1,348 research outputs found

    Synchronizing geospatial-intelligence to the dismounted soldier

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    Thesis (S.M. in System Design and Management)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2010."June 2010." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 124-126).The Army's Geospatial Enterprise (AGE) has an emerging identity and value proposition arising from the need to synchronize geospatial information activities across the Army in order to deliver value to military decision makers. Recently, there have been significant efforts towards increasing the capability of the enterprise to create value for its diverse stakeholder base, ranging from the warfighter, to early stage research and development. The AGE has many architectural alternatives to consider as it embarks upon geospatial transformation within the Army, each of these alternatives must deliver value through an increasingly wide range of operating environments characterized by the uncertainty of both future technology and the evolution of future operations. This research focuses on understanding how the Army's geospatial foundation data layers propagate through the battlefield and enable well informed tactical decisions. The goal of this investigation is to develop heuristics to guide the transformation efforts currently underway within the Army's Geospatial Enterprise. A set of surveys and informal interviews with individuals in the Army geospatial community inform the "as-is" enterprise architecture. A system dynamics (SD) model is developed to simulate the current state enterprise at the enterprise boundary, where the AGE delivers value to the warfighters at the tactical level. Potential future state architectures are developed, simulated in the SD model, and evaluated against a changing environment using Epoch-Era analysis. The results do not attempt to optimize a desired future architecture for the AGE, but rather inform decision making early in enterprise development to assist the Army geospatial leadership to understand possible transformation trajectories. Several candidate architectures are developed and evaluated within the context of dynamic environmental conditions. Given lower resource availability, the best architectural choice is to focus on capturing the geospatial information obtained by Soldiers as they travel around the area of operations, learning about the terrain from experiences and interactions with local populations. As the level of funding increases, there is a significant jump in geospatial information if a geospatial sensor is deployed while at the same time synchronizing information dissemination and use. Aligning resources appropriately to a coordinated geospatial architectural approach is important to future military operations as new technologies continue to require increased geospatial information quality.by James E. Richards.S.M.in System Design and Managemen

    Multimodal and multidimensional geodata interaction and visualization

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    This PhD proposes the development of a Science Data Visualization System, SdVS, that analyzes and presents different kinds of visualizing and interacting techniques with Geo-data, in order to deal with knowledge about Geo-data using GoogleEarth. After that, we apply the archaeological data as a case study, and, as a result, we develop the Archaeological Visualization System, ArVS, using new visualization paradigms and Human-Computer-Interaction techniques based on SdVS. Furthermore, SdVS provides guidelines for developing any other visualization and interacting applications in the future, and how the users can use SdVS system to enhance the understanding and dissemination of knowledge

    Management and Services

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    Management in all business areas and organisational activities are the acts of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. Service is intangible, therefore, it is not too easy to define the theory application in varieties of service industries. Service Management usually incorporates automated systems along with skilled labour; it also provides service development. Due to enormous demand of service industries and management development, the book under the title "Management and Services" would create a milestone in management arena for all categories of readers including Business Administration, Engineering and Architecture. This book covers educational service development, service-oriented-architecture and case research analysis, including theory application in network security, GRID technology, integrated circuit application. The book is comprised of five chapters and has been divided into two parts. Part A contains chapters on service development in educational institutions and it depicts the application of supply chain management concept in service industries like tertiary educational institutions and multiple ways of web 2.0 applications transforming learning patterns and pathways. To understand the subject in a practical manner, Part B of this book consists of noteworthy case studies and research papers on management and services and represents theory application of Data mining, Fuzzy Cluster, Game theory, GRID Technology, simulation of Operational Amplifier and Current Controlled Conveyor II in network security, architecture, and integrated circuit application

    Mobility mining for time-dependent urban network modeling

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    170 p.Mobility planning, monitoring and analysis in such a complex ecosystem as a city are very challenging.Our contributions are expected to be a small step forward towards a more integrated vision of mobilitymanagement. The main hypothesis behind this thesis is that the transportation offer and the mobilitydemand are greatly coupled, and thus, both need to be thoroughly and consistently represented in a digitalmanner so as to enable good quality data-driven advanced analysis. Data-driven analytics solutions relyon measurements. However, sensors do only provide a measure of movements that have already occurred(and associated magnitudes, such as vehicles per hour). For a movement to happen there are two mainrequirements: i) the demand (the need or interest) and ii) the offer (the feasibility and resources). Inaddition, for good measurement, the sensor needs to be located at an adequate location and be able tocollect data at the right moment. All this information needs to be digitalised accordingly in order to applyadvanced data analytic methods and take advantage of good digital transportation resource representation.Our main contributions, focused on mobility data mining over urban transportation networks, can besummarised in three groups. The first group consists of a comprehensive description of a digitalmultimodal transport infrastructure representation from global and local perspectives. The second groupis oriented towards matching diverse sensor data onto the transportation network representation,including a quantitative analysis of map-matching algorithms. The final group of contributions covers theprediction of short-term demand based on various measures of urban mobility

    Geospatial Framework for the Use of Natural Resource Extraction in Public Private Partnerships

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    Resources for the maintenance and expansion of existing highway infrastructure are scarce. Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are feasible solutions to the concern of lagging investment. PPP are increasingly used for the procurement of services and goods, because of their flexibility and ability to channel private resources. This research addresses the possible implementation of a barter approach in Public Private Partnerships (PPP), which includes natural resources for trade model to offset costs.;Federal law permits the extraction of coal when it is a byproduct of the construction process, coal which under normal circumstances would not be economically feasible to extract. West Virginia law allows PPP to extract coal by surface mining when they develop road beads for new highways. There is no exchange of funds between the coal company and the West Virginia Department of Transportation; the benefits are derived entirely from the construction cost savings for roadbed construction.;This dissertation develops a geospatial method to quantify the availability of natural resources along predetermined roadway alignments. The methodology is divided in three phases: Macroscopic (Level I), Mesoscopic (Level II) and Microscopic (Level III), for the King Coal Highway. The process considers laws and industry best practices in the calculation. The research outcome suggests that there are segments of the road with enough, as well as segments of the road without enough coal

    Drones, Virtual Reality, and Modeling: Communicating Catastrophic Dam Failure

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    Dam failures occur worldwide and can be economically and ecologically devastating. Communicating the scale of these risks to the general public and decision-makers is imperative. Two-dimensional (2D) dam failure hydraulic models inform owners and floodplain managers of flood regimes but have limitations when shared with non-specialists. This study addresses these limitations by constructing a 3D Virtual Reality (VR) environment to display the 1976 Teton Dam disaster case study using a pipeline composed of (1) 2D hydraulic model data (extrapolated into 3D), (2) a 3D reconstructed dam, and (3) a terrain model processed from UAS (Uncrewed Airborne System) imagery using Structure from Motion photogrammetry. This study validates the VR environment pipeline on the Oculus Quest 2 VR Headset with the criteria: immersion fidelity, movement, immersive soundscape, and agreement with historical observations and terrain. Through this VR environment, we develop an effective method to share historical events and, with future work, improve hazard awareness; applications of this method could improve citizen engagement with Early Warning Systems. This paper establishes a pipeline to produce a visualization tool for merging UAS imagery, Virtual Reality, digital scene creation, and sophisticated 2D hydraulic models to communicate catastrophic flooding events from natural or human-made levees or dams

    Flood Disaster Resilient Bridge Structures For Sustainable Bridge Management Systems

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    Extreme weather events are occurring at an increasing ferocity and frequency. Floods are the most comand damaging natural disaster. More than 4,400 occurrences of flood disasters have been reported globally between 1900 and 2016. As a result, around seven million people were killed and millions more were displaced. Climate impacts are expected to intensify weather related flooding events, and sea level rise expected worldwide will increase the risk of coastal disasters. Transportation infrastructure, vital to the economy and society of every country, is especially prone to the inland and coastal floods. Bridge structures are under the constant threat of these natural disasters. Superstructures can be washed away due to lateral forces generated by floodwater. Floodwater can also accelerate scouring around bridge piers, which often contributes to bridge failures. This research used the results of an extreme flood simulation conducted by the Center for Advanced Infrastructure Technology at the University of Mississippi. A flood inundation model was implemented for an extreme flood scenario at a floodplain site of Little Tallahatchie River in Northern Mississippi that featured surface transportation corridor sites and other infrastructure assets. Geospatial analysis of flood inundation mapping and simulation results shothat total flood inundation covered an area of 22.46 sq mi2 (58.16 sq km2) in the floodplain, where maximum floodwater depth reached up to 34.19 ft (10.42 m) within the inundation area. The results of the extreme flood simulation were used for assessing structural integrity of a bridge structure subject to lateral floodwater forces, with primary focus on the superstructure. A Three Dimensional-Finite Element model of US-51 Highway bridge, located in the floodplain site, was developed for flood impact analysis considering bridge girder-deck superstructure, bearings, pile caps and piers. The numerical results of finite element simulation shothat the bridge superstructure displaced 2.42 m under the lateral hydrodynamic force of floodwater. The dowel bars inserted at the bottom of each girder end through bearing to the top end of pile cap, failed in shear against lateral floodwater forces. This would lead to the failure of US-51 Highway bridge superstructure if an extreme flood event occurs in real life. A framework for structural integrity assessment of bridge structures is presented with Flood Resiliency Index. Recommendations for design enhancements and hardening of bridges are discussed for flood disaster resilience. An enhanced geospatial decision support system is recommended considering “vertical underclearance” criteria for bridge superstructure height above the channel and “flood probability” related to flood occurrence in 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1,000 years. These flood resilience parameters are missing from the traditional bridge management system (BMS) framework. Enhancing the current practice of BMS is proposed using optimization based prioritization of flood disaster vulnerable bridges, which considers vertical underclearance criteria, flood disaster risk probability and life cycle cost analysis. For this purpose, a Flood Vulnerability Rating (FVR) is proposed on a scale of 1 (catastrophic risk) to 6 (very low risk). The FVR scale was used for a case study of 270 bridges on major rivers in the state of Mississippi, which were analyzed using an optimization objective function to maximize benefits considering reconstruction/hardening costs and indirect benefits (cost avoidance from traffic disruption and economic loss related to bridge failure). Based on the present-worth life cycle analysis, total life cycle costs for the agency’s pre-planned bridge hardening for flood resilience was 59.3% less than the case of no hardening of the same bridge. This dissertation advances flood risk assessment and resilience management methodologies for transportation infrastructure in the United States and across the globe
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