716,108 research outputs found
An Empirical Model for Optimal Highway Durability in Cold Regions
We develop an empirical tool to estimate optimal highway durability in cold regions. To test the model, we assemble a data set containing all highway construction and maintenance projects in Arizona and Washington State from 1990 to 2014. The data set includes information on location, time, type (resurfacing, construction, or lane widening), pavement material and thickness, and total expenditure for these projects. Using the data, we first estimate how highway maintenance costs and highway duration depend on pavement thickness and traffic loading. We then calibrate the effects of different deicers on highway durability and thus on highway maintenance costs. Finally, we demonstrate how the estimated and calibrated model can be used by planners to make optimal decisions for highway pavement and winter operations in cold regions
A Note on the Balancedness and the Concavity of Highway Games
A highway problem is determined by a connected graph which provides all potential entry and exit vertices and all possible edges that can be constructed between vertices, a cost function on the edges of the graph and a set of players, each in need of constructing a connection between a specific entry and exit vertex. Mosquera and Zarzuelo (2006) introduce highway problems and the corresponding cooperative cost games called high- way games to address the problem of fair allocation of the construction costs in case the underlying graph is a chain. In this note, we study the concavity and the balancedness of highway games on more general graphs. A graph G is called highway-game concave if for each highway problem in which G is the underlying graph the corresponding highway game is concave. The main result of our study is that a graph is highway-game concave if and only if it is weakly triangular. Moreover, we provide sufficient conditions on highway problems defined on cyclic graphs such that the corresponding highway games are balanced.cooperative games;highway games;cost sharing
Cellular automata models of traffic flow along a highway containing a junction
We examine various realistic generalizations of the basic cellular automaton
model describing traffic flow along a highway. In particular, we introduce a
{\em slow-to-start} rule which simulates a possible delay before a car pulls
away from being stationary. Having discussed the case of a bare highway, we
then consider the presence of a junction. We study the effects of acceleration,
disorderness, and slow-to-start behavior on the queue length at the entrance to
the highway. Interestingly, the junction's efficiency is {\it improved} by
introducing disorderness along the highway, and by imposing a speed limit.Comment: to appear in J. Phys. A:Math.& General. 15 pages, RevTeX, 3
Postscript figure
The Impact of Interstate Highways on Land Use Conversion
Between 1945 and 2007, the United States lost 19.3 % of its agricultural land. Over the same time period, the construction of the 42,500 mile interstate highway system lowered transportation costs and opened large tracts of land for development. This paper assesses the impact of the interstate highway system on agricultural land loss in Georgia and uses the empirical estimates to simulate agricultural land loss resulting from the construction of additional interstate highways. Using a historical data set of agricultural land and interstate highway mileage, empirical estimates indicate that each additional mile of interstate highway reduces agricultural land by 468 acres. The impact of interstate highways is heterogeneous across initial level of county development. Urban counties convert 70 % more land than the full sample estimates. Simulation results show that additions to the interstate system create further loss of agricultural land. The results imply that future conservation programs need to consider how to mitigate the impact of the interstate highway system
Prizing on Paths: A PTAS for the Highway Problem
In the highway problem, we are given an n-edge line graph (the highway), and
a set of paths (the drivers), each one with its own budget. For a given
assignment of edge weights (the tolls), the highway owner collects from each
driver the weight of the associated path, when it does not exceed the budget of
the driver, and zero otherwise. The goal is choosing weights so as to maximize
the profit.
A lot of research has been devoted to this apparently simple problem. The
highway problem was shown to be strongly NP-hard only recently
[Elbassioni,Raman,Ray-'09]. The best-known approximation is O(\log n/\log\log
n) [Gamzu,Segev-'10], which improves on the previous-best O(\log n)
approximation [Balcan,Blum-'06].
In this paper we present a PTAS for the highway problem, hence closing the
complexity status of the problem. Our result is based on a novel randomized
dissection approach, which has some points in common with Arora's quadtree
dissection for Euclidean network design [Arora-'98]. The basic idea is
enclosing the highway in a bounding path, such that both the size of the
bounding path and the position of the highway in it are random variables. Then
we consider a recursive O(1)-ary dissection of the bounding path, in subpaths
of uniform optimal weight. Since the optimal weights are unknown, we construct
the dissection in a bottom-up fashion via dynamic programming, while computing
the approximate solution at the same time. Our algorithm can be easily
derandomized. We demonstrate the versatility of our technique by presenting
PTASs for two variants of the highway problem: the tollbooth problem with a
constant number of leaves and the maximum-feasibility subsystem problem on
interval matrices. In both cases the previous best approximation factors are
polylogarithmic [Gamzu,Segev-'10,Elbassioni,Raman,Ray,Sitters-'09]
Statistical Analysis of the Road Network of India
In this paper we study the Indian Highway Network as a complex network where
the junction points are considered as nodes, and the links are formed by an
existing connection. We explore the topological properties and community
structure of the network. We observe that the Indian Highway Network displays
small world properties and is assortative in nature. We also identify the most
important road-junctions (or cities) in the highway network based on the
betweenness centrality of the node. This could help in identifying the
potential congestion points in the network. Our study is of practical
importance and could provide a novel approach to reduce congestion and improve
the performance of the highway networ
A Method of Identifying Hazardous Highway Locations Using the Principle of Individual Lifetime Risk
Dr. Ossenbruggen presents a scientific framework for identifying hazardous highway locations that may be more easily understood by non-scientists and has potential for comparing highway with other risks to health
Recurrent Highway Networks
Many sequential processing tasks require complex nonlinear transition
functions from one step to the next. However, recurrent neural networks with
'deep' transition functions remain difficult to train, even when using Long
Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. We introduce a novel theoretical analysis of
recurrent networks based on Gersgorin's circle theorem that illuminates several
modeling and optimization issues and improves our understanding of the LSTM
cell. Based on this analysis we propose Recurrent Highway Networks, which
extend the LSTM architecture to allow step-to-step transition depths larger
than one. Several language modeling experiments demonstrate that the proposed
architecture results in powerful and efficient models. On the Penn Treebank
corpus, solely increasing the transition depth from 1 to 10 improves word-level
perplexity from 90.6 to 65.4 using the same number of parameters. On the larger
Wikipedia datasets for character prediction (text8 and enwik8), RHNs outperform
all previous results and achieve an entropy of 1.27 bits per character.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 3 table
Travelling on Graphs with Small Highway Dimension
We study the Travelling Salesperson (TSP) and the Steiner Tree problem (STP)
in graphs of low highway dimension. This graph parameter was introduced by
Abraham et al. [SODA 2010] as a model for transportation networks, on which TSP
and STP naturally occur for various applications in logistics. It was
previously shown [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015] that these problems admit a
quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme (QPTAS) on graphs of constant
highway dimension. We demonstrate that a significant improvement is possible in
the special case when the highway dimension is 1, for which we present a
fully-polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). We also prove that STP is
weakly NP-hard for these restricted graphs. For TSP we show NP-hardness for
graphs of highway dimension 6, which answers an open problem posed in [Feldmann
et al. ICALP 2015]
- …