538 research outputs found
Model-based Transportation Performance: A Comparative Framework and Literature Synthesis, Research Report 11-09
In an era of limited resources and a proliferation of data, there is increasing pressure to conduct careful evaluations of the economic, environmental, and equity effects of investments and policies that influence transportation and land-use systems. This report compares performance measures recommended to achieve desired goals and reviews the literature to determine the degree to which these measures have been implemented and what they indicate about the relative effectiveness of land-use, transit, and automobile pricing policies. Despite the variation in methods and performance measures implemented in the studies reviewed for this report, the synthesis of study results suggests the direction and relative magnitude of change resulting from different types of policies, as well as potential biases introduced by omitting the representation of the land-use and transportation interaction. Overall, the performance measures indicate that carefully designed transit, land-use, and automobile pricing policies may improve travel, economic, environmental, and equity conditions for communities. However, transit and peak-period automobile pricing policies can, in some situations, lead to negative performance outcomes across some or all measures, as illustrated in studies that explicitly represent the land-use and transportation interaction
Business Case and Technology Analysis for 5G Low Latency Applications
A large number of new consumer and industrial applications are likely to
change the classic operator's business models and provide a wide range of new
markets to enter. This article analyses the most relevant 5G use cases that
require ultra-low latency, from both technical and business perspectives. Low
latency services pose challenging requirements to the network, and to fulfill
them operators need to invest in costly changes in their network. In this
sense, it is not clear whether such investments are going to be amortized with
these new business models. In light of this, specific applications and
requirements are described and the potential market benefits for operators are
analysed. Conclusions show that operators have clear opportunities to add value
and position themselves strongly with the increasing number of services to be
provided by 5G.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure
A gap analysis of Internet-of-Things platforms
We are experiencing an abundance of Internet-of-Things (IoT) middleware
solutions that provide connectivity for sensors and actuators to the Internet.
To gain a widespread adoption, these middleware solutions, referred to as
platforms, have to meet the expectations of different players in the IoT
ecosystem, including device providers, application developers, and end-users,
among others. In this article, we evaluate a representative sample of these
platforms, both proprietary and open-source, on the basis of their ability to
meet the expectations of different IoT users. The evaluation is thus more
focused on how ready and usable these platforms are for IoT ecosystem players,
rather than on the peculiarities of the underlying technological layers. The
evaluation is carried out as a gap analysis of the current IoT landscape with
respect to (i) the support for heterogeneous sensing and actuating
technologies, (ii) the data ownership and its implications for security and
privacy, (iii) data processing and data sharing capabilities, (iv) the support
offered to application developers, (v) the completeness of an IoT ecosystem,
and (vi) the availability of dedicated IoT marketplaces. The gap analysis aims
to highlight the deficiencies of today's solutions to improve their integration
to tomorrow's ecosystems. In order to strengthen the finding of our analysis,
we conducted a survey among the partners of the Finnish IoT program, counting
over 350 experts, to evaluate the most critical issues for the development of
future IoT platforms. Based on the results of our analysis and our survey, we
conclude this article with a list of recommendations for extending these IoT
platforms in order to fill in the gaps.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for publication in Computer
Communications, special issue on the Internet of Things: Research challenges
and solution
Creating Innovative Regions: The role of universities in local growth and productivity
Professor Culkin was a member of the Report's Advisory Board.Our latest report aims to bust a myth – that the main contribution of universities to innovation is through the commercialisation of their research. Universities contribute so much more, particularly in their regions. Institutions like those in the Alliance are rooted in their regional economies. Many grew out of the needs of the industrial revolution and have been a stable presence ever since. They have longstanding networks of graduates in many different occupations and public sector bodies. They align their research activities to regional strengths. They are hubs for innovation activity and are well placed to take on strategic and leadership roles to ensure the economic prosperity and productivity of their regions
Blockchain and Distributed Autonomous Community Ecosystems: Opportunities to Democratize Finance and Delivery of Transport, Housing, Urban Greening and Community Infrastructure
This report investigates and develops specifications for using blockchain and distributed organizations to enable decentralized delivery and finance of urban infrastructure. The project explores use cases, including: providing urban greening, street or transit infrastructure; services for street beautification, cleaning and weed or graffiti abatement; potential ways of resource allocation ADU; permitting and land allocation; and homeless housing. It establishes a general process flow for this blockchain architecture, which involves: 1) the creation of blocks (transactions); 2) sending these blocks to nodes (users) on the network for an action (mining) and then validation that that action has taken place; and 3) then adding the block to the blockchain. These processes involve the potential for creating new economic value for cities and neighborhoods through proof-of-work, which can be issued through a token (possibly a graphic non-fungible token), certificate, or possible financial reward. We find that encouraging trading of assets at the local level can enable the creation of value that could be translated into sustainable “mining actions” that could eventually provide the economic backstop and basis for new local investment mechanisms or currencies (e.g., local cryptocurrency). These processes also provide an innovative local, distributed funding mechanism for transportation, housing and other civic infrastructure
IoT Middleware Platforms for Smart Energy Systems: An Empirical Expert Survey
Middleware platforms are key technology in any Internet of Things (IoT) system, considering their role in managing the intermediary communications between devices and applications. In the energy sector, it has been shown that IoT devices enable the integration of all network assets to one large distributed system. This comes with significant benefits, such as improving energy efficiency, boosting the generation of renewable energy, reducing maintenance costs and increasing comfort. Various existing IoT middlware solutions encounter several problems that limit their performance, such as vendor locks. Hence, this paper presents a literature review and an expert survey on IoT middleware platforms in energy systems, in order to provide a set of tools and functionalities to be supported by any future efficient, flexible and interoperable IoT middleware considering the market needs. The analysis of the results shows that experts currently use the IoT middleware mainly to deploy services such as visualization, monitoring and benchmarking of energy consumption, and energy optimization is considered as a future application to target. Likewise, non-functional requirements, such as security and privacy, play vital roles in the IoT platforms’ performances
Semantic Communications in Networked Systems
We present our vision for a departure from the established way of
architecting and assessing communication networks, by incorporating the
semantics of information for communications and control in networked systems.
We define semantics of information, not as the meaning of the messages, but as
their significance, possibly within a real time constraint, relative to the
purpose of the data exchange. We argue that research efforts must focus on
laying the theoretical foundations of a redesign of the entire process of
information generation, transmission and usage in unison by developing:
advanced semantic metrics for communications and control systems; an optimal
sampling theory combining signal sparsity and semantics, for real-time
prediction, reconstruction and control under communication constraints and
delays; semantic compressed sensing techniques for decision making and
inference directly in the compressed domain; semantic-aware data generation,
channel coding, feedback, multiple and random access schemes that reduce the
volume of data and the energy consumption, increasing the number of supportable
devices.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 1500 word
- …