Transportation Systems Analysis and Assessment

The transportation system is the backbone of any social and economic system, and is also a very complex system in which users, transport means, technologies, services, and infrastructures have to cooperate with each other to achieve common and unique goals.The aim of this book is to present a general overview on some of the main challenges that transportation planners and decision makers are faced with. The book addresses different topics that range from user's behavior to travel demand simulation, from supply chain to the railway infrastructure capacity, from traffic safety issues to Life Cycle Assessment, and to strategies to make the transportation system more sustainable

Celebrating Spatial Planning at TU Delft 2008-2019:

The Department of Urbanism of the TU Delft is organised in five sections: Spatial Planning & Strategy (SPS), Urban Design, Environmental Modelling, Urban Studies, and Landscape Architecture. SPS has three distinct and complementary pillars: (i) Spatial Planning & Strategy, (ii) Regional Design and Planning, and (iii) International Urbanisation & Development Planning. Spatial Planning at TU Delft has an evident, but unique relationship with spatial design, focusing on the development and transformation of spatial form, composition, patterns, structures, and networks. Spatial Planning, together with Design and Technology, form the key pillars to Urbanism at Delft University of Technology. This integrative approach to urbanism has a long history at TU Delft and makes the University’s academic profile in spatial planning highly distinctive and also highly ranked. All over the world, cities and regions are challenged by the risks and opportunities associated with accelerating challenges arising from migration, climate change, the fourth industrial revolution, globalisation, rising inequality, and political instability. They face urgent questions with respect to sustainable growth and transformation that can only be tackled in an interdisciplinary integrative way that promotes social, economic, and environmental sustainability and spatial justice. In other words, they are not only concerned with what to do (i.e. the objectives of spatial planning) but also with how to do it (i.e. processes of democratic citizen engagement and governance). Over recent decades, spatial planning, policy-making and territorial governance have changed drastically. First, trends of deregulation and decentralisation have had a large impact on traditionally strong spatial planning authorities, such as national governments and national bodies of planning. They have repositioned themselves and gotten new responsibilities, but regional and local planning authorities have had to adapt as well. Additionally, at least in the European Union, private stakeholders and civil society have been given much more room to co-create spatial plans and interventions with those planning authorities. Spatial planning has developed into an inter- and transdisciplinary activity, especially in advanced economies. Secondly, vision and strategy-making have become mainstream in spatial planning with an increased understanding of the complex, uncertain, networked, and dynamic nature of cities and regions. Planning for resilience and sustainability, for organic growth, for flexibility, and for adaptivity means that planning has become a process of intensive interaction, negotiation, and communication between involved stakeholders, looking for shared visions and strategies to go forward. Such a process is helped by diverse tools and ways of approaching the tasks at hand, with the formulation of alternative spatial scenarios and by vision and strategy-making. These tools contribute to a new planning paradigm that focuses on communication and consensus-seeking in collaborative decision-making processes. This has increased the need for urbanism-planning professionals who can lead, guide, facilitate, mediate, manage, and steer those processes, across a variety of spatial scales, from neighbourhood to city-region and beyond. Thirdly, spatial planning has become a more digitised and digitally supported process in many ways. In several places, spatial planning processes are based on E-participation and innovative ways of citizen engagement. Urban (big) data and sophisticated 2D and 3D analysis, visualisation, modelling, and decision-making tools are providing urbanism professionals with more input on the city than ever before, making urban policy-making processes potentially more transparent, explicit, and democratic, and strongly underpinned and supported by actual and dynamic data that allows for evidence-based decision- making. The changes within the professional field of spatial planning come with many questions that can be researched at the University , focusing on issues of: fairness, spatial justice, and democracy building; the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders in spatial development processes, including the roles and values of planners spatial decision-making processes and how they are informed by socio-spatial data (analysis). SPS contributes to teaching and research on these questions and contributes to the understanding of theoretical perspectives on the nature, scope, and effects of spatial planning. Our section focuses on (i) international and European territorial governance and policy-making, including their potential for democracy building, (ii) contemporary methods of spatial planning, spatial planning instruments, and spatial planning systems, (iii) territorial evidence and impact assessment. By doing so, the Section contributes to theories of spatial planning and builds on SPS’s strong tradition of international comparative studies. TU Delft is the leading institution in the Netherlands for research and education on Urbanism. It has an established track record of excellence in research, teaching, and learning, confirmed by external assessments

Algorithms for Scheduling Problems

This edited book presents new results in the area of algorithm development for different types of scheduling problems. In eleven chapters, algorithms for single machine problems, flow-shop and job-shop scheduling problems (including their hybrid (flexible) variants), the resource-constrained project scheduling problem, scheduling problems in complex manufacturing systems and supply chains, and workflow scheduling problems are given. The chapters address such subjects as insertion heuristics for energy-efficient scheduling, the re-scheduling of train traffic in real time, control algorithms for short-term scheduling in manufacturing systems, bi-objective optimization of tortilla production, scheduling problems with uncertain (interval) processing times, workflow scheduling for digital signal processor (DSP) clusters, and many more

Cities and metropolises in France and Germany

In both countries, France and Germany, there is great pressure to change and adapt towards new forms of urbanity and to conceive new strategic approaches with limited public finance and a need for economic efficiency. Not all types of urban areas are equally affected by these issues. The book aims to do justice to this situation, considering in both cases the context of the national urban systems. As it proved impossible to address all the topics relevant to the spatial development of urban and rural areas, the authors decided to concentrate on a number of important topical themes which are undoubtedly relevant in both countries, albeit in different ways, and which could be significant for a comparison. The focus is thus on issues related to metropolises, small and medium-sized towns and particularly current issues of urbanity, sustainability, Smart Cities, transport and mobility, and the role of crossborder urban development. The structure of the chapters is conceived in these terms. Besides scientific and theoretical approaches, the authors also consider the practical planning perspective and methodological aspects of the topic at hand. They mainly address three relevant factors: the differences between the two institutional systems, the development paths and historical constants, and how new challenges are addressed on both sides of the border

Electric Vehicle Efficient Power and Propulsion Systems

Vehicle electrification has been identified as one of the main technology trends in this second decade of the 21st century. Nearly 10% of global car sales in 2021 were electric, and this figure would be 50% by 2030 to reduce the oil import dependency and transport emissions in line with countries’ climate goals. This book addresses the efficient power and propulsion systems which cover essential topics for research and development on EVs, HEVs and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV), including: Energy storage systems (battery, fuel cell, supercapacitors, and their hybrid systems); Power electronics devices and converters; Electric machine drive control, optimization, and design; Energy system advanced management methods Primarily intended for professionals and advanced students who are working on EV/HEV/FCEV power and propulsion systems, this edited book surveys state of the art novel control/optimization techniques for different components, as well as for vehicle as a whole system. New readers may also find valuable information on the structure and methodologies in such an interdisciplinary field. Contributed by experienced authors from different research laboratory around the world, these 11 chapters provide balanced materials from theorical background to methodologies and practical implementation to deal with various issues of this challenging technology. This reprint encourages researchers working in this field to stay actualized on the latest developments on electric vehicle efficient power and propulsion systems, for road and rail, both manned and unmanned vehicles

IEOM Society International

IEOM Society Internationa

Multimodal, intermodal and terminals

The chapter looks at rail freight terminals, rail--sea interfaces, in particular, as part of a multimodal, or integrated transportation network. Terminals are key infrastructure for linking individual transport modes and governing and managing their interchange in a manner that creates a seamless and sustainable transportation system. Therefore, their performance is critical for maximising transport efficiency and modes integration. This chapter focused on how to measure the operational performance of rail freight terminals in a framework of integrated transportation network. In an increasingly competitive and commercialised world, there is an increasing demand to be able to rank transport options and routes in some way. Drawing on new material, this talk attempts to outline possible methods for how to measure the performance of rail terminals. It focuses on the identification of suitable methods to assess performance by key indicators. Intermodality demands for going beyond safeguarding the individual modes to ensuring the security of the intermodal inter-faces (terminals), the nodes that link and integrate passenger and freight flows. That demands for an integrated holistic approach built on the collaboration between international, national organisations and operators. The study put emphasis on the security challenges and threats to freight transport generally and in rail-sea interfaces more specifically. It moves onto the regulations already governing security in rail-sea interfaces. Finally, it focus on the role that infrastructure planning can play in improving security and offer some conclusions and recommendations for the futur

Control of Energy Storage

Energy storage can provide numerous beneficial services and cost savings within the electricity grid, especially when facing future challenges like renewable and electric vehicle (EV) integration. Public bodies, private companies and individuals are deploying storage facilities for several purposes, including arbitrage, grid support, renewable generation, and demand-side management. Storage deployment can therefore yield benefits like reduced frequency fluctuation, better asset utilisation and more predictable power profiles. Such uses of energy storage can reduce the cost of energy, reduce the strain on the grid, reduce the environmental impact of energy use, and prepare the network for future challenges. This Special Issue of Energies explore the latest developments in the control of energy storage in support of the wider energy network, and focus on the control of storage rather than the storage technology itself

Automated Validation of State-Based Client-Centric Isolation with TLA ⁺

Clear consistency guarantees on data are paramount for the design and implementation of distributed systems. When implementing distributed applications, developers require approaches to verify the data consistency guarantees of an implementation choice. Crooks et al. define a state-based and client-centric model of database isolation. This paper formalizes this state-based model in, reproduces their examples and shows how to model check runtime traces and algorithms with this formalization. The formalized model in enables semi-automatic model checking for different implementation alternatives for transactional operations and allows checking of conformance to isolation levels. We reproduce examples of the original paper and confirm the isolation guarantees of the combination of the well-known 2-phase locking and 2-phase commit algorithms. Using model checking this formalization can also help finding bugs in incorrect specifications. This improves feasibility of automated checking of isolation guarantees in synthesized synchronization implementations and it provides an environment for experimenting with new designs.</p