Policy-driven planning in coalitions - A case study

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A Constraint Programming Approach for Non-Preemptive Evacuation Scheduling

Large-scale controlled evacuations require emergency services to select evacuation routes, decide departure times, and mobilize resources to issue orders, all under strict time constraints. Existing algorithms almost always allow for preemptive evacuation schedules, which are less desirable in practice. This paper proposes, for the first time, a constraint-based scheduling model that optimizes the evacuation flow rate (number of vehicles sent at regular time intervals) and evacuation phasing of widely populated areas, while ensuring a nonpreemptive evacuation for each residential zone. Two optimization objectives are considered: (1) to maximize the number of evacuees reaching safety and (2) to minimize the overall duration of the evacuation. Preliminary results on a set of real-world instances show that the approach can produce, within a few seconds, a non-preemptive evacuation schedule which is either optimal or at most 6% away of the optimal preemptive solution.Comment: Submitted to the 21st International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2015). 15 pages + 1 reference pag

Passenger Flows in Underground Railway Stations and Platforms, MTI Report 12-43

Urban rail systems are designed to carry large volumes of people into and out of major activity centers. As a result, the stations at these major activity centers are often crowded with boarding and alighting passengers, resulting in passenger inconvenience, delays, and at times danger. This study examines the planning and analysis of station passenger queuing and flows to offer rail transit station designers and transit system operators guidance on how to best accommodate and manage their rail passengers. The objectives of the study are to: 1) Understand the particular infrastructural, operational, behavioral, and spatial factors that affect and may constrain passenger queuing and flows in different types of rail transit stations; 2) Identify, compare, and evaluate practices for efficient, expedient, and safe passenger flows in different types of station environments and during typical (rush hour) and atypical (evacuations, station maintenance/ refurbishment) situations; and 3) Compile short-, medium-, and long-term recommendations for optimizing passenger flows in different station environments

Public Awareness and Education for Flooding Disasters

In recent years, dramatic river flooding occurred in the city of Prague causing the raising of the river water level more than 8 m and the inundation of the lower parts of the city. The disaster resulted in numerous casualties and damages of buildings and infrastructures. Prior disaster analysis showed that the city was not well prepared for facing the disasters. A digital training could be a powerful tool for increasing knowledge and awareness of the citizens and providing training facilities about response to such disasters. A special Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), therefore, has been developed focused on flooding in Prague offering educational material in crisis flooding. Dedicated technologies have been developed such as a flooding alert and a nonverbal communication language based on icons. The MOOC enables participants to train the new technologies. Participants can also play roles in the crisis management team to increase the sensitivity of the complexity of a flooding crisis and its measurements. The first prototype of the MOOC was tested on a group of students of the Technical Universities of Prague and Delft. The test results will be reported

A Framework for Developing and Integrating Effective Routing Strategies Within the Emergency Management Decision-Support System, Research Report 11-12

This report describes the modeling, calibration, and validation of a VISSIM traffic-flow simulation of the San José, California, downtown network and examines various evacuation scenarios and first-responder routings to assess strategies that would be effective in the event of a no-notice disaster. The modeled network required a large amount of data on network geometry, signal timings, signal coordination schemes, and turning-movement volumes. Turning-movement counts at intersections were used to validate the network with the empirical formula-based measure known as the GEH statistic. Once the base network was tested and validated, various scenarios were modeled to estimate evacuation and emergency vehicle arrival times. Based on these scenarios, a variety of emergency plans for San José’s downtown traffic circulation were tested and validated. The model could be used to evaluate scenarios in other communities by entering their community-specific data

GA-based Optimisation of a LiDAR Feedback Autonomous Mobile Robot Navigation System

Autonomous mobile robots require an efficient navigation system in order to navigate from one location to another location fast and safe without hitting static or dynamic obstacles. A light-detection-and-ranging (LiDAR) based autonomous robot navigation is a multi-component navigation system consists of various parameters to be configured. With such structure and sometimes involving conflicting parameters, the process of determining the best configuration for the system is a non-trivial task. This work presents an optimisation method using Genetic algorithm (GA) to configure such navigation system with tuned parameters automatically. The proposed method can optimise parameters of a few components in a navigation system concurrently. The representation of chromosome and fitness function of GA for this specific robotic problem are discussed. The experimental results from simulation and real hardware show that the optimised navigation system outperforms a manually-tuned navigation system of an indoor mobile robot in terms of navigation time

Community rotorcraft air transportation benefits and opportunities

Information about rotorcraft that will assist community planners in assessing and planning for the use of rotorcraft transportation in their communities is provided. Information useful to helicopter researchers, manufacturers, and operators concerning helicopter opportunities and benefits is also given. Three primary topics are discussed: the current status and future projections of rotorcraft technology, and the comparison of that technology with other transportation vehicles; the community benefits of promising rotorcraft transportation opportunities; and the integration and interfacing considerations between rotorcraft and other transportation vehicles. Helicopter applications in a number of business and public service fields are examined in various geographical settings