71,417 research outputs found
Autonomous Mobility and Energy Service Management in Future Smart Cities: An Overview
With the rise of transportation electrification, autonomous driving and
shared mobility in urban mobility systems, and increasing penetrations of
distributed energy resources and autonomous demand-side management techniques
in energy systems, tremendous opportunities, as well as challenges, are
emerging in the forging of a sustainable and converged urban mobility and
energy future. This paper is motivated by these disruptive transformations and
gives an overview of managing autonomous mobility and energy services in future
smart cities. First, we propose a three-layer architecture for the convergence
of future mobility and energy systems. For each layer, we give a brief overview
of the disruptive transformations that directly contribute to the rise of
autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems. Second, we propose the concept of
autonomous flexibility-on-demand (AFoD), as an energy service platform built
directly on existing infrastructures of AMoD systems. In the vision of AFoD,
autonomous electric vehicles provide charging flexibilities as a service on
demand in energy systems. Third, we analyze and compare AMoD and AFoD, and we
identify four key decisions that, if appropriately coordinated, will create a
synergy between AMoD and AFoD. Finally, we discuss key challenges towards the
success of AMoD and AFoD in future smart cities and present some key research
directions regarding the system-wide coordination between AMoD and AFoD.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure
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Development of Eco-Friendly Ramp Control for Connected and Automated Electric Vehicles
With on-board sensors such as camera, radar, and Lidar, connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) can sense the surrounding environment and be driven autonomously and safely by themselves without colliding into other objects on the road. CAVs are also able to communicate with each other and roadside infrastructure via vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, respectively, sharing information on the vehiclesâ states, signal phase and timing (SPaT) information, enabling CAVs to make decisions in a collaborative manner. As a typical scenario, ramp control attracts wide attention due to the concerns of safety and mobility in the merging area. In particular, if the line-of-the-sight is blocked (because of grade separation), then neither mainline vehicles nor on-ramp vehicles may well adapt their own dynamics to perform smoothed merging maneuvers. This may lead to speed fluctuations or even shockwave propagating upstream traffic along the corridor, thus potentially increasing the traffic delays and excessive energy consumption. In this project, the research team proposed a hierarchical ramp merging system that not only allowed microscopic cooperative maneuvers for connected and automated electric vehicles on the ramp to merge into mainline traffic flow, but also had controllability of ramp inflow rate, which enabled macroscopic traffic flow control. A centralized optimal control-based approach was proposed to both smooth the merging flow and improve the system-wide mobility of the network. Linear quadratic trackers in both finite horizon and receding horizon forms were developed to solve the optimization problem in terms of path planning and sequence determination, and a microscopic electric vehicle (EV) energy consumption model was applied to estimate the energy consumption. The simulation results confirmed that under the regulated inflow rate, the proposed system was able to avoid potential traffic congestion and improve the mobility (in terms of average speed) as much as 115%, compared to the conventional ramp metering and the ramp without any control approach. Interestingly, for EVs (connected and automated EVs in this study), the improved mobility may not necessarily result in the reduction of energy consumption. The âsweet spotâ of average speed ranges from 27â34 mph for the EV models in this study.View the NCST Project Webpag
Interstate 74 Quad Cities Corridor Study Scott County, Iowa and Rock Island County, Illinois Project Number IM-74-1(122)0-13-82 FHWA-IOWA-EIS-09-01-F, February 2009
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Iowa and Illinois Departments of
Transportation (Iowa DOT and IDOT) have identified the Selected Alternative for
improving Interstate 74 (I-74) from its southern terminus at Avenue of the Cities (23rd
Avenue) in Moline, Illinois to its northern terminus one mile north of the I-74
interchange with 53rd Street in Davenport, Iowa. The Selected Alternative identified and
discussed in this Record of Decision is the preferred alternative identified in the Final
Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS).
The purpose of the proposed improvements is to improve capacity, travel reliability, and
safety along I-74 between its termini, and provide consistency with local land use
planning goals. The need for the proposed improvements to the I-74 corridor is based
on a combination of factors related to providing better transportation service and
sustaining economic development
The Role of Transportation in Campus Emergency Planning, MTI Report 08-06
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina created the greatest natural disaster in American history. The states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama sustained significant damage, including 31 colleges and universities. Other institutions of higher education, most notably Louisiana State University (LSU), became resources to the disaster area. This is just one of the many examples of disaster impacts on institutions of higher education. The Federal Department of Homeland Security, under Homeland Security Presidential Directiveâ5, requires all public agencies that want to receive federal preparedness assistance to comply with the National Incident Management System (NIMS), which includes the creation of an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP). Universities, which may be victims or resources during disasters, must write NIMSâcompliant emergency plans. While most university emergency plans address public safety and logistics management, few adequately address the transportation aspects of disaster response and recovery. This MTI report describes the value of integrating transportation infrastructure into the campus emergency plan, including planning for helicopter operations. It offers a list of materials that can be used to educate and inform campus leadership on campus emergency impacts, including books about the Katrina response by LSU and Tulane Hospital, contained in the report´s bibliography. It provides a complete set of Emergency Operations Plan checklists and organization charts updated to acknowledge lessons learned from Katrina, 9/11 and other wideâscale emergencies. Campus emergency planners can quickly update their existing emergency management documents by integrating selected annexes and elements, or create new NIMSâcompliant plans by adapting the complete set of annexes to their university´s structures
CoLight: Learning Network-level Cooperation for Traffic Signal Control
Cooperation among the traffic signals enables vehicles to move through
intersections more quickly. Conventional transportation approaches implement
cooperation by pre-calculating the offsets between two intersections. Such
pre-calculated offsets are not suitable for dynamic traffic environments. To
enable cooperation of traffic signals, in this paper, we propose a model,
CoLight, which uses graph attentional networks to facilitate communication.
Specifically, for a target intersection in a network, CoLight can not only
incorporate the temporal and spatial influences of neighboring intersections to
the target intersection, but also build up index-free modeling of neighboring
intersections. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use graph
attentional networks in the setting of reinforcement learning for traffic
signal control and to conduct experiments on the large-scale road network with
hundreds of traffic signals. In experiments, we demonstrate that by learning
the communication, the proposed model can achieve superior performance against
the state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 10 pages. Proceedings of the 28th ACM International on Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management. ACM, 201
Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)
This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio
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