47,827 research outputs found
Comparative Analysis on Road Users’ Cost Using HDM-4 Software and Manual Technique: A Case of Addis Ababa-Adama Expressway
Continuous changes in vehicle technology, road condition, traffic compositions initiate the change or updating of road users’ cost models. So that it needs to practice a continuous revision or update periodically for realistic estimation of costs and benefits. This paper presented the relationship and comparison between road users’ cost along Addis Ababa-Adama newly constructed expressway using the Highway Development and Management (HDM-4) Software and manually using formulations developed in the Portuguese model. The method started with data collection. All input data were collected from primary and secondary sources. The primary data utilized an interview, and secondary data were sourced out from pertinent documents, both published and unpublished. More data were gathered that related to vehicles. The vehicles using the road are classified based on the manual from the Ethiopian Road Authority as cars, utilities, small bus, large bus, small truck, medium truck, heavy truck, and truck trailer. The collected data have been input into the HDM-4 interface; the output of the analysis was vehicle operating costs, travel time, and road users’ cost as a summation. Using manual technique and HDM-4 Software, Birr 128.62/km/vehicle and Birr 139.23/km/vehicle, respectively, were found from road users’ costs analysis. The result shows the difference of Birr 10.61. Also, the correlation coefficient of 0.75 is determined, which shows that the two results of road users’ costs are highly related. As a result, the study reveals that the application of HDM-4 Software and the manual technique formulations from the Portuguese model can be adopted interchangeably to calculate Road Users’ Cost of road sections in Ethiopia. Hence, the study results are expected to be an eye-opener for a future similar project by the concerned agencies
Candidate Technologies for the Integrated Health Management Program
The purpose of this report is to assess Vehicle Health Management (VHM) technologies for implementation as a demonstration. Extensive studies have been performed to determine technologies which could be implemented on the Atlas and Centaur vehicles as part of a bridging program. This paper discusses areas today where VHM can be implemented for benefits in reliability, performance, and cost reduction. VHM Options are identified and one demonstration is recommended for execution
Expert system decision support for low-cost launch vehicle operations
Progress in assessing the feasibility, benefits, and risks associated with AI expert systems applied to low cost expendable launch vehicle systems is described. Part one identified potential application areas in vehicle operations and on-board functions, assessed measures of cost benefit, and identified key technologies to aid in the implementation of decision support systems in this environment. Part two of the program began the development of prototypes to demonstrate real-time vehicle checkout with controller and diagnostic/analysis intelligent systems and to gather true measures of cost savings vs. conventional software, verification and validation requirements, and maintainability improvement. The main objective of the expert advanced development projects was to provide a robust intelligent system for control/analysis that must be performed within a specified real-time window in order to meet the demands of the given application. The efforts to develop the two prototypes are described. Prime emphasis was on a controller expert system to show real-time performance in a cryogenic propellant loading application and safety validation implementation of this system experimentally, using commercial-off-the-shelf software tools and object oriented programming techniques. This smart ground support equipment prototype is based in C with imbedded expert system rules written in the CLIPS protocol. The relational database, ORACLE, provides non-real-time data support. The second demonstration develops the vehicle/ground intelligent automation concept, from phase one, to show cooperation between multiple expert systems. This automated test conductor (ATC) prototype utilizes a knowledge-bus approach for intelligent information processing by use of virtual sensors and blackboards to solve complex problems. It incorporates distributed processing of real-time data and object-oriented techniques for command, configuration control, and auto-code generation
Automatic Recognition of Public Transport Trips from Mobile Device Sensor Data and Transport Infrastructure Information
Automatic detection of public transport (PT) usage has important applications
for intelligent transport systems. It is crucial for understanding the
commuting habits of passengers at large and over longer periods of time. It
also enables compilation of door-to-door trip chains, which in turn can assist
public transport providers in improved optimisation of their transport
networks. In addition, predictions of future trips based on past activities can
be used to assist passengers with targeted information. This article documents
a dataset compiled from a day of active commuting by a small group of people
using different means of PT in the Helsinki region. Mobility data was collected
by two means: (a) manually written details of each PT trip during the day, and
(b) measurements using sensors of travellers' mobile devices. The manual log is
used to cross-check and verify the results derived from automatic measurements.
The mobile client application used for our data collection provides a fully
automated measurement service and implements a set of algorithms for decreasing
battery consumption. The live locations of some of the public transport
vehicles in the region were made available by the local transport provider and
sampled with a 30-second interval. The stopping times of local trains at
stations during the day were retrieved from the railway operator. The static
timetable information of all the PT vehicles operating in the area is made
available by the transport provider, and linked to our dataset. The challenge
is to correctly detect as many manually logged trips as possible by using the
automatically collected data. This paper includes an analysis of challenges due
to missing or partially sampled information in the data, and initial results
from automatic recognition using a set of algorithms. Improvement of correct
recognitions is left as an ongoing challenge.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, 10 table
Nypa Frutican Rachis as building envelope heat insulator
This research is conducted to investigate the possibility of cellulose in Nypa Frutican Rachis to achieve thermal comfort. As Malaysia was known as tropical country which has hot and humid climate, this research focus on to study the transfer of heat through Nypa Frutican Rachis as a roof. Since only Nypa leaves have been used as a roof and have been applied until now in East Malaysia, this project uses an innovation of Nypa palm by using its rachis that contain chemical material that have lower thermal conductivity value such as cellulose and lignin as a roof or building envelope heat insulator. This paper described the experimental study method by measuring the temperature of outer and inner surface of Nypa Frutican Rachis on small physical model study. The temperature was measured by using Digital Infrared Thermometer. The average outer and inner tempe rature for five consecutive days was obtained from the experiment is highlighted. Results show that the average of heat loss and heat transfer conduction for five consecutive days are 9.63 W/h and 9.86 W. This experiment shows a good result and proved that Nypa Frutican Rachis is suitable and effective to be a building envelope heat insulator
Service-Oriented Architecture for Space Exploration Robotic Rover Systems
Currently, industrial sectors are transforming their business processes into
e-services and component-based architectures to build flexible, robust, and
scalable systems, and reduce integration-related maintenance and development
costs. Robotics is yet another promising and fast-growing industry that deals
with the creation of machines that operate in an autonomous fashion and serve
for various applications including space exploration, weaponry, laboratory
research, and manufacturing. It is in space exploration that the most common
type of robots is the planetary rover which moves across the surface of a
planet and conducts a thorough geological study of the celestial surface. This
type of rover system is still ad-hoc in that it incorporates its software into
its core hardware making the whole system cohesive, tightly-coupled, more
susceptible to shortcomings, less flexible, hard to be scaled and maintained,
and impossible to be adapted to other purposes. This paper proposes a
service-oriented architecture for space exploration robotic rover systems made
out of loosely-coupled and distributed web services. The proposed architecture
consists of three elementary tiers: the client tier that corresponds to the
actual rover; the server tier that corresponds to the web services; and the
middleware tier that corresponds to an Enterprise Service Bus which promotes
interoperability between the interconnected entities. The niche of this
architecture is that rover's software components are decoupled and isolated
from the rover's body and possibly deployed at a distant location. A
service-oriented architecture promotes integrate-ability, scalability,
reusability, maintainability, and interoperability for client-to-server
communication.Comment: LACSC - Lebanese Association for Computational Sciences,
http://www.lacsc.org/; International Journal of Science & Emerging
Technologies (IJSET), Vol. 3, No. 2, February 201
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