A Collision Relationship-Based Driving Behavior Decision-Making Method for an Intelligent Land Vehicle at a Disorderly Intersection via DRQN

An intelligent land vehicle utilizes onboard sensors to acquire observed states at a disorderly intersection. However, partial observation of the environment occurs due to sensor noise. This causes decision failure easily. A collision relationship-based driving behavior decision-making method via deep recurrent Q network (CR-DRQN) is proposed for intelligent land vehicles. First, the collision relationship between the intelligent land vehicle and surrounding vehicles is designed as the input. The collision relationship is extracted from the observed states with the sensor noise. This avoids a CR-DRQN dimension explosion and speeds up the network training. Then, DRQN is utilized to attenuate the impact of the input noise and achieve driving behavior decision-making. Finally, some comparative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. CR-DRQN maintains a high decision success rate at a disorderly intersection with partially observable states. In addition, the proposed method is outstanding in the aspects of safety, the ability of collision risk prediction, and comfort.

Analysis of Hull Shape Impact on Energy Consumption in an Electric Port Tugboat

The trend to replace internal combustion engines with electric zero-emission drives, visible in the automotive industry, also exists in the shipbuilding industry. In contrary to land vehicles, the requirements for the electric propulsion system of tugs are much greater, which combined with the limited space and energy on board, makes any amount of energy valuable. Strategic changes in the policy of many countries, such as the “Fit for 55” package, introduce plans to significantly reduce CO2 emissions, which favors the development of alternative drives and their introduction to new areas of operation. This article presents that it is possible to reduce the amount of energy an electric tug spends for movement by applying the Particle Swarm Optimization method to modify the shape of its hull. A statistical analysis of public data was performed to determine the speed profiles of actual port tugs. The Van Oortmerssen method was used to determine the hull resistances of the proposed tug and the impact of the hull shape modification sets on reducing these resistances. Based on the six obtained speed profiles, it was determined that one of the tested variants of modifications made it possible to reduce energy consumption on average by 2.12%, to even 3.87% for one of the profiles, and that some modifications increase energy consumption by even 6.59%.

Prospects for the development of electric powered land vehicles in the USA

The article discusses plans to replace internal combustion engines with electric ones in the US armed forces, analyzes the problems associated with the implementation of these plans, and also presents their advantages and provides examples of electric models of military equipment in service.

GPS Data Correction Based on Fuzzy Logic for Tracking Land Vehicles

GPS sensors are widely used to know a vehicle’s location and to track its route. Although GPS sensor technology is advancing, they present systematic failures depending on the environmental conditions to which they are subjected. To tackle this problem, we propose an intelligent system based on fuzzy logic, which takes the information from the sensors and correct the vehicle’s absolute position according to its latitude and longitude. This correction is performed by two fuzzy systems, one to correct the latitude and the other to correct the longitude, which are trained using the MATLAB ANFIS tool. The positioning correction system is trained and tested with two different datasets. One of them collected with a Pmod GPS sensor and the other a public dataset, which was taken from routes in Brazil. To compare our proposal, an unscented Kalman filter (UKF) was implemented. The main finding is that the proposed fuzzy systems achieve a performance of 69.2% higher than the UKF. Furthermore, fuzzy systems are suitable to implement in an embedded system such as the Raspberry Pi 4. Another finding is that the logical operations facilitate the creation of non-linear functions because of the ‘if else’ structure. Finally, the existence justification of each fuzzy system section is easy to understand.

HIGH DAMPING VALUES OF SANDWICH STRUCTURES WITH POLYMER COMPOSITE FACE SHEETS AND FOAM CORES

Structures with high damping and reasonable stiffness values are demanded by designers of aerospace and automotive sectors as these features of the structures are remedies to the vibratory conditions that lead to malfunction of many electronics and mechanical components of aerial and land vehicles. In this study, sandwich structure beams with face sheets of woven carbon fiber-reinforced polymer plies and a foam core have been manufactured to provide high damping performance. For this purpose, first, the beams from the carbon fiber plies with different fiber orientations were subjected to the vibrating beam test with free-free boundary conditions, and their damping and flexural modulus values were obtained. It was found that the plies with 450 angle gave the highest damping value with a reasonable modulus. The same test procedure was also applied to the bare foam beams to obtain their dynamic values. Eventually, the plies with the 450 angle were selected as face sheets for the sandwich beams that yielded reasonably high damping and equivalent flexural modulus values. The data obtained from each constituent material, the laminate face sheets and the core, were used as input data for modal simulations of the sandwich beams using a Finite Element Method.

The Aircraft Engines in the Land Vehicles

The examples of the applications of the aircraft engines to propulsion of the heavy armored land vehicles are presented in this paper. They provide the power necessary for high mobility of these land vehicles, which have a weight much greater than trucks. These engines were mass produced and thus were readily available. It was easier to repair damaged engines, too. Both spark-ignition and compression-ignition piston engines as well as turbocharged engines were used to propulsion of the armored vehicles. General solutions of the dual-purpose engines for the vehicles during the First and Second World War as well as the engines used nowadays are presented. Attention is also given to the specific solutions of these engine assemblies. Their basic technical and operational parameters are described. The implications of adapting aircraft engines to land vehicles were analyzed.

CURRENT TRENDS OF AUTOTRANSPORT INSURANCE IN UKRAINE

The research of the article is aimed at highlighting the essence and features of the functioning of the car insurance market in Ukraine. The study found that motor insurance is associated with profound economic and social changes in society due to mass motorization, the growth of the car fleet and traffic intensity, as well as huge material losses as a result of road accidents. It should be noted that freight transport is developing quite rapidly both within the country and abroad. At the same time, an increase in the number of intercity bus transportation, excursion and tourist bus services has been established, and as a result, international motor tourism is growing. It is proved that these factors contribute to the growth of accidents, losses in the transportation of goods, increase accidents with passengers and pedestrians on highways and, accordingly, material and social losses of society, population, commercial and government agencies. It is substantiated that insurance in general and civil liability insurance, as its integral part, is an infrastructure that helps to increase the efficiency of all areas of business. This determines the importance of the development of all types of insurance in Ukraine, taking into account the process of integration into the world community. It is established that the development of insurance market in our country should be based on the study and balanced use of experience of industrialized countries with long traditions in the insurance market, legal regulation of insurers and diversification of various types of insurance. However, it should be borne in mind that the world community has invented universal means of compensation, which is the most popular type of liability insurance worldwide – is the insurance of civil liability of owners of land vehicles. It provides for the payment of monetary compensation to the victim in the amount that would be collected from the owner of the vehicle on a civil lawsuit in favor of a third party for damage to life and health, as well as for damage or loss of property due to an accident or other road – transport accident due to the fault of the insured. Given the state and prospects of motorization in our country, as well as foreign experience in insurance market, we can say with confidence that liability insurance is one of the leading areas among other types of insurance. However, in its organization and implementation there are many different problems of legal, social, economic and organizational type. Recommendations on the prospects for the development of civil liability insurance of owners of land vehicles in Ukraine are given.

Effect of Transaction Costs on Profit and the Capital Formation of Soybean Farming in Lamongan Regency, East Java

Transaction costs was one of imperfect market characteristic. The transaction costs of soybean farming affected profit level, and profit was one factor of capital formation. This research aimed to analyze the structure and the effect of transaction costs on the profitability and the capital formation of soybean farming. This study applied transaction cost analysis and simultaneous equation as the methods. The respondents were determined using simple random sampling by taking the proportion of 25% for the three selected districts, resulting in 120 respondents. The data were the transaction costs in 2014/2015 and household data from 2012 to 2014, comprising the assets of land, vehicles, farm equipment, crop, and livestock. The results revealed that the transaction costs were IDR 144,120.86. The negotiation costs became the highest cost component (60.30%), followed by information costs (14.07%), coordination costs (12.22%), implementation costs (8.03%), monitoring costs (4.23%) and risk costs (1.15%). Transaction costs had a significant effect on the profitability of soybean farming. The highest percentage of capital formation on soybean farming was for farmland, reaching 40.43%. Other capitals included vehicles (24.59%), plants (19.31%), building (7.37%), and supporting tools (3.09%). Transaction costs did not significantly effect on farming capital formation. As a recommendation, collective action was required, farmers should be active on farmers groups to reduce transaction costs.

Assessing relative contributions of PAHs to soot mass by reversible heterogeneous nucleation and condensation

Given the recent EURO 6 regulations, which include limits on particle number density (and hence size) for soot emissions from land vehicles, soot models must be capable of accurately predicting soot particle sizes. Previous modeling work has demonstrated the importance of the relative strengths of nucleation and condensation in predicting soot primary particle size. Due to this importance, a fundamental reversible model for nucleation and condensation, called the reversible PAH clustering (RPC) model, was developed in previous work through the use of statistical mechanics and the results from several recent works. In the present work, the RPC model is enhanced to include multiple nucleation (or dimerization) events from 6 different PAH size groups, resulting in 21 unique dimer pairs. In addition, a soot PAH tracking model is developed to track the amount of each PAH size group within soot particles. The addition of this model resulted in reduced computation times and the ability to investigate PAH-PAH reactions within soot particles. The results of the enhanced RPC model demonstrate that smaller PAHs are most important for the nucleation process, while small and large PAHs are important for the condensation process. These results are shown to be due to the relatively lower reversibility of condensation versus the nucleation process. These findings are discussed in light of recent experimental results in the literature and are shown to be well supported. Keywords: reversibility, PAH nucleation, PAH condensation, laminar diffusion flame, soot model