Utilization of Extraterrestrial Resources

Eight state-of-the-art briefings intended to bring members of the Working Group up to date in technical areas relating to future manned expeditions to the Moon and planets were presented at the Meeting of the Working Group on Extraterrestrial Resources held in Washington, D. C., September 25-26, 1962 by recognized authorities in their respective fields. Since it was felt that the material presented at the meeting would be useful for reference purposes, most of the speakers submitted summaries of their remarks for publication. This document is a collection of the material submitted. Contents: Status of Designs of Lunar Surface Vehicles; Hydroponics or Soilless Culture; Processing of Water on the Moon; Lunar Base Construction; Lunar Rocks as a Source of Oxygen; Water in Lunar Materials; Summary of Apollo and Lunar Logistics System Plans

Studying Regional and Cross Border Freight Movement Activities with Truck GPS Big Data

This dissertation utilizes an existing GPS data source to create and analyze a dataset of processed truck trips. The original data was generated for the purpose of fleet management by GPS transponders installed on Canadian owned trucks. These vehicles provide a critical service by fulfilling the economic need to move goods from one location to another. This thesis subsequently re-purposes the GPS pings as a form of opportunistic data to enrich the current state of knowledge regarding freight movement patterns. The first sections of this thesis are dedicated towards understanding the GPS data and devising processing methods needed to convert raw data into a suitable dataset of truck trips. Due to the nature of the topic, a geographic perspective was integral to this work to properly mine the data for useful information. For example, a new application of entropy based on the variety and distribution of carriers stopping at a location was created to assist with the classification of stop events. The data processing resulted in an approximate sample size of 245,000 trips per month from September 2012 to December 2014 and the month of March 2016. The volume of data and level of detail provides information that has not been available to date, which includes trip origins and destinations, associated industry, observed routes, and border crossing time/location if the trip was international. The processed trips derived from GPS data are applied towards a better understanding of inter-regional and cross-border truck movements. This area is underrepresented due to the difficulties in obtaining long-haul trip data where trucks move through multiple jurisdictions. These difficulties are compounded for international trips since the study area spans multiple nations. The processed truck trips are utilized to identify the spatial patterns of truck movements at specific border crossings between Canada and the U.S. including the Ambassador Bridge, Blue Water Bridge, and Peace Bridge. The choice of border crossing is also investigated using a specific case study of trucks travelling between Toronto, Ontario, and Chicago, Illinois. Finally, the observed trips from origin to destination allows for an analysis of delays at single locations (the border crossing) as well as their impact on the total trip. These applications represent a small part of the full potential that passive GPS data can provide after sufficient processing is applied. It is the hope of this author that these efforts can contribute towards the state of practice in transportation as GPS data becomes increasingly available to researchers. The work presented in this thesis illustrates how such GPS data can be used as a viable source to fill in gaps in knowledge. While traditional data collection techniques will remain a necessary facet of transportation research in the foreseeable future, information generated passively by users every day provides a new source of data that is characteristically large (in terms of volume and spatio-temporal coverage) and cost-effective

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

Aeronautical Engineering: A special bibliography with indexes, supplement 48

This special bibliography lists 291 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in August 1974

The End of Traffic and the Future of Access: A Roadmap to the New Transport Landscape

In most industrialized countries, car travel per person has peaked and the automobile regime is showing considering signs of instability. As cities across the globe venture to find the best ways to allow people to get around amidst technological and other changes, many forces are taking hold — all of which suggest a new transport landscape. Our roadmap describes why this landscape is taking shape and prescribes policies informed by contextual awareness, clear thinking, and flexibility

A methodological framework for quantifying impacts of truck traffic on regional network with implications to transport policy

Increased global trade has promoted the importance of shipping industry and the introduction of mega-ships has created an opportunity to be more cost-effective. Because of this, the expected change in freight transportation influences the operating regimes and schedules at the port terminals. Trucks being the predominant mode of transportation used to carry the freight transport, there is a growing concern about the impact of trucks in the region. The problems are further expected to grow as the improvements to resolve them are hindered by funding shortfalls. Public agencies are therefore involved in developing comprehensive state freight plans that outline immediate and long-range plans for freight-related transportation improvements. However, for states to develop and implement investment policies that can adequately address challenges, there is a need for a policy framework that can evaluate the impact of freight. The lack of the framework makes it difficult for state/metropolitan planning organizations to implement investment strategies in the best possible way. The proposed framework in the dissertation tries to fill the gap by developing a methodological framework, which can help agencies to evaluate multiple policies and their impact on local communities. Additionally, the framework can ascertain the magnitude of impacts that the infrastructure or policy in conjunction with the change in truck traffic might have on a regional level. The developed framework thus can help decision makers to prioritize policies that will benefit both public and freight transportation needs. Three demand models are used in the framework, which is built on the principle of behavioral route choice and mode-choice assignment problem. The outputs from the demand models are further used to quantify the impact in terms of cost-benefit analysis. The dissertation includes a real-world case study demonstrating how the framework can be used to evaluate alternative policies and its impact on a regional level. To this end, the developed framework in the dissertation addresses the research questions to present stakeholder\u27s complex implications that policy can have on the region. It also answers the question of how much the change in truck demand affects the region regarding monetary costs such as safety, congestion, environment, and pavement damage. The research further provides an insight of the change in travel behavior as a result of policy decision and its effect on communities

Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions From U.S. Transportation

Outlines the need to cut transportation emissions to limit climate change effects, mitigation options and technologies, policies to promote mitigation, and various scenarios for public attitudes, public policy, technological progress, and energy prices

Facilitating Cooperative Truck Platooning for Energy Savings: Path Planning, Platoon Formation and Benefit Redistribution

Enabled by the connected and automated vehicle (CAV) technology, cooperative truck platooning that offers promising energy savings is likely to be implemented soon. However, as the trucking industry operates in a highly granular manner so that the trucks usually vary in their operation schedules, vehicle types and configurations, it is inevitable that 1) the spontaneous platooning over a spatial network is rare, 2) the total fuel savings vary from platoon to platoon, and 3) the benefit achieved within a platoon differs from position to position, e.g., the lead vehicle always achieves the least fuel-saving. Consequently, trucks from different owners may not have the opportunities to platoon with others if no path coordination is performed. Even if they happen to do so, they may tend to change positions in the formed platoons to achieve greater benefits, yielding behaviorally unstable platoons with less energy savings and more disruptions to traffic flows. This thesis proposes a hierarchical modeling framework to explicate the necessitated strategies that facilitate cooperative truck platooning. An empirical study is first conducted to scrutinize the energy-saving potentials of the U.S. national freight network. By comparing the performance under scheduled platooning and ad-hoc platooning, the author shows that the platooning opportunities can be greatly improved by careful path planning, thereby yielding substantial energy savings. For trucks assembled on the same path and can to platoon together, the second part of the thesis investigates the optimal platoon formation that maximizes total platooning utility and benefits redistribution mechanisms that address the behavioral instability issue. Both centralized and decentralized approaches are proposed. In particular, the decentralized approach employs a dynamic process where individual trucks or formed platoons are assumed to act as rational agents. The agents decide whether to form a larger, better platoon considering their own utilities under the pre-defined benefit reallocation mechanisms. Depending on whether the trucks are single-brand or multi-brand, whether there is a complete information setting or incomplete information setting, three mechanisms, auction, bilateral trade model, and one-sided matching are proposed. The centralized approach yields a near-optimal solution for the whole system and is more computationally efficient than conventional algorithms. The decentralized approach is stable, more flexible, and computational efficient while maintaining acceptable degrees of optimality. The mechanisms proposed can apply to not only under the truck platooning scenario but also other forms of shared mobility.PHDCivil EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163047/1/xtsun_1.pd