81 research outputs found
Analysing passengers' behaviours when boarding trains to improve rail infrastructure and technology
Concentrated boarding describes the phenomenon when rail passengers congregate in certain areas of the platform and board the train carriages that stop near these areas. This influences the distribution of passengers throughout the carriages, which can negatively affect passenger comfort, safety at the platform-train interface, efficiency of the rail network, and the reputation of rail travel as a whole. This project aimed to determine whether concentrated boarding occurs in stations in the UK in order to understand its relevance for future rolling stock, infrastructure design and its associated manufacturing research. Video recording technology was used to observe the movements of passengers in Oxford Station and data was collected for nine individual trains. By reviewing the recordings, the number of passengers boarding through each door of the trains was determined, and the boarding distribution along the length of the platform was plotted. Several reasons for noted trends are offered, and potential solutions proposed. The use of real time information could be invaluable to minimise concentrated boarding, as it would allow passengers to make informed decisions as to where they could board trains to have a better journey experience. These findings indicate the relevance of a human-centred design process, particularly the user research stages, in the process of defining priorities for manufacturing and engineering
Ecological Invasion, Roughened Fronts, and a Competitor's Extreme Advance: Integrating Stochastic Spatial-Growth Models
Both community ecology and conservation biology seek further understanding of
factors governing the advance of an invasive species. We model biological
invasion as an individual-based, stochastic process on a two-dimensional
landscape. An ecologically superior invader and a resident species compete for
space preemptively. Our general model includes the basic contact process and a
variant of the Eden model as special cases. We employ the concept of a
"roughened" front to quantify effects of discreteness and stochasticity on
invasion; we emphasize the probability distribution of the front-runner's
relative position. That is, we analyze the location of the most advanced
invader as the extreme deviation about the front's mean position. We find that
a class of models with different assumptions about neighborhood interactions
exhibit universal characteristics. That is, key features of the invasion
dynamics span a class of models, independently of locally detailed demographic
rules. Our results integrate theories of invasive spatial growth and generate
novel hypotheses linking habitat or landscape size (length of the invading
front) to invasion velocity, and to the relative position of the most advanced
invader.Comment: The original publication is available at
www.springerlink.com/content/8528v8563r7u2742
Estruturas secretoras em ĂłrgĂŁos vegetativos e florais de Secondatia densiflora A.DC. (Apocynaceae - Apocynoideae - Odontadenieae)
Estruturas secretoras da lâmina foliar de amapá amargo (Parahancornia fasciculata, Apocynaceae): histoquĂmica e doseamento de flavonoides
Grower Diets and Bird Density Effects on Growth and Cannibalism in Ring-Necked Pheasants
Discordance between morphological and taxonomic diversity: land snails of oceanic archipelagos
OCT embedded sections of pathological specimens as a source of high quality RNA for reverse transcriptase/polymerase chain reaction.
- …