laboratory (virtual) and on the road (actual) to validate the appropriateness of CASA. It is a contribution to safe driving. CASA’s contribution also lies in its approach in the semantic modeling of the context of the environment, the vehicle and the driver, and on the modeling of rules for fusion of data and fission process yielding an action to be implemented. In addition, CASA proposes a secured means of transmitting data using light, via light fidelity (LiFi), itself an alternative means of wireless vehicle–smartphone communication.

scholarly journals Measures to optimize traffic and the environment. Calculations of environmental safety on a given section of the Rostov-on-Don road network

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-77
Author(s):  
R. S. Durov ◽  
◽  
E. V. Varnakova ◽  
K. O. Kobzev ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Road Network ◽  
Road Transport ◽  
Environmental Safety ◽  
Environmental Indicators ◽  
Nox Emissions ◽  
The Road ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Reduce Emissions ◽  
On The Road ◽  
State Of The Environment

Introduction. One of the most pressing socio-economic problems is the state of the environment, which affects the living conditions of many people. The article deals with the problem areas of the intersection of 20-ya Liniya street – Sholokhov Avenue in Rostov-on-Don. Problem Statement. The purpose of this paper is to improve environmental safety at the intersection of 20-ya Liniya street – Sholokhov Avenue in Rostov-on-Don by reducing emissions from road transport through the proposed measures to reorganize traffic on this section of the road network. Theoretical Part. The article provides an assessment of environmental and road safety on the road network section before applying the proposed measures. The measures are listed and justified that would help improve the conditions for road transport at the selected intersection and reduce emissions from road transport, which would improve environmental safety. The calculation of environmental indicators was made after the proposed measures to reduce NOx emissions by cars. Conclusion. The article analyzes the environmental indicators before and after the events, and then compares them. Based on the analysis and calculations, it is determined how much the proposed measures to optimize traffic will help reduce NOx emissions by cars.

scholarly journals Two-Layer Routing for High-Voltage Powerline Inspection by Cooperated Ground Vehicle and Drone

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yao Liu ◽  
Jianmai Shi ◽  
Zhong Liu ◽  
Jincai Huang ◽  
Tianren Zhou
Keyword(s):  
High Voltage ◽  
Road Network ◽  
Inspection System ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Technical Improvement ◽  
Routing Problem ◽  
Ground Vehicle ◽  
The Road ◽  
Battery Capacity ◽  
On The Road

A novel high-voltage powerline inspection system is investigated, which consists of the cooperated ground vehicle and drone. The ground vehicle acts as a mobile platform that can launch and recycle the drone, while the drone can fly over the powerline for inspection within limited endurance. This inspection system enables the drone to inspect powerline networks in a very large area. Both vehicle’ route in the road network and drone’s routes along the powerline network have to be optimized for improving the inspection efficiency, which generates a new two-layer point-arc routing problem. Two constructive heuristics are designed based on “Cluster First, Rank Second” and “Rank First, Split Second”. Then local search strategies are developed to further improve the quality of the solution. To test the performance of the proposed algorithms, practical cases with different-scale are designed based on the road network and powerline network of Ji’an, China. Sensitivity analysis on the parameters related with the drone’s inspection speed and battery capacity is conducted. Computational results indicate that technical improvement on the inspection sensor is more important for the cooperated ground vehicle and drone system.

scholarly journals Analysis of Traffic Evolution on Road Networks of a Roundabout

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Tolesa Hundesa Muleta ◽  
Legesse Lemecha Obsu
Keyword(s):  
Traffic Congestion ◽  
Road Network ◽  
Road Networks ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Traffic Dynamics ◽  
Demand And Supply ◽  
The Road ◽  
On The Road ◽  
Detailed Mathematical Analysis ◽  
Control Traffic

In this paper, the analyses of traffic evolution on the road network of a roundabout having three entrances and three exiting legs are conducted from macroscopic point of view. The road networks of roundabouts are modeled as a merging and diverging types 1×2 and 2×1 junctions. To study traffic evolution at junction, two cases have been considered, namely, demand and supply limited cases. In each case, detailed mathematical analysis and numerical tests have been presented. The analysis in the case of demand limited showed that rarefaction wave fills the portion of the road network in time. In the contrary, in supply limited case, traffic congestion occurs at merging junctions and shock wave propagating back results in reducing the performance of a roundabout to control traffic dynamics. Also, we illustrate density and flux profiles versus space discretization at different time steps via numerical simulation with the help of Godunov scheme.

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