Принципы построения интеллектуальных транспортных систем для обеспечения инфомобильности

The paper provides a discussion about the development of information system to increase citizens’ mobility. The system is also known as system for infomobility. The following questions are discussed in the paper: the system expediency, main system’s features main principles that is used for system development. Additionally, the comparison of existing services that provide infomobility is presented in the paper.В статье рассматриваются вопросы, связанные с разработкой информационной системы для повышения мобильности жителей города, также известной как «инфомобильная» система. Рассматривается целесообразность создания подобной системы, основные свойства, которыми она должна обладать и принципы построения систем такого класса. Приводится сравнение доступных в настоящее время сервисов, обеспечивающих инфомобильность пользователей

Ontology-based personalisation of e-learning resources for disabled students

Students with disabilities are often expected to use e-learning systems to access learning materials but most systems do not provide appropriate adaptation or personalisation to meet their needs.The difficulties related to inadaptability of current learning environments can now be resolved using semantic web technologies such as web ontologies which have been successfully used to drive e-learning personalisation. Nevertheless, e-learning personalisation for students with disabilities has mainly targeted those with single disabilities such as dyslexia or visual impairment, often neglecting those with multiple disabilities due to the difficulty of designing for a combination of disabilities.This thesis argues that it is possible to personalise learning materials for learners with disabilities, including those with multiple disabilities. This is achieved by developing a model that allows the learning environment to present the student with learning materials in suitable formats while considering their disability and learning needs through an ontology-driven and disability-aware personalised e-learning system model (ONTODAPS). A disability ontology known as the Abilities and Disabilities Ontology for Online LEarning and Services (ADOOLES) is developed and used to drive this model. To test the above hypothesis, some case studies are employed to show how the model functions for various individuals with and without disabilities and then the implemented visual interface is experimentally evaluated by eighteen students with disabilities and heuristically by ten lecturers. The results are collected and statistically analysed.The results obtained confirm the above hypothesis and suggest that ONTODAPS can be effectively employed to personalise learning and to manage learning resources. The student participants found that ONTODAPS could aid their learning experience and all agreed that they would like to use this functionality in an existing learning environment. The results also suggest that ONTODAPS provides a platform where students with disabilities can have equivalent learning experience with their peers without disabilities. For the results to be generalised, this study could be extended through further experiments with more diverse groups of students with disabilities and across multiple educational institutions

D4.3.2 Report on IOT Living Labs Continuous Exploration and Evaluation (interim version)

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RURAL DEMAND RESPONSIVE TRANSPORT An overview of the Italian scenario and analysis of Antola-Tigullio inner area case study

Over time, a car-centred mobility system has contributed to the negative externalities that can be observed today in both urban and rural areas: congestion of transport infrastructures, air and noise pollution, reduced urban space for pedestrians and cyclists, lack of parks, etc. All this has led policy makers to find solutions to shift citizens from cars to public transport and other sustainable modes (walking and cycling). While in urban areas traditional public transport is often an already widespread and effective service that only needs to be transformed to build user confidence, in rural and mountainous areas, where low transport demand and long distances make it economically unviable, it needs to be integrated or completely replaced by innovative forms of mobility. One of the most valid solutions in this regard is on-demand transport technology, which allows transport providers to reduce their costs by rationalizing the supply (e.g. higher vehicles’ load factor) and population of these areas to improve their accessibility to public transport and abandon the use of the car. Over time, research has been done extensively in academic literature on the application of this technology in urban areas, but little has been undertaken in rural contexts: this PhD thesis aims to contribute to research in this field by studying the technical characteristics of these services in the Italian scenario, in order to provide decision-makers with useful information to counter the phenomena of depopulation and economic and social isolation of these territories. First, this paper provides a comprehensive literature review aimed at understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the DRT service in general and in its application in rural areas: from the description of its historical development, the close relationship between the diffusion of this tool and the phases of technological progress emerges. The central chapters of this thesis deal with an in-depth analysis of all rural DRT cases in operation in Italy in the last decade (both temporary and permanent), carried out through a web search, an analysis of the Program Framework Agreements of the Italian regions and sector agencies’ websites, as well as with the planning of some DRT services in the inner area of Antola-Tigullio (Liguria Region): this last work, carried out after an analysis of the socio-demographic data and the travel behavior of the population, helped to identify the best routes, time slots and target user groups to experiment with the DRT service. After 5 months of experimentation, it was possible to carry out an ex-post analysis of the initial results thanks to the data provided by the local Public Transport Authority (PTA), commissioner of the study. The results of this PhD thesis, obtained from the study of the literature and the analysis both at national level and of a single case study, are multiple and provide useful indications to policy makers and transport providers for the implementation of DRT services in hard-to-reach areas with low transport demand, capable of truly satisfying the mobility needs of the inhabitants by favoring the use of public transport and slowing down the processes of depopulation and economic marginalization affecting these contexts

Exploiting available domain knowledge to improve the retrieval and recommendation of Digital Cultural Heritage materials

Cultural Heritage (CH) institutions, such as museums, have recently embraced computing techniques to digitise CH materials (artefacts, paintings, books etc) and to make accessible those digital representations through their online portals to millions of museum visitors (onsite and remote). This mass availability of digitised materials, however, can lead to information overload. Therefore, ordinary CH online users can find it challenging to access these materials, because they usually have no domain knowledge and also lack the experience of which precise keyword terms to use to search and discover new information. As an attempt to mitigate the issues explained above, recommender systems and visual search interfaces have been used by millions of users to discover new and relevant to the users’ interests CH materials. A CH recommender system is a system that uses knowledge — content and social — representations assembled from various domain knowledge sources, to generate personalised recommendations of CH materials. Social knowledge representations provide better recommendation quality than content knowledge representations when they have substantial social knowledge such as user-interactions and social tagging in the representation, but they suffer when available information is insufficient (cold start problem and sparsity of social knowledge). Different approaches have been deployed to address these challenges, for example a hybrid approach that incorporated content directly into a social knowledge representation to provide a recommendation. But this hybrid approach only works well on domains for which specific content knowledge exists which can directly describe an item and is always available and meaningful. The CH domain does not have such rich specific knowledge that can directly describe the content of CH materials, thus limiting the ability to incorporate content directly into the social knowledge representation for CH recommendations.To address these challenges, this Thesis starts with examining the strengths and weaknesses of content and social knowledge representations in the context of CH recommendations and how these knowledge representations can complement each other to improve the recommendations of CH materials. The identified knowledge gap is bridged through a new hybrid representation approach by integrating the content and social knowledge representations. The effect of knowledge integration is to increase the instances of quality recommendations and improved discovery, and to provide opportunities to users to discover unexpected and liked recommendations of CH materials.The new integrated and social knowledge representations are used to further develop a dynamic hybrid CH recommender system. The dynamic hybrid system combines the learned integrated knowledge for each CH object with CH object’s social knowledge, and assigns the weights to both integrated and social knowledge representations to control the contributions of each knowledge so that each representation could contribute based on the current user and search status. A new visual search interface is also described in this thesis, developed as a part of the research work. The search interface enables visual search and exploration across large CH collections by providing an interactive visual summary of the recommended CH items, addressing the challenge of the lack of domain knowledge by online users. User satisfaction evaluation was conducted to measure the user satisfaction level for using a visual search interface for search and exploration of information from the vast collection when compared to the non-visual search interface. The evaluation showed that a user with no domain knowledge prefers using a visual search interface than one with no visual summary presentation, but the result also shows that there is no significant difference for users that have domain knowledge.The challenges of evaluating CH recommendations are also addressed in the Thesis. The feedback provided by the users, both implicit and explicit, is exploited to measure and reflect the performance of the cultural heritage recommendation methods used. A user study to evaluate both the ground truth measures and integrated knowledge representations is conducted. Throughout the user study, the results obtained show that the hybrid representation produced a better quality recommendation of CH materials when compared with content and social knowledge representations. The social representation does not provide a better high-level recommendation quality compared to the hybrid representation, but it does outperform the hybrid representation in recommending novel CH materials

Designing a multi-agent system for monitoring and operations recovery for an airline operations control centre

A operação de uma companhia área raramente acontece como planeado. São comuns os problemas relacionados com os aviões, com as tripulações e com os passageiros. As acções que têm como objectivo resolver estes problemas são conhecidas como Gestão das Irregularidades Operacionais. O Centro de Controlo Operacional da Companhia Aérea (CCO) tenta resolver estes problemas com o mínimo de impacto na operação, com o mínimo custo e, ao mesmo tempo, satisfazendo todas as regras de segurança requeridas. Normalmente, cada problema é tratado separadamente e algumas ferramentas têm sido propostas para ajudar no processo de tomada de decisão pelos coordenadores destes centros de controlo. Observamos o CCO da TAP Portugal, a maior companhia aérea Portuguesa, e, destas observações, várias hipóteses foram identificadas e algumas experimentadas. Acreditamos, e esta é uma das nossas principais hipóteses, que o paradigma do Sistema Multi-Agente (SMA) é mais adequado para representar a organização hierárquica de vários níveis e as várias funções (roles) existentes no CCO. Nesta tese, propomos o desenho e a implementação parcial de um SMA Distribuído que represente as várias funções existentes no CCO. Admitimos a hipótese de que, tirando partido do facto de que cada base operacional tem recursos específicos (quer aviões quer tripulantes) e juntando informações que digam respeito aos custos envolvidos (por exemplo, informação sobre vencimentos dos tripulantes, custos dos hotéis, entre outros), as soluções para os problemas detectados serão encontradas mais rapidamente e serão menos caras. Também admitimos a hipótese de que se utilizarmos agentes de software especializados que implementam diferentes soluções (heurísticas e outras soluções baseadas em modelos de investigação operacional e algoritmos de inteligência artificial) aplicadas ao mesmo problema, a robustez do sistema irá aumentar. Finalmente, acreditamos que a inclusão de um mecanismo de aprendizagem, que aprenda com a utilização anterior dos tripulantes, irá aumentar a qualidade das soluções. Estendendo esse mecanismo de forma a aprender o perfil de cada tripulante e aplicando esse conhecimento na geração de planeamentos (escalas) futuros, a gestão deste recurso tão caro será muito mais eficiente e o nível de satisfação de cada tripulante irá aumentar. Apresentamos um caso de estudo real, obtido no CCO da TAP, onde um problema relacionado com tripulantes é resolvido usando o SMA proposto. Apresentamos resultados computacionais, usando uma operação real da companhia aérea, incluindo a comparação com uma solução para o mesmo problema encontrada pelo operador humano do CCO. Mostramos que, mesmo para problemas simples e quando comparado com soluções encontradas por operadores humanos, no caso específico desta companhia aérea, é possível encontrar soluções válidas, em menos tempo e com menos custos.Nesta tese também mostramos como completamos a metodologia GAIA de forma a melhor analisar e desenhar o SMA proposto para o CCO. Para além de mostrarmos o rationale que está por trás da análise, desenho e implementação do nosso sistema, também mostramos como mapeamos as abstracções usadas no desenho orientado a agentes para código específico em JADE. As vantagens da utilização de uma análise de requisitos orientada a objectivos e a sua influência nas fases seguintes da análise e do desenho, também são apresentadas. Finalmente, propomos diagramas UML 2.0 para representação de vários deliverables da GAIA, tais como, estrutura organizacional, modelos de funções (role) e de interacções e modelos de agentes e de serviços.An airline schedule seldom operates as planned. Problems related with aircrafts, crew members and passengers are common and the actions towards the solution of these problems are usually known as operations recovery or disruption management. The Airline Operations Control Center (AOCC) tries to solve these problems with the minimum impact in the airline schedule, with the minimum cost and, at the same time, satisfying all the required safety rules. Usually, each problem is treated separately and some tools have been proposed to help in the decision making process of the airline coordinators. We have observed the AOCC of TAP Portugal, the major Portuguese airline, and, from those observations, several hypotheses have been identified and some of them experimented. We believe, and that is one of our main hypothesis, that the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm is more adequate to represent the multi-level hierarchy organization and the several roles that are played in an AOCC. In this thesis we propose the design and partial implementation of a Distributed MAS representing the existing roles in an AOCC. We hypothesize that if we take advantage of the fact that each operational base has specific resources (both crew and aircrafts) and that if we include information regarding costs involved (for example, crew payroll information and hotels costs, among others), the solutions to the detected problems will be faster to find and less expensive. We also hypothesize that if we use specialized software agents that implement different solutions (heuristic and other solutions based in operations research models and artificial intelligence algorithms), to the same problem, the robustness of the system will increase. Finally, we believe that the inclusion of some kind of learning mechanism that learns from previous utilization of crew members will improve the solutions quality. Extending that learning mechanism to learn each crew member profile, and applying that knowledge for generating future schedules, the management of that expensive resource will be much more efficient and the level of satisfaction of each crew member will increase. We also present a real case study taken from TAP Portugal AOCC, where a crew recovery problem is solved using the MAS. Computational results using a real airline schedule are presented, including a comparison with a solution for the same problem found by the human operators in the Airline Operations Control Center. We show that, even for simple problems, and when comparing with solutions found by human operators in the case of this airline company, it is possible to find valid solutions, in less time and with a smaller cost. In this thesis we also show how we complement the GAIA methodology in order to better analyze and design the proposed MAS for the AOCC. Besides showing the rationale behind the analysis, design and implementation of our system, we also present how we mapped the abstractions used in agent-oriented design to specific constructs in JADE. The advantages of using a goal-oriented early requirements analysis and its influence on subsequent phases of analysis and design are also presented. Finally, we also propose UML 2.0 diagrams at several different levels for representation of GAIA deliverables, like organizational structure, role and interaction model, agent and service model

An Agent-Based Variogram Modeller: Investigating Intelligent, Distributed-Component Geographical Information Systems

Geo-Information Science (GIScience) is the field of study that addresses substantive questions concerning the handling, analysis and visualisation of spatial data. Geo- Information Systems (GIS), including software, data acquisition and organisational arrangements, are the key technologies underpinning GIScience. A GIS is normally tailored to the service it is supposed to perform. However, there is often the need to do a function that might not be supported by the GIS tool being used. The normal solution in these circumstances is to go out and look for another tool that can do the service, and often an expert to use that tool. This is expensive, time consuming and certainly stressful to the geographical data analyses. On the other hand, GIS is often used in conjunction with other technologies to form a geocomputational environment. One of the complex tools in geocomputation is geostatistics. One of its functions is to provide the means to determine the extent of spatial dependencies within geographical data and processes. Spatial datasets are often large and complex. Currently Agent system are being integrated into GIS to offer flexibility and allow better data analysis. The theis will look into the current application of Agents in within the GIS community, determine if they are used to representing data, process or act a service. The thesis looks into proving the applicability of an agent-oriented paradigm as a service based GIS, having the possibility of providing greater interoperability and reducing resource requirements (human and tools). In particular, analysis was undertaken to determine the need to introduce enhanced features to agents, in order to maximise their effectiveness in GIS. This was achieved by addressing the software agent complexity in design and implementation for the GIS environment and by suggesting possible solutions to encountered problems. The software agent characteristics and features (which include the dynamic binding of plans to software agents in order to tackle the levels of complexity and range of contexts) were examined, as well as discussing current GIScience and the applications of agent technology to GIS, agents as entities, objects and processes. These concepts and their functionalities to GIS are then analysed and discussed. The extent of agent functionality, analysis of the gaps and the use these technologies to express a distributed service providing an agent-based GIS framework is then presented. Thus, a general agent-based framework for GIS and a novel agent-based architecture for a specific part of GIS, the variogram, to examine the applicability of the agent- oriented paradigm to GIS, was devised. An examination of the current mechanisms for constructing variograms, underlying processes and functions was undertaken, then these processes were embedded into a novel agent architecture for GIS. Once the successful software agent implementation had been achieved, the corresponding tool was tested and validated - internally for code errors and externally to determine its functional requirements and whether it enhances the GIS process of dealing with data. Thereafter, its compared with other known service based GIS agents and its advantages and disadvantages analysed

Human-Computer Interaction

In this book the reader will find a collection of 31 papers presenting different facets of Human Computer Interaction, the result of research projects and experiments as well as new approaches to design user interfaces. The book is organized according to the following main topics in a sequential order: new interaction paradigms, multimodality, usability studies on several interaction mechanisms, human factors, universal design and development methodologies and tools

Smart accessibility patterns and shrinking cities: The added value of urban design

During these last decades, the shrinkage of cities has become a major urban issue, a process caused by many factors but one that will generally increase during the next years. This is mainly because of the trend of urbanization: in 2016 the UN estimated that 54.5% of people live in urban settlements, and that by 2030 it will become 60%. The non-urban areas impacted by depopulation, will face several issues in terms of land maintenance, heritage preservation, and conservation of local traditions. This dynamic is strongly related to the notion of accessibility, which, here, stands for the possibility of people to access places, spaces, items, and services. This approach tries to include different points of view such as the notion of accessibility seen in transportation terms, based on its efficiency and multimodality, or the issue of accessibility concerning people with disabilities. The ongoing digital revolution has further impacted the issue of accessibility. The pervasive transition from analogue to digital processes and the development of Information and Communication Technologies has provided new opportunities to supply information, infrastructures, and public services to people. With our smartphones, citizens can access and produce data, which can then be used by them to increase their awareness about urban opportunities and optimize urban projects and policies. Worldwide internet connection has blurred the relation between a place and its use, deepening reuse strategies for buildings and neighbourhoods. The development of shared and circular economy and new health standards in cities has led to the innovation of public services both in an evolutionary way (e.g. water supply and management, waste management) and in a disruptive way (e.g. transportation design, urban hybrid services). Smart Cities projects try to catch most of these opportunities, focusing on innovative urban solutions able to exploit this potential. This article aims to contribute to this debate, reviewing some of the main definitions of urban accessibility and showing the possible added value given by innovative urban strategies open to ICT solutions. To better understand this approach these notions will be related to Gjirokastra, one of the most important cities in southern Albania. Its distinctive combination in terms of heritage, strategic position and business opportunities are facing urban shrinkage, with the consequent loss of city population, lack of maintenance of its renowned heritage and a declining economy. Then a design proposal that uses the notion of accessibility to analyse and indicate strategic accessibility patterns to challenge shrinkage will be outlined. These actions will be referenced to pilot projects and case studies to prove how innovative urban design can add new value to urban accessibility patterns. The conclusions will resume the role of urban design dealing with these issues, indicating constraints and potentials of this approach