scholarly journals Design of Flexible Vehicle Scheduling Systems for Sustainable Paratransit Services

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (14) ◽  
pp. 5594
Author(s):  
Daniel Y. Mo ◽  
H. Y. Lam ◽  
Weikun Xu ◽  
G. T. S. Ho

The aging population has led to an increase in the variety and volume of transportation demands by people facing travel difficulties. Hence, transportation organisations need to provide flexible and sustainable paratransit services to meet these increasing demands. In this study, we investigate the design of flexible vehicle scheduling systems in order for a community organisation to serve more people and achieve higher operational efficiency. We analyse and propose a system design based on user requirements for different types of paratransit types. Further, we identify an integrated service option and process flow for dial-a-ride passengers to ride on a vehicle with schedule route passengers. Because this option involves a complex decision, we formulate the problem as a two-stage decision model. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed design, we perform numerical simulations and conduct a case study by collaborating with a transportation organisation. We found that the proposed system would enable the organisation to serve more people with fewer vehicles but without an increase in the travelling time. These results demonstrate the importance of a flexible vehicle scheduling system for accessible transportation organisations to sustain their service operations.

Author(s):  
CARINA ALVES ◽  
ANTHONY FINKELSTEIN

The development of COTS-based systems largely depends on the success of the selection process. This activity encompasses the evaluation of COTS packages against customer requirements, so that it is necessary to perform a complex decision-making process to select the most suitable package. We argue that analysing the matching between features and requirements is a core task of COTS decision-making. In particular, it is very likely that mismatches occur, as COTS are designed to meet very general requirements rather than specific needs. In this paper, we investigate the different types of conflicts that can arise from these mismatches. We propose a goal driven framework to deal with such conflicts. We demonstrate the approach with the mail server case study.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
John Harner ◽  
Lee Cerveny ◽  
Rebecca Gronewold

Natural resource managers need up-to-date information about how people interact with public lands and the meanings these places hold for use in planning and decision-making. This case study explains the use of public participatory Geographic Information System (GIS) to generate and analyze spatial patterns of the uses and values people hold for the Browns Canyon National Monument in Colorado. Participants drew on maps and answered questions at both live community meetings and online sessions to develop a series of maps showing detailed responses to different types of resource uses and landscape values. Results can be disaggregated by interaction types, different meaningful values, respondent characteristics, seasonality, or frequency of visit. The study was a test for the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service, who jointly manage the monument as they prepare their land management plan. If the information generated is as helpful throughout the entire planning process as initial responses seem, this protocol could become a component of the Bureau’s planning tool kit.


The effective altruism movement consists of a growing global community of people who organize significant parts of their lives around two key ideas, represented in its name. Altruism: If we use a significant portion of the resources in our possession—whether money, time, or talents—with a view to helping others, we can improve the world considerably. Effectiveness: When we do put such resources to altruistic use, it is crucial to focus on how much good this or that intervention is reasonably expected to do per unit of resource expended (for example, per dollar donated). While global poverty is a widely used case study in introducing and motivating effective altruism, if the ultimate aim is to do the most good one can with the resources expended, it is far from obvious that global poverty alleviation is highest priority cause area. In addition to ranking possible poverty-alleviation interventions against one another, we can also try to rank interventions aimed at very different types of outcome against one another. This includes, for example, interventions focusing on animal welfare or future generations. The scale and organization of the effective altruism movement encourage careful dialogue on questions that have perhaps long been there, throwing them into new and sharper relief, and giving rise to previously unnoticed questions. In the present volume, the first of its kind, a group of internationally recognized philosophers, economists, and political theorists contribute in-depth explorations of issues that arise once one takes seriously the twin ideas of altruistic commitment and effectiveness.


Author(s):  
Andrea B. Temkin ◽  
Mina Yadegar ◽  
Christine Cho ◽  
Brian C. Chu

In recent years, the field of clinical psychology has seen a growing movement toward the research and development of transdiagnostic treatments. Transdiagnostic approaches have the potential to address numerous issues related to the development and treatment of mental disorders. Among these are the high rates of comorbidity across disorders, the increasing need for efficient protocols, and the call for treatments that can be more easily disseminated. This chapter provides a review of the current transdiagnostic treatment approaches for the treatment of youth mental disorders. Three different types of transdiagnostic protocols are examined: mechanism-based protocols, common elements treatments, and general treatment models that originated from single-disorder approaches to have broader reach. A case study illuminates how a mechanism-based approach would inform case conceptualization for a client presenting with internalizing and externalizing symptoms and how a transdiagnostic framework translates into practice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 403
Author(s):  
Jiamin Liu ◽  
Yueshi Li ◽  
Bin Xiao ◽  
Jizong Jiao

The siting of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) landfills is a complex decision process. Existing siting methods utilize expert scores to determine criteria weights, however, they ignore the uncertainty of data and criterion weights and the efficacy of results. In this study, a coupled fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approach was employed to site landfills in Lanzhou, a semi-arid valley basin city in China, to enhance the spatial decision-making process. Primarily, 21 criteria were identified in five groups through the Delphi method at 30 m resolution, then criteria weights were obtained by DEMATEL and ANP, and the optimal fuzzy membership function was determined for each evaluation criterion. Combined with GIS spatial analysis and the clustering algorithm, candidate sites that satisfied the landfill conditions were identified, and the spatial distribution characteristics were analyzed. These sites were subsequently ranked utilizing the MOORA, WASPAS, COPRAS, and TOPSIS methods to verify the reliability of the results by conducting sensitivity analysis. This study is different from the previous research that applied the MCDM approach in that fuzzy MCDM for weighting criteria is more reliable compared to the other common methods.


Geosciences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 150
Author(s):  
Nilgün Güdük ◽  
Miguel de la Varga ◽  
Janne Kaukolinna ◽  
Florian Wellmann

Structural geological models are widely used to represent relevant geological interfaces and property distributions in the subsurface. Considering the inherent uncertainty of these models, the non-uniqueness of geophysical inverse problems, and the growing availability of data, there is a need for methods that integrate different types of data consistently and consider the uncertainties quantitatively. Probabilistic inference provides a suitable tool for this purpose. Using a Bayesian framework, geological modeling can be considered as an integral part of the inversion and thereby naturally constrain geophysical inversion procedures. This integration prevents geologically unrealistic results and provides the opportunity to include geological and geophysical information in the inversion. This information can be from different sources and is added to the framework through likelihood functions. We applied this methodology to the structurally complex Kevitsa deposit in Finland. We started with an interpretation-based 3D geological model and defined the uncertainties in our geological model through probability density functions. Airborne magnetic data and geological interpretations of borehole data were used to define geophysical and geological likelihoods, respectively. The geophysical data were linked to the uncertain structural parameters through the rock properties. The result of the inverse problem was an ensemble of realized models. These structural models and their uncertainties are visualized using information entropy, which allows for quantitative analysis. Our results show that with our methodology, we can use well-defined likelihood functions to add meaningful information to our initial model without requiring a computationally-heavy full grid inversion, discrepancies between model and data are spotted more easily, and the complementary strength of different types of data can be integrated into one framework.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5300
Author(s):  
Antonia Nisioti ◽  
George Loukas ◽  
Stefan Rass ◽  
Emmanouil Panaousis

The use of anti-forensic techniques is a very common practice that stealthy adversaries may deploy to minimise their traces and make the investigation of an incident harder by evading detection and attribution. In this paper, we study the interaction between a cyber forensic Investigator and a strategic Attacker using a game-theoretic framework. This is based on a Bayesian game of incomplete information played on a multi-host cyber forensics investigation graph of actions traversed by both players. The edges of the graph represent players’ actions across different hosts in a network. In alignment with the concept of Bayesian games, we define two Attacker types to represent their ability of deploying anti-forensic techniques to conceal their activities. In this way, our model allows the Investigator to identify the optimal investigating policy taking into consideration the cost and impact of the available actions, while coping with the uncertainty of the Attacker’s type and strategic decisions. To evaluate our model, we construct a realistic case study based on threat reports and data extracted from the MITRE ATT&CK STIX repository, Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), and interviews with cyber-security practitioners. We use the case study to compare the performance of the proposed method against two other investigative methods and three different types of Attackers.


Coatings ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Pavel Koštial ◽  
Zora Koštialová Jančíková ◽  
Robert Frischer

These days there are undeniably unique materials that, however, must also meet demanding safety requirements. In the case of vehicles, these are undoubtedly excellent fire protection characteristics. The aim of the work is to experimentally verify the proposed material compositions for long-term heat loads and the effect of thickness, the number of laminating layers (prepregs) as well as structures with different types of cores (primarily honeycomb made of Nomex paper type T722 of different densities, aluminum honeycomb and PET foam) and composite coating based on a glass-reinforced phenolic matrix. The selected materials are suitable candidates for intelligent sandwich structures, usable especially for interior cladding applications in the industry for the production of means of public transport (e.g., train units, trams, buses, hybrid vehicles).


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Miguel R. Luaces ◽  
Jesús A. Fisteus ◽  
Luis Sánchez-Fernández ◽  
Mario Munoz-Organero ◽  
Jesús Balado ◽  
...  

Providing citizens with the ability to move around in an accessible way is a requirement for all cities today. However, modeling city infrastructures so that accessible routes can be computed is a challenge because it involves collecting information from multiple, large-scale and heterogeneous data sources. In this paper, we propose and validate the architecture of an information system that creates an accessibility data model for cities by ingesting data from different types of sources and provides an application that can be used by people with different abilities to compute accessible routes. The article describes the processes that allow building a network of pedestrian infrastructures from the OpenStreetMap information (i.e., sidewalks and pedestrian crossings), improving the network with information extracted obtained from mobile-sensed LiDAR data (i.e., ramps, steps, and pedestrian crossings), detecting obstacles using volunteered information collected from the hardware sensors of the mobile devices of the citizens (i.e., ramps and steps), and detecting accessibility problems with software sensors in social networks (i.e., Twitter). The information system is validated through its application in a case study in the city of Vigo (Spain).


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