Centrality and connectivity in public transport networks and their significance for transport sustainability in cities

The promotion of public transport as a backbone of mobility in urban agglomerations, or at least as an alternative to the dominance of the automobile, has become a prominent policy focus in most large cities around the world. However, while some cities have been successful in shifting car journeys onto rail and buses, others are struggling despite considerable effort to make public transport more attractive. This paper provides a brief overview of success factors for public transport and then takes the configuration of public transport networks as a vantage point for policy evaluation. The development of centrality and connectivity indicators for the public transport network of Melbourne's north-eastern suburbs delivers an instrument for assessing the congruence of the systems with the geographical structure of central areas and urban activities in these cities. It is hypothesised that a higher number of convenient transfer points and a choice of routes to users (network connectivity), as well as a high degree of spatial overlap and integration between public transport infrastructure and urban activity centres and corridors (centrality of facilities) will lead to a greater role for public transport in the mobility patterns of the city as a whole

Teleoperation of passivity-based model reference robust control over the internet

This dissertation offers a survey of a known theoretical approach and novel experimental results in establishing a live communication medium through the internet to host a virtual communication environment for use in Passivity-Based Model Reference Robust Control systems with delays. The controller which is used as a carrier to support a robust communication between input-to-state stability is designed as a control strategy that passively compensates for position errors that arise during contact tasks and strives to achieve delay-independent stability for controlling of aircrafts or other mobile objects. Furthermore the controller is used for nonlinear systems, coordination of multiple agents, bilateral teleoperation, and collision avoidance thus maintaining a communication link with an upper bound of constant delay is crucial for robustness and stability of the overall system. For utilizing such framework an elucidation can be formulated by preparing site survey for analyzing not only the geographical distances separating the nodes in which the teleoperation will occur but also the communication parameters that define the virtual topography that the data will travel through. This survey will first define the feasibility of the overall operation since the teleoperation will be used to sustain a delay based controller over the internet thus obtaining a hypothetical upper bound for the delay via site survey is crucial not only for the communication system but also the delay is required for the design of the passivity-based model reference robust control. Following delay calculation and measurement via site survey, bandwidth tests for unidirectional and bidirectional communication is inspected to ensure that the speed is viable to maintain a real-time connection. Furthermore from obtaining the results it becomes crucial to measure the consistency of the delay throughout a sampled period to guarantee that the upper bound is not breached at any point within the communication to jeopardize the robustness of the controller. Following delay analysis a geographical and topological overview of the communication is also briefly examined via a trace-route to understand the underlying nodes and their contribution to the delay and round-trip consistency. To accommodate the communication channel for the controller the input and output data from both nodes need to be encapsulated within a transmission control protocol via a multithreaded design of a robust program within the C language. The program will construct a multithreaded client-server relationship in which the control data is transmitted. For added stability and higher level of security the channel is then encapsulated via an internet protocol security by utilizing a protocol suite for protecting the communication by authentication and encrypting each packet of the session using negotiation of cryptographic keys during each session

Using Machine Learning for Handover Optimization in Vehicular Fog Computing

Smart mobility management would be an important prerequisite for future fog computing systems. In this research, we propose a learning-based handover optimization for the Internet of Vehicles that would assist the smooth transition of device connections and offloaded tasks between fog nodes. To accomplish this, we make use of machine learning algorithms to learn from vehicle interactions with fog nodes. Our approach uses a three-layer feed-forward neural network to predict the correct fog node at a given location and time with 99.2 % accuracy on a test set. We also implement a dual stacked recurrent neural network (RNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) cells capable of learning the latency, or cost, associated with these service requests. We create a simulation in JAMScript using a dataset of real-world vehicle movements to create a dataset to train these networks. We further propose the use of this predictive system in a smarter request routing mechanism to minimize the service interruption during handovers between fog nodes and to anticipate areas of low coverage through a series of experiments and test the models' performance on a test set