Optimized scheduling of highway work zones

Highway maintenance activities usually require lane closures and disrupt traffic operations. Because of budget constraints, project deadlines, and the resulting traffic impact, the objective of this dissertation is to improve the efficiencies of traffic operation and maintenance work, and minimize the total project cost (i.e., agency cost and road user cost) by optimizing work zone schedules. This dissertation focuses on the maintenance projects on multiple-lane highways. The objective total cost function is formulated while considering a discrete maintenance time-cost function and time-dependent traffic diversions. However, the work zone scheduling problem is a combinatorial optimization problem and difficult to solve analytically. This dissertation transformed the complicated problem into two separate steps: determining the time-dependent traffic diversion by the User Equilibrium Assignment, and minimizing the total project cost by a Genetic Algorithm. An iterative algorithm that integrates the two steps was developed. The optimized work zone schedule and the associated optimal diverted traffic flow can be found simultaneously after multiple iterations. Case studies and extensive sensitivity analyses were conducted to analyze various scheduling scenarios with or without a time-cost function and traffic diversion. The relations among key decision variables were analyzed. Conclusions and recommendations are provided, and directions of future research efforts are discussed

Central atlantic regional ecological test site: A prototype regional environmental information system, volume 1

The author has identified the following significant results. LANDSAT data showed the test region in 1972 to be 9% urban and built-up land, 38% agriculture, 50% forest, 3% nonforested wetlands, and less than 1% barren land, exclusive of water-covered areas. A comprehensive user evaluation revealed greatest demand for high-altitude aerial photography and the detailed maps and data products that can be derived from the metropolitan areas agencies, found relatively little use for LANDSAT imagery at 1:250,000 scale and corresponding manually interpreted land use maps

Improving Access to Justice in State Courts with Platform Technology

Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes—often with the government—is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often the financial wherewithal to miss work or to pay for child care. In this Article, I investigate the effects of altering this structural baseline by studying the consequences of introducing online platform technology to improve citizen access to justice. In courts that adopt the technology, citizens are able to communicate with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to seek relief or negotiate a resolution through an online portal at any time of day. Examining many months of data from half a dozen adopting state courts, I present evidence that introducing this technology dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes for citizens to resolve their disputes and satisfy any fines or fees they owe. Default rates also plummet, and court personnel, including judges, appear to engage constructively with citizens when using the platform. From the perspective of state courts, disputes end more quickly, the percentage of payments received increases, and it takes less time for courts to receive those payments. Even citizens who do not use the platform may benefit from the technology’s introduction, presumably because they find they face less congestion when they physically go to a courthouse

Improving Access to Justice in State Courts with Platform Technology

Access to justice often equates to access to state courts, and for millions of Americans, using state courts to resolve their disputes-often with the government-is a real challenge. Reforms are regularly proposed in the hopes of improving the situation (e.g., better legal aid), but until recently a significant part of the problem has been structural. Using state courts today for all but the simplest of legal transactions entails at the very least traveling to a courthouse and meeting with a decision maker in person and in a one-on-one setting. Even minimally effective access, therefore, requires time, transportation, and very often the financial wherewithal to miss work or to pay for child care. In this Article, I investigate the effects of altering this structural baseline by studying the consequences of introducing online platform technology to improve citizen access to justice. In courts that adopt the technology, citizens are able to communicate with law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges to seek relief or negotiate a resolution through an online portal at any time of day. Examining many months of data from half a dozen adopting state courts, I present evidence that introducing this technology dramatically reduces the amount of time it takes for citizens to resolve their disputes and satisfy any fines or fees they owe. Default rates also plummet, and court personnel, including judges, appear to engage constructively with citizens when using the platform. From the perspective of state courts, disputes end more quickly, the percentage of payments received increases, and it takes less time for courts to receive those payments. Even citizens who do not use the platform may benefit from the technology\u27s introduction, presumably because they find they face less congestion when they physically go to a courthouse

A Case Study on Factors Influencing Retention of Mental Health Clinicians in a New Hampshire Community Mental Health Center

This study examined the perspectives of master-level clinical mental health providers and members of leadership at a Community Mental Health Center (CMHC) in New Hampshire, to understand clinician and leadership perspectives as to why master-level providers choose to continue working at CMHCs. Most prior research on turnover in such organizations has focused on why so many leave their positions, however this study instead focuses on factors related to the decision to stay at a specific CMHC in an urban area of New Hampshire. A single case study method was utilized to focus on masters-level mental health care providers with additional interviews with leadership at the CMHC. Some of the findings that will be explored is what draws providers to community mental health centers, the importance of connections with colleagues and leadership, and aspects of why master-level providers stay. The study contributes to the understanding of clinician retention in community mental health centers and provides recommendations for master-level providers, CMHC leadership, and clinical mental health educators. Some of the overarching themes that surface from the data were around why clinicians remain in the CMHC, the reasons why providers do the work they do each day, the draw to CMHC, and reasons why people master-level providers consider leaving a CMHC. Connections with leadership and supervisor were very important in why clinicians want to stay at the CMHC. Licensure contracts were also an area that was explored in this research. Clinicians and members of leadership provided their perspective on licensure contracts and the implementation of the contracts. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA (https://aura.antioch.edu/) and OhioLINK ETD Center (https://etd.ohiolink.edu)

Bringing the River Back: Working with Landowners on Willamette River Restoration

The Willamette River has gone through extensive changes since Euro American settlement – changes that have reduced channel connectivity, destroyed important habitat for species and vastly undermined floodwater storage capacity. Efforts to preserve portions of the river have a controversial legacy that has left lingering suspicions of government involvement in any activity that includes private lands. Nonetheless, there are opportunities for willing landowners to work with governmental and non-governmental partners to design and implement voluntary restoration projects which can provide financial and land use benefits. The river’s floodplain can be an asset and a resource beyond its usefulness for agricultural production. This report is part technical guide, part story based on interviews we conducted with different interests. We have separated out the landowners’ viewpoints and experience to make clear the importance of understanding that critical central element in restoration planning. The Harkens Lake area of the Willamette River near Monroe, Oregon, is a priority conservation area detailed in the 2002 Willamette River Basin Planning Atlas: Trajectories of Environmental and Ecological Change. The Horning families who own property in the Harkens Lake area have teamed with several partners to design and implement a restoration project as a way to, in their words, bring what was once a living area back to life as a way to give back to the river. If the potential for restoration is to be realized, landowners and their partners need to be aware of the multiple associated challenges and ways to work through them. Restoration is still new to many landowners, and projects can become complicated fairly quickly. The concept of lead project partners as case managers for landowners is critical. This approach will help landowners define their needs and expectations, develop the level of trust essential to project success, and ensure that landowners are not overwhelmed with the complexity of financing, the demands of design and permitting, and the challenge of incorporating good science. Landowners also need to know that there is a broad range of restoration programs and tools available, along with associated funding. The sweep of these programs and tools can be confusing. Though the Harken’s Lake project has not yet required permits from regulatory agencies, many stakeholders interviewed for this report identified permitting as one of the most perennially vexing parts of project implementation. It typically requires cooperation among different agencies at different levels of government, and can take from three months to three years, requiring a great deal of patience on the part of landowners and matching perseverance on the part of project partners. Finally, as the Harkens Lake story illustrates, a vital concept that may help ensure successful processes is making certain project partners and landowners discuss critical timing issues, align process steps accordingly, and develop two-way assurances that serve as accountability measures and benchmarks for progress. Those involved with the Harkens Lake restoration project expressed clear hopes: that the project will be a model for more restoration on the mainstem of the Willamette, that restoration will provide good compensation to property owners so that restoration represents a practical addition to agricultural business portfolios, and that landowners will feel good about their legacy in its benefits to the health of the river. The report should be of interest to landowners, agencies and others in the conservation community, and academics. We emphasize that it is a case study of one landowner’s experience, and the pool of associated interview participants was limited. Typical of single case studies, the experiences and outcomes cannot be generalized. There are nonetheless many elements of the study that represent long-standing landowner issues and concerns still shared by many, as indicated by the landowners and by several of the people we interviewed

Evaluating the robustness of crew schedules for rail transit systems

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 145-146).Crew scheduling has traditionally been the last step in the process of service planning, and it has traditionally aimed at minimizing manpower costs because it was assumed that the crew schedule does not directly impact service quality. There has been a growing recognition that crew schedules do in fact affect performance, especially during disruptions, and in that context different crew schedules perform differently. The primary objective of this research is to evaluate the robustness of a crew schedule, or in other words, the performance of a crew schedule under a range of commonly observed disrupted conditions. While the thesis focuses on the Piccadilly Line on the London Underground, the concepts and methods developed are intended to be applicable to a range of metro lines and systems. The thesis has four components: first, a description of the types of incidents that take place on a line, the type of service control interventions used to respond to incidents, and the intimate relationship between the crew schedule and service control policies; second, a comparative analysis of the structure of two Piccadilly Line crew schedules to demonstrate how two crew schedules with similar underlying timetables can have very different structures, and how those structural differences can affect performance; third, the development of a simulation-based framework for evaluating the robustness of crew schedules, and a simulation model of the Piccadilly Line; and finally, the application of the simulation model to evaluate and compare the performance of the same two Piccadilly Line crew schedules under a range of disrupted conditions. Based on observation and understanding the relationship between the crew schedule and service control, a service control module has been implemented in the simulation. This module mimics the actions of a service controller when the operations plan is disrupted and is a key contribution of this research. This allows for the simulation of incidents on the line which leads to an understanding of how the structure of a crew schedule affects its performance during disruptions. Elements of a crew schedule such as slack time and relief locations are identified as key drivers of robustness. The effect of these elements on performance is demonstrated by comparing the simulated performance of two crew schedules that differ in the distribution of these elements. The simulation also allows the testing of hypothetical crew schedules, such as those corresponding to different labour agreements. Therefore, it can be used to test the performance impact of changes in labour agreements. This is demonstrated for the case of the Piccadilly Line through the simulation of two hypothetical scenarios where two different labour constraints are relaxed. The thesis concludes with recommendations to Piccadilly Line and London Underground management and staff regarding crew scheduling, service control and data collection. Results suggest that the slack time in Piccadilly Line crew schedules could be redistributed in a way that improves performance by relaxing other constraints, and that service controllers currently make control decisions without easy access to critical crew information and control decisions could be improved by providing them with better information on crew activities.by Harshavardhan Ravichandran.S.M.in Transportatio

Diagnosis and assessment of operations control interventions : framework and applications to a high frequency metro line

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 178-180).Service control, the task of implementing the timetable in daily operations on a metro line, plays a key role in service delivery, as it determines the quality of the service as provided to passengers. This thesis proposes a framework for the study of rail service control which builds on the integration and analysis of data from multiple sources and on background knowledge about service control. The framework takes into account the decision environment in which service control takes place and acknowledges that the reliability of the system depends on many factors which are endogenous to it, aspects previously not recognized in a comprehensive manner by researchers and practitioners alike. This research makes use of automatically generated operational and passenger data, which are increasingly available and accessible to transit agencies and allow for addressing questions in service control from multiple perspectives. As a result, this study takes a distinctly different approach than previous research, which has mostly focused on individual service control strategies and relied heavily on modeling and on simplifying assumptions about the objectives and constraints of service control on a metro line. The developed framework consists of four main elements. First, the controller's decision environment is integrated and described based on an extended visit of the author to a control center. Second, an algorithm for reconstructing train operations from signaling data and identifying service control interventions is presented. Third, a measure for assessing the impact of the interventions on operations is introduced.(cont.) The fourth and final element is a set of passenger travel time and reliability measures. The framework is applied to the Central line, a high-frequency line of the London Underground where the control center observations were also made. Three common service control strategies are assessed in terms of their impact on operations and on passengers, and the influence of timetable variables on the frequency of service control interventions is investigated. From observations at the control center, it is found that aside from the objective of maintaining adequate levels of service from an operations perspective and minimizing the impact of schedule deviations on passengers, considerations relating to crew and rolling stock management, safety and infrastructure capacity have a major influence on service control decisions. Given the uncertain environment in which service control operates, a strong preference among controllers for manageable and robust solutions is observed. In the analysis of common control strategies, it is found that in the absence of official policies on the response to certain types of problems on the line and in the presence of the multitude of factors mentioned above, service controllers have developed rules of thumb which may not always be optimal from the passengers' perspective. Furthermore, the fundamental tradeoff is highlighted between the availability of spare resources in form of drivers, trains and infrastructure capacity and the need for service control interventions.(cont.) Regarding the influence of timetable variables, it is found that an increase in scheduled service frequency and in running times on an otherwise unchanged line operating close to its capacity caused significant increases in numbers of service control interventions, mostly due to a higher rolling stock requirement and reduced operational flexibility. Recommendations are made with regards to service control policies, the structure of responsibilities among operational staff, the design of the timetable and the design of the operations control system. Although the results provided by the applications are specific to the Central line, they demonstrate how the elements of the framework can be implemented in a practical setting, and many of the conclusions of this thesis are transferable to other metro lines and systems. Finally, future research in passenger behavior and crew management in the presence of service control interventions is proposed.by André Carrel.S.M.in Transportatio