Low Cost Road Health Monitoring System: A Case of Flexible Pavements

A healthy road network plays a significant role in the socio-economic development of any country. Road management authorities struggle with pavement repair approaches and the finances to keep the existing road network to its best functionality. It has been observed that real-time road condition monitoring can drastically reduce road and vehicle maintenance expenses. There are various methods to analyze road health, but most are either expensive, costly, time-consuming, labor-intensive, or imprecise. This study aims to design a low-cost smart road health monitoring system to identify the road section for maintenance. An automized sensor-based system is developed to assist the road sections for repair and rehabilitation. The proposed system is mounted in a vehicle and the data have been collected for a more than 1000 km road network. The data have been processed using SPSS, and it shows that the proposed system is adequate for detecting the road quality. It is concluded that the proposed system can identify the vulnerable sections to add to the pavement maintenance plan. In the future, the created application can be launched as a smart citizen app where each car driver can install this application and can monitor the road quality automatically.

Keele Street Avenue Study

From its humble origins as a rural country road to its present form as a suburban arterial, the Keele Street Corridor - stretching from Wilson Avenue to Grandravine Drive - has long served the transportation and day-to-day needs of North York and Toronto residents. The following study presents the corridor as it was, as it is, and as it could be. Through a series of recommendations, this report intends to offer a vision of the corridor as an urbanized, livable, and beautiful corridor in keeping with the Official Plan’s Avenues policies and based on the following principles: Locating new and denser housing types that encourage a mix of use, make efficient use of lands, frame the right-of-way, are appropriately massed and attractively designed. Supporting the creation of complete communities that provide a mix of unit types and offers a range of affordability. Creating high-quality and well-planned public spaces that retain existing residents, attract new residents, encourage interaction and animation, and provide the infrastructure required by all. Prioritizing opportunities for greening within the right-of-way, including planting new trees, creating new parks with frontage along Keele Street, planters, and green buildings. Reconfiguring and civilizing Keele Street into a complete street that serves as a living space for its residents, assigns priority to safety, and encourages active transportation and transit. The report is divided into two parts: The first part - BACKGROUND - contains a description of the corridor’s boundaries, its evolution from an agrarian community, presents the current built environment, and reviews the existing policy layers affecting the Corridor. The second part - PLAN - contains recommendations related to the future development and revitalization of the corridor related to future land uses, built form, development, public realm, parks and open space, and transportation network. Key words: Avenue, urban design, urbanization, suburbs, mid-rise building, corridor.

Keele Street Avenue Study

From its humble origins as a rural country road to its present form as a suburban arterial, the Keele Street Corridor - stretching from Wilson Avenue to Grandravine Drive - has long served the transportation and day-to-day needs of North York and Toronto residents. The following study presents the corridor as it was, as it is, and as it could be. Through a series of recommendations, this report intends to offer a vision of the corridor as an urbanized, livable, and beautiful corridor in keeping with the Official Plan’s Avenues policies and based on the following principles: Locating new and denser housing types that encourage a mix of use, make efficient use of lands, frame the right-of-way, are appropriately massed and attractively designed. Supporting the creation of complete communities that provide a mix of unit types and offers a range of affordability. Creating high-quality and well-planned public spaces that retain existing residents, attract new residents, encourage interaction and animation, and provide the infrastructure required by all. Prioritizing opportunities for greening within the right-of-way, including planting new trees, creating new parks with frontage along Keele Street, planters, and green buildings. Reconfiguring and civilizing Keele Street into a complete street that serves as a living space for its residents, assigns priority to safety, and encourages active transportation and transit. The report is divided into two parts: The first part - BACKGROUND - contains a description of the corridor’s boundaries, its evolution from an agrarian community, presents the current built environment, and reviews the existing policy layers affecting the Corridor. The second part - PLAN - contains recommendations related to the future development and revitalization of the corridor related to future land uses, built form, development, public realm, parks and open space, and transportation network. Key words: Avenue, urban design, urbanization, suburbs, mid-rise building, corridor.

WALL HOSCHMENZIL IN THE VALLEY RUBAS

The Khoshmenzil Wall is a new archaeological site discovered in the lower reaches of the river. Rubas, on the northern outskirts of the village. Rubas of Derbent region of the Republic of Dagestan. It received its designation from the old name of the village located in the place of its location - with. Hochmenzil [Nice place]. The archaeological site is the 6th section of a stone wall preserved on a country road in the northern outskirts of the village. Rubas.The article presents materials from the exploration excavations of this monument, carried out in 2020. The purpose of the research was to determine the functional belonging of the construction site, establish its dating and possible belonging to the barrage defensive line noted in written sources of the mid-18th century. in the lower reaches of the river. Rubas. The relevance of the study was due to the development of the problem of the structure and layout of a large defensive complex of the middle of the 6th century. - Rubas fortification, located 2 km to the west on the left bank of the river. Rubas.The tasks of excavating a new archaeological site were to identify the structure and layout of the structure, to determine the technology of its construction and the degree of preservation.The construction is a section of a stone wall, erected by armour-clad technique from processed stone blocks. The southern facade of the wall with a length of 3.6 m and an adjoining section of backfilling, including torn stone and lime mortar, have been preserved. The stone blocks of the wall are installed using the "poke-spoon" technology. The base of the wall is placed on a stone fill, consisting of torn stone, filled with lime mortar. The height of the preserved section of the wall is 0.6 m. The section of the wall is located on the left bank of the river, it is oriented along with its channel (W – E).The preliminary dating of the monument was determined by the features of the facade design and masonry technology within the middle of the 6th century.

Forest path condition monitoring based on crowd-based trajectory data analysis

The development of Road Information Acquisition Systems (RIASs) based on the Mobile Crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm has been widely studied for the last years. In that sense, most of the existing MCS-based RIASs focus on urban road networks and assume a car-based scenario. However, there exist a scarcity of approaches that pay attention to rural and country road networks. In that sense, forest paths are used for a wide range of recreational and sport activities by many different people and they can be also affected by different problems or obstacles blocking them. As a result, this work introduces SAMARITAN, a framework for rural-road network monitoring based on MCS. SAMARITAN analyzes the spatio-temporal trajectories from cyclists extracted from the fitness application Strava so as to uncover potential obstacles in a target road network. The framework has been evaluated in a real-world network of forest paths in the city of Cieza (Spain) showing quite promising results.

Analysis of the Influence of Suspension Actuator Limitations on Ride Comfort in Passenger Cars Using Model Predictive Control

Active suspension systems help to deliver superior ride comfort and can be used to resolve the objective conflict between ride comfort and road-holding. Currently, there exists no method for analyzing the influence of actuator limitations, such as maximum force and maximum rate of change, on the achievable ride comfort. This research paper presents a method that is capable of doing this. It uses model predictive control to eliminate the influence of feedback controller performance and to integrate both actuator limitations and necessary constraints on dynamic wheel-load variation and suspension travel. Various scenarios are simulated, such as driving over a speed bump and inner city driving, as well as driving on a country road and motorway driving, using a state-of-the-art quarter-car model, parameterized for a luxury class vehicle. It is analyzed how comfort, or in one scenario road-holding, can be improved with consideration for the actuator limitations. The results indicate that actuator rate limitation has a strong influence on vertical vehicle dynamics control system performance, and that relatively small maximum forces of around 1000 to 2000 N are sufficient to successfully reject disturbances from road irregularities, provided the actuator is capable of supplying the forces at a sufficiently high rate of change.