Experimental appraisal for characterizing laboratorial and field performance parameters of pervious concrete pavement

Loratorial tests with pervious concrete comprised porosity and hydraulic conductivity as well as mechanical parameters as compressive, indirect tensile and bending strengths besides assessing its static and dynamic elasticity moduli. Later, a pervious sidewalk area of 1.0 x 8.65 square meters was built in order to determine the variation of the infiltration rate along time; over such experimental sidewalk, impact deflection tests performed allowed to assess back calculated moduli of the pervious concrete layer, resulting 33% to 13% lower than conventional concretes. A mechanistic analysis allowed to estimate the required thickness of concrete for heavy- and light-traffic areas. Tests disclosed no significant difference among the different concrete mixes, with 25% porosity and 0,1 cm/s permeability. Initial sidewalk infiltration rate of 0.5 cm/s dropped 50% four months after construction. It was verified that pervious concrete thicknesses for trucks and buses use are far higher than conventional concrete pavements.

In-queue priority purchase: a dynamic game approach

Pay-for-priority is a common practice in congestion-prone service systems. The extant literature on this topic restricts attention to the case where the only epoch for customers to purchase priority is upon arrival, and if customers choose not to upgrade when they arrive, they cannot do so later during their wait. A natural alternative is to let customers pay and upgrade to priority at any time during their stay in the queue, even if they choose not to do so initially. This paper builds a queueing-game-theoretic model that explicitly captures self-interested customers’ dynamic in-queue priority-purchasing behavior. When all customers (who have not upgraded yet) simultaneously decide whether to upgrade, we find in our model that pure-strategy equilibria do not exist under some intuitive criteria, contrasting the findings in classical models where customers can only purchase priority upon arrival. However, when customers sequentially decide whether to upgrade, threshold-type pure-strategy equilibria may exist. In particular, under sufficiently light traffic, if the number of ordinary customers accumulates to a certain threshold, then it is always the second last customer who upgrades, but in general, it could be a customer from another position, and the queue-length threshold that triggers an upgrade can also vary with the traffic intensity. Finally, we find that in-queue priority purchase subject to the sequential rule yields less revenue than upon-arrival priority purchase in systems with small buffers.

Urban Growth and urban need to fair distribution of healthcare service: a case study on Shiraz Metropolitan area

Objective (1) To analyze urbanization development pattern in Shiraz after the year 1977; (2) To analyze hospital development model in Shiraz after the year 1977; (3) To review and prioritize location-allocation criteria for hospitals; and (4) To specify appropriate locations for the establishment of potential future general hospitals in Shiraz based on selected criteria. Results Although a significant expansion is seen from different geographical directions (particularly northwest and southeast of the city) in the urbanization model after the year 1977, the construction of hospitals has been limited to the central parts of the city and the areas around the city lack any hospitals. The “open access path to the hospital during incidents and disasters and a light traffic” criterion has enjoyed the highest priority amongst the 24 selected hospital location-allocation criteria. Appropriate locations for establishment of new hospitals in the future have been marked as colored maps. The present study has been able to determine and prioritize a comprehensive list of hospital location-allocation criteria. Moreover, the achieved maps from this study can be used by policy makers to develop new hospitals.

Urban Growth and Urban Need to Fair Distribution of Healthcare Service, Case Study: Shiraz Metropolitan

Objective: 1) To analyze urbanization development pattern in Shiraz after the year 1977; 2) To analyze hospital development model in Shiraz after the year 1977; 3) To review and prioritize location allocation criteria for hospitals; and 4) To specify appropriate locations for the establishment of potential future hospitals in Shiraz based on selected criteria.Results: Although a significant expansion is seen from different geographical directions (particularly northwest and southeast of the city) in the urbanization model after the year 1977, the construction of hospitals has been limited to the central parts of the city and the areas around the city lack any hospitals. The “open access path to the hospital during incidents and disasters and a light traffic” criterion has enjoyed the highest priority amongst the 24 selected hospital location allocation criteria. Appropriate locations for establishment of new hospitals in the future have been marked as colored maps. The present study has been able to determine and prioritize a comprehensive list of hospital location allocation criteria. Moreover, the achieved maps from this study can be used by policy makers to develop new hospitals.

Performance Evaluation of Proximity Services and Wi-Fi for Public Safety Mission Critical Voice Application

Proximity Services (ProSe) and Wi-Fi are two promising technologies that may provide support for Mission Critical Voice (MCV) applications in remote and rural areas by enabling Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. In this paper, several performance metrics of ProSe and Wi-Fi are evaluated and compared side-by-side under various configurations. The ns-3 simulation results show that ProSe outperforms Wi-Fi in terms of coverage range and access time with a medium traffic load, while Wi-Fi has a shorter access time under a light traffic load. In addition, with various user densities, ProSe offers better coverage range and access time a majority of the time. The evaluation in this paper provides insights to first responders on what to expect with either technology and how to improve the performance by adjusting different system parameters.

Spectroscopic Assessment of Platinum Group Elements of PM10 Particles Sampled in Three Different Areas in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Platinum group elements (PGE) including Ru, Rh, Pt and Pd have been quantified in air particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter equal or less than 10 microns (PM10) using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS). PM10 aerosols have been collected from three sites representing various activities in Jeddah city, Saudi Arabia. These locations are residential site with heavy traffic, industrial site and heavy traffic and a light traffic site outside the city. To obtain reasonable data of the PGE concentrations, a group from 10 to 15 PM10 samples were collected every month. The annual and seasonal variation of the mass concentration of the PGE were demonstrated. In all locations, Pt and Pd were relatively higher than Ru and Rh possibly because their main use is in automobile catalytic converters. Concentrations of observed PGE in PM10 could be arranged in ascending order as: Rh < Ru < Pd < Pt. In case of Ru and Pt, there are clear similarities in terms of the overall mean concentrations at the sampling locations. Due to the high concentration of Ru, Rh and Pd at low traffic site, there are certainly other sources of these elements rather than vehicle catalytic converters. However, at the industrial/heavy traffic location, high concentrations of Ru were detected during February 2015. In addition, high Pt concentrations were also detected at the light traffic site during May 2015. Results indicate that Pt source in PM10 is mainly the automobile catalytic converters.