Examining Hazard Governance from a Complex Systems Perspective

abstract: The Maricopa County Heat Relief Network (HRN) is an ad-hoc partially self-organized network with some attributes of hierarchical coordination that forms each year to provide heat relief and hydration to residents in need by operating as cooling centers. These HRN organizations are a collection of non-profit, governmental and religious organizations. This dissertation looks at the HRN from a complexity governance perspective and engaged different parts of the network in interviews to learn more about their perspective in delivering heat relief. Further, participatory modeling with a prototype agent based model was done with the HRN coordinating agencies to look for emergent outcomes in the HRN system and learn from their perspective. Chapter one evaluates organizational theory and complexity with climate adaptation, hazard preparedness and resilience in the HRN. Chapter two presents results from interviews with HRN facility managers and evaluates their perspective on how they function to offer heat relief. Chapter three finds that the HRN is a good example of complexity governance when engaged through a participatory agent based modeling approach. Chapter four engages the HRN coordinators in participatory agent based modeling interviews to increase their systems level awareness, learn about their perspective on heat relief delivery, and how the system can be improved. Chapter five looks across the different levels of the HRN investigated, the facility managers and coordinators, for differences and similarities in perspectives. The research conducted in this dissertation shows different levels of systems awareness of the different parts of the HRN and how participatory modeling can be used to increase systems awareness. Results indicate that there was very little horizontal network connection between HRN facility managers and most of the interaction was vertically coordinated indicating opportunities for increased network communication in the future both horizontally and vertically if communication interventions were put in place.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Public Administration and Policy 201

The impact of airport road wayfinding design on senior driver behaviour

Airport road access wayfinding refers to a process in which a driver makes a decision to navigate using information support systems in order to arrive to airport successfully. The purpose of this research is to evaluate senior drivers’ behaviour of alternative airport road access designs. In order to evaluate the impact of wayfinding, the combination of simulated driving and completion of a questionnaire were performed. Quantitative data was acquired to give significant results justifying the research outcomes and allow non-biased interpretation of the research results. It represents the process within the development of the methodology and the concept of airport road access design and driving behaviour. Wayfinding complexity varied due to differing levels of road-side furniture. The simulated driving parameters measured were driving mistakes and performances of senior drivers. Three types of driving scenarios were designed consisting of 3.8 miles of airport road access. 40 senior drivers volunteered to undertake these tasks. The questionnaire was used as a supporting study to increase the reliability and validity of the research. Respondents who volunteered for the simulated driving test were encouraged to participate in the questionnaire sessions. The questionnaire was answered after each simulation test was completed. The Mean, Standard Deviation (SD) and Two-Way ANOVA test were used to analyse the results and discussed with reference to the use of the driving simulation. The results confirmed that age group has no significant effect of airport road access complexity design on driving behaviour. Although many studies have been conducted on wayfinding in general, a detailed evaluation on airport road access wayfinding network and driving behaviour in respect of senior drivers were still unexplored domains

School Design to Promote Physical Activity

Increasing children’s physical activity (PA) at school is a national focus to address childhood obesity. Research has demonstrated associations between school built environments and students’ PA, but has lacked a comprehensive synthesis of evidence. Chapter 1 presents new evidence-, theory-, and practice-informed school design guidelines, including evidence substantiality ratings, to promote PA in school communities. These guidelines delineate strategies for school designers, planners, and educators to create K-12 school environments conducive to PA. They also engage public health scientists in needed transdisciplinary perspectives. There have been few longitudinal studies to verify causal relationships between the school built environment and PA. Chapter 2 presents results from a natural experiment with objective PA-related measures before and after a move to a new K-5 school designed based on the Chapter 1 guidelines. The study hypothesized that the school would have desirable impacts on students’ sedentary behaviors and PA. The intervention school group was compared longitudinally with a demographically-similar group at 2 control schools. School-time analyses showed that the intervention school design had positive impact on accumulation of sedentary time, and time in light PA, likely due to movement-promoting classroom design. Studies of built environment impacts on human behaviors and health have presented challenges in control of confounding effects. Chapter 3 presents results from experiments using an agent based model (ABM) to simulate population samples of children and to quantify the impact of a single design intervention, dynamic furniture in school, on obesity and overweight prevalence over time. Results of computational experiments showed that there could be some desirable population impact among girls with low PA profiles. Chapter 4 places the work presented in Chapters 1-3 in a larger context. Via exploration of theories of space as a social phenomenon, of design as a discipline with human purpose, and of limitations of current public health built environment studies, the investigator proposes key strategies toward achieving substantial unrealized potential to design our built environments to achieve health

30th International Conference on Information Modelling and Knowledge Bases

Information modelling is becoming more and more important topic for researchers, designers, and users of information systems. The amount and complexity of information itself, the number of abstraction levels of information, and the size of databases and knowledge bases are continuously growing. Conceptual modelling is one of the sub-areas of information modelling. The aim of this conference is to bring together experts from different areas of computer science and other disciplines, who have a common interest in understanding and solving problems on information modelling and knowledge bases, as well as applying the results of research to practice. We also aim to recognize and study new areas on modelling and knowledge bases to which more attention should be paid. Therefore philosophy and logic, cognitive science, knowledge management, linguistics and management science are relevant areas, too. In the conference, there will be three categories of presentations, i.e. full papers, short papers and position papers

Investigation of smart work zone technologies using mixed simulator and field studies

Safety is the top concern in transportation, especially in work zones, as work zones deviate from regular driving environment and driver behavior is very different. In order to protect workers and create a safer work zone environment, new technologies are proposed by agencies and deployed to work zones, however, some are without scientific study before deployment. Therefore, quantitative studies need to be conducted to show the effectiveness of technologies. Driving simulator is a safe and cost-effective way to test effectiveness of new designs and compare different configurations. Field study is another scientific way of testing, as it provides absolute validity, while simulator study provides relative validity. The synergy of field and simulator studies construct a precise experiment as field study calibrates simulator design and validates simulator results. Two main projects, Evaluation of Automated Flagger Assistance Devices (AFADs), and Evaluation of Green Lights on Truck-Mounted Attenuator (TMA), are discussed in this dissertation to illustrate the investigation of smart work zone technologies using mixed simulator and field studies, along with one simulator project investigating interaction between human driven car and autonomous truck platoon in work zones. Both field and simulator studies indicated that AFADs improved stationary work zone safety by enhancing visibility, isolating workers from immediate traffic, and conveying clear guidance message to traffic. The results of green light on TMAs implied an inverse relationship between visibility/awareness of work zone and arrow board recognition/easy on eyes, but did not show if any of the light configurations is superior. Results anticipated for autonomous truck platoon in work zones are drivers behave more uniformly after being educated about the meaning of signage displayed on the back of truck, and performance measured with signage would be more preferable than those without signage. Applications of statistics are extension of studies, including experimental design, survey design, and data analysis. Data obtained from AFAD and Green Light projects were utilized to illustrate the methodologies of data analysis and model building, which incorporated simulator data, biofeedback and survey response to interpret the relationship among driver perspective and mental status, and driving behavior. From the studies conducted, it could be concluded that mixed simulator and field study is a good fit for smart work zone technologies investigation. Simulators provide a safe environment, flexibility and cost-effectiveness, while field studies calibrate and validate simulator setup and its results. The collaboration of two forms of study generates legitimate and convincing results for investigations. Applying statistical methodologies into transportation simulator and field studies is a good way to make experiment and survey design more rational, and the statistical methods are applicable for further data analysis.Includes bibliographical reference

Objective Validation of Airport Terminal Architecture using Agent-based Simulations

This thesis explores how airport terminal architecture is tested before it is built. The purpose of testing is to make sure an architectural layout aligns with the rest of the airport’s systems. The design of a terminal is a long and expensive process that must accommodate tens of thousands of passengers every hour, the movement of logistics, and control of security. Evaluating spaces for that many people can be difficult to measure, which can result in architects relying on their intuition and experience to judge the impact of a layout for daily operations without objective validation. It is not practical for designers to build a complete airport to see how it works and make renovations after finding aspects that have poor performance. As a result, testing airports requires using mathematical models and simulations to validate how well different systems work together. Designers try to validate architectural layouts in airport terminals by using crowd simulations to approximate passenger behaviour. Existing research in civil engineering and computer science has shown how mathematical models can predict patterns of human activity in the built environment on a large scale. However, these simulations have primarily focused on either modelling passengers as a process flow or people in emergency building evacuation. As a result, existing agent navigation does not consider how passengers use the surrounding architecture for decision-making during daily airport interactions. When passengers enter a terminal for the first time, they can be unaware of what they need to do or how to get there. Instead, passengers rely on using their perception of the environment (the architecture) to inform them what to do. However, there currently are no methods that incorporate architectural perception to validate a building layout in these conditions. This thesis develops an agent-based simulation to validate how well architectural layouts align with the daily operations of an airport terminal. It quantifies the value of a spatial arrangement as a function of people’s interactions in a given space. The model approximates human behaviour based on statistics from existing crowd simulations. It uses spatial analysis, like the isovist and graph theory, for agent navigation and measuring architectural conditions. The proposal incorporates agent perception to provide feedback between people’s decision-making and the influence of the surrounding space. The thesis calculates architectural value using normalized passenger priorities based on typical processing and non-processing airport domains. The success of a terminal layout is dependent on the agent’s ability to complete airport processing and fulfill their priorities. The final value of an architectural layout is determined using statistical methods to provide a probability distribution of likely values. The proposed agent simulation and mathematical models are built using Unity software, which is used to perform several simulation tests in this thesis. Basic functional components of the simulation are validated using existing crowd modelling standards. Tests are also performed to illustrate how different agent perception and priorities influence the value of architectural spaces. Monte Carlo simulations are created for simple terminal layouts to illustrate how changing the floor plan of a security area affects the architectural value for departing passengers. Finally, the architectural values of two real airport terminals are compared against an established passenger experience survey in a basic simulation model. The results of the testing shows that the agent simulation can differentiate between different architectural conditions, within reason, depending on the passengers’ priorities

Proceedings of the 8th International congress on architectural technology (ICAT 2019): architectural technology, facing the renovation and refurbishment challenge.

During the past decade, the construction industry focus has largely been on the many new challenges brought about by the sustainability/climate change agenda and the introduction of BIM in new build. The theme of the next ICAT conference will focus on all issues related to the renovation, refurbishment and re-use of existing buildings. Given the fact that more than half of the industry’s activity is dedicated to these types of building work, the focus seems highly needed. Architectural technology is at the core of the industry where the interplay of many factors creates varied interfaces. Academics and professionals associated with the discipline are ideally placed to lead as we strive to enhance the design, delivery and performance of existing and new buildings as well as the industry at large. This congress will be a vehicle to disseminate research, education and practice at these interfaces