Justice in transport policy

For the last hundred years or so, transport and planning systems have been based on the assumption that people had access to a car. What happens to people who have no such opportunity? Rural shops and facilities close, urban city centres degenerate leaving poorer people with little or no local goods and services. The increase in movement accorded to that part of the population with access to a car has left the other part of the population worse off than they had been before. This has had particularly bad consequences for those members of society who are already losing out, especially poor, elderly, disabled and young people. These people are dependent on others: neighbours, family or friends (if they have them), or what society chooses to dispense (if they do not).This is often seen as a transport, urban or rural planning problem. However, it is much more serious than that. People are being left without access to fundamental aspects of society: health care, education, legal and electoral rights in addition to affordable nutritious food. As a result they are losing out on the benefits of living within a society because the transport system is unable to accommodate their needs. The direction taken by transport and planning over the past hundred years or so has managed to open up enormous opportunities for some elements of society at the expense of restricting access to basic rights for others.The problem now is that society has designed itself to be inaccessible for certain parts of the population who have no means of reaching what are often considered basic aspects of modern life. These people are excluded from full participation in society as a result of a conscious decision to encourage movement rather than access. This has the unintended consequence that those who are unable, for whatever reason, to avail themselves of the means of movement, are also unable to obtain independent access to activities to which they are theoretically entitled as of right. This is inherently unjust.Transport should be available to all in a form that they can use independently because it is the means by which access to the fundamental activities is obtained. In general, this means what we might call ?public transport?: a transport system which the public is able to use. This suggests that the default transport system ? the one that should be designed and implemented as a starting point ? is the public transport system in its widest sense. Design for car traffic is secondary: it includes one part of the population at the expense of the rest. Devising measures that will help planners to plan such a system and which will demonstrate that access is sufficient is a matter of urgency. Such a measure would allow society to decide exactly what it means by ?sufficient? transport ? e.g. maximum walking time to a doctor?s surgery, fresh food, school ? and to allocate funds accordingly. The provision of accessible transport is a necessary element of making a just society

Industrial Fieldbus Improvements in Power Distribution and Conducted Noise Immunity With No Extra Costs

Industrial distributed control continues the move toward networks at all levels. At lower levels, control networks provide flexibility, reliability, and low cost, although perhaps the simplest but most important advantage is the reduced volume of wiring. Powered fieldbuses offer particular notable benefits in system wiring simplification. Nevertheless, very few papers are dealing with the potentials and limitations in power distribution through the bus cable. Only a few of the existent fieldbus standards consider this possibility but often simply as an option without enough technical specifications. In fact, nobody talks about it, but power distribution through the bus and conducted noise disturbances are strongly related. This paper points out and analyzes these limitations and proposes a new low-cost fieldbus physical layer that enlarges power distribution capability of the bus and improves system robustness. We show an industrial application on water desalination plants and the very good results obtained owing to the fieldbus. Finally, we present electromagnetic compatibility test results that verify improvements against electrical fast transients on the sensor/actuator connection side as disturbances usually encountered in harsh-environment industrial applications

Analysing the design criteria of charging cordons

The idea of the efficient use of roads, which requires users to pay for the traffic congestion cost that they impose on an urban road network, is long established (Pigou, 1920; Walters, 1961). However, the gap between the constructive theory of road pricing and its real world application is significant due to the issue of public acceptance, technical feasibility, and the cost of implementation (Sharp, 1966; Verhoef et al, 1995; Stenman and Sterner, 1998; and Sumalee, 2000). Different charging regimes have been developed and studied including time or delay based charging, distance based charging, cordon or boundary based charging, and area based charging (Holland and Watson, 1978; May, 1992; Oldridge, 1990; Smith et al, 1994; and Ison, 1998). The cordon charging system is the core of the study in this paper where we are looking for criteria for the judgmental design of cordons. We use the term “judgmental cordon design” to describe the process to identify the best locations to levy the charges and specify the optimal charge levels based on professional judgment. This paper reviews the literature to identify design criteria in section 2, and then it describes a survey with six UK local authorities in section 3. Section 4 presents the results of the survey and finally section 5 discuss the results and draw the conclusions

The principles of public transport network planning: a review of the emerging literature with select examples

This paper highlights for urban planners the key strategies and tactics that can be deployed to improve suburban public transport networks. Introduction The governance and management of public transport systems is an essential component of metropolitan planning and urban management. Most metropolitan strategies in Australia and in other jurisdictions presuppose the provision of public transport. Yet there is often a disconnection between transport plans and land-use schemes. Similarly, metropolitan land-use plans that do integrate with transport plans tend to focus on infrastructure rather than service quality and connectivity. A failure to adequately consider the quality of public transport networks in land-use planning analysis has the potential to produce poor planning outcomes in two key ways. First new land-uses may be inadequately served with public transport services, leading to dependence on alternative travel modes, such as cars. Second, the failure to recognise the significance of well-planned local public transport networks may result in the preclusion of some land-use options. This preclusion may relate to the location of land-uses or their design, such as over-provision of carparking. The continuing debate over whether to address suburban cardependence via land-use change or via transport planning is a case in point. And while the arguments in favour of and against land-use change as a means to overcome car dependence are well known in the planning literature. There is a growing if not yet widely appreciated literature that advocates improvements to public transport network planning and coordination as a means of reducing car dependence. The recognition of improved public transport network planning as a means of reducing car dependence is immensely significant because it offers planners an additional or alternative tool for managing urban transport patterns beyond land-use variation or investment in heavy infrastructure. Urban planning practitioners are not yet well served and informed by the broader public transport planning literature on the advantages of public transport network planning. While there is an extensive literature focusing on the economics and engineering of urban public transport systems the planning literature on the practices that contribute to success in public transport network design and operations is relatively poorly documented. There is also very little literature dedicated to public transport network design within Australian cities which are distinguished by highly centralised radial heavy rail networks with bus or tram networks that are well developed in inner urban zones but less so in the outer suburbs. The remainder of this paper has four objectives for transport planning theory and practice. First the paper reviews the literature on public transport network planning principles; next the paper attempts to formulate these principles in practical terms such that they can be applied to line and network design; third the paper considers further dimensions of network planning, including institutional arrangements and transition points in network design. The paper is intended for three audiences. The first is planning scholars who are involved in debates about public transport. The second is strategic policy officials in planning agencies who are involved in the planning and design of public transport networks. The third audience comprises those involved in development processes and who seek insights into the technical components of public transport network planning. Some caveats are appropriate however. The paper is not seeking to justify public transport network planning. The authors consider that the case for dedicated planning is implicit in the assumption that cities should provide good quality public transport to their residents. The wider case in favour of network planning has been successfully advanced elsewhere. Conversely, the paper is not intended as a directly applicable manual of detailed transport planning practice. While it does offer some insights into the practical public transport network planning task such guidance is better provided by Nielsen et al and Vuchic. Instead the paper highlights for urban planners the key strategies and tactics for that can be deployed to improve suburban public transport networks. Understanding these principles should thus assist urban planners – and urban scholars – to better shape and evaluate urban development processes and patterns

Planning and Design Soa Architecture Blueprint

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a framework for integrating business processes and supporting IT infrastructure as secure, standardized components-services-that can be reused and combined to address changing business priorities. Services are the building blocks of SOA and new applications can be constructed through consuming these services and orchestrating services within a business process. In SOA, services map to the business functions that are identified during business process analysis. Upon a successful implementation of SOA, the enterprise gain benefit by reducing development time, utilizing flexible and responsive application structure, and following dynamic connectivity of application logics between business partners. This paper presents SOA reference architecture blueprint as the building blocks of SOA which is services, service components and flows that together support enterprise business processes and the business goals

Project based learning on industrial informatics: applying IoT to urban garden

Copyright (c) 2018 IEEEThe fast evolution of technologies forces teachers to trade content off for self-learning. PBL is one of the best ways to promote self-learning and simultaneously boost motivation. In this paper, we present our experience introducing project-based learning in the last year subject. New Internet of Things (IoT) topic allows us to carry out complete projects, integrating different technologies and tools. Moreover, the selection of open-source and standard free technologies makes easy and cheap the access to hardware and software platforms used. We carefully have picked communication, data management, and programming tools that we think would be attractive to our students. They can start making fast prototyping with little initial skills and, at the same time, these are serious and popular tools widely used in the industry. In this paper, we report on the design of a project-based learning for our course and the impact this has on the student satisfaction and motivation. Surveys taught us that tuning the courses towards developing real projects on the field, has a large impact on acceptance, learning objectives achievements and motivation towards the course content.”I Plan Propio Integral de Docencia de la Universidad de Málaga” y Proyecto de Innovación Educativa PIE17/085, de la Universidad de Málaga. Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

CSP channels for CAN-bus connected embedded control systems

Closed loop control system typically contains multitude of sensors and actuators operated simultaneously. So they are parallel and distributed in its essence. But when mapping this parallelism to software, lot of obstacles concerning multithreading communication and synchronization issues arise. To overcome this problem, the CT kernel/library based on CSP algebra has been developed. This project (TES.5410) is about developing communication extension to the CT library to make it applicable in distributed systems. Since the library is tailored for control systems, properties and requirements of control systems are taken into special consideration. Applicability of existing middleware solutions is examined. A comparison of applicable fieldbus protocols is done in order to determine most suitable ones and CAN fieldbus is chosen to be first fieldbus used. Brief overview of CSP and existing CSP based libraries is given. Middleware architecture is proposed along with few novel ideas