Risk-minimal routes for emergency cars

The computation of an optimal route for given start and destination in a static transportation network is used in many applications of private route planning. In this work we focus on route planning for emergency cars, such as for example police, fire brigade and ambulance. In case of private route planning typical quantities to be minimized are travel time or route length. However, the idea of this paper is to minimize the risk of a travel time exceeding a certain limit. This is inspired by the fact that the emergency cars have to reach the destination within a legal time. We consider mainly two approaches. The first approach takes into account relevant information to determine the weight, i.e. the desirability of certain edges of a graph during the minimization procedure. One possible risk factor to be aware of would be a suddenly jammed single-lane road on which the emergency car has no chance to make use of the benefits of the siren for instance. The same holds for full-closure situations and railroad crossings. We present a catalogue of risk factors along with an appropriate algorithm for practical route planning in emergency situations. The second one takes into account a weekly updated set of probe-vehicle data for each minute of the week along with data of current travel times. Comparing those travel-time data allows calculation of the associated risk for traveling certain edges of a route in a road network. We expect our algorithm to be a major advancement especially for destinations that lie outside the typical region travelled weekdays. In this case the automatic route planning naturally goes along with an additional gain of time

Listening to Voices: Understanding Chinese Students' Journey at a Canadian University

This research explored the motivations of Chinese students to study in Canada and analyzed their cultural adaptation process at a Canadian university. This served the Canadian educational administrators and prospective Chinese students who were interested in studying in Canada. The following three research questions provided the direction for this study: 1 What are Chinese students’ motivations to study in Canada? 2 What are Chinese students’ experiences at Canadian universities and how do their motivations shape their journey in Canada? 3 What challenges and opportunities do Chinese students face in their cultural adaptation, and what strategies do Chinese students think can be applied by Canadian educational administrators to assist Chinese students? A qualitative approach was the research method utilized in this study. Using semi-structured life-story interviews, data were collected from a purposeful sample of four Chinese graduate students studying at a Canadian university. Utilizing a narrative research method, from an emic perspective, I listened to Chinese students’ voices and their life stories and to explore deeply their experiences in Canada. Three theoretical frameworks were employed to analyze the data. The synthesis model was used to explore the decision making process of participants to come to Canada; the push-pull model was employed to identify the factors attracting people to move to another country; and Self- Determined Theory was used to analyze the connection between participants’ motivations to study abroad and their subsequent cultural adaptation. Data collected from semi-structured interviews with four participants indicated that Chinese students were easily attracted to study in Canada by its favorable and tolerant environment, positive reputation for diversity, high quality post-secondary institutions and the possibility of securing a visa relatively easily. In their decision making process, Chinese students were influenced by some important factors: student characteristics, parental factors, and other external important factors. Among those factors influencing Chinese students’ decisions to move to Canada, family was recognized a very important factor and participants’ narratives suggested that having family connections in Canada could be a helpful factor for Chinese students to adapt to a new culture, which was reported as a best case scenario in this research. However, family also acted as a barrier for Chinese students to acquire English proficiency and interact with local people. Findings from this study supported earlier research that suggested students who were more self-determined to study abroad were more likely to succeed academically and had fewer traumas in navigating cross-cultural adaptations

Report on 4th Workshop of Topic Working Groups

This deliverable contains a brief, concise summarization of the fourth cycle of Topic Working Group (TWG) Workshops in the DAREnet EU project. In this cycle the project aims to identify and discuss barriers as well as enablers in flood response and flood management together with practitioners with respect to "standards" and "procedures"

Bevorrechtigung von Einsatzfahrzeugen mittels einer dezentralen LSA-Steuerung

Neben der Bevorrechtigung von Einsatzfahrzeugen mit Blaulicht über den Kommunikationsweg der Verkehrsmanagementzentrale wurde in SIRENE ein dezentraler Ansatz über V2X und LTE umgesetzt und untersucht. Der Vortrag beinhaltet Informationen zur Methodik und Umsetzung. Die Ergebnisse befinden sich in einem separaten Vortrag

"El nen s'ha menjat una aranya": The development of narratives in Catalan speaking children

The production of a well-constructed narrative is the culmination of several years of language acquisition and is an important milestone in children's development. There is no current description of narrative development for Catalan speaking children. This study collected elicited narratives in Catalan from 118 children aged 4;0-10;11. Narratives were scored for macrostructure and microstructure. Narrative scores improved with age with maximum performance for macrostructure by 9 years. Children's ability to use micro-structural components of Catalan is variable with some developments continuing beyond 9 years. The results are discussed in relation to theoretical arguments about universal and specific features of narrative development. We conclude by highlighting the usefulness of the new test for future language assessment of children acquiring Catalan

A smart data approach to traffic safety

This work demonstrates, how a large data-base of traffic crashes can be used to analyze ensemble data. It fused data from the German Unfallatlas (German Crash Database - GCDB) with Open Streetmap (OSM) data (both publicly available), and a database from the German Federal State Northrhine-Westfalia (NW) named NWSIB that provides additional information about each intersection, most importantly an estimate of the ADT-values and street view images. The results have to be taken with care, since the quality of the ADT's in the database is hard to control, and because this approach may have assignment errors. The results partially reproduce known findings; however, they allow in principle for a more detailed investigation of the relationship between crash-numbers and ADT-values than is possible with generalized linear models (glm). In line with the call, all the data, as well as the scripts that analyse the data are publicly available -- this text is entirely written in the Rmd format \citep{RStudio2022}, and most computations have been done in R \citep{R2021} and QGIS \citep{QGIS}

Action-points in human driving and in SUMO

When following a vehicle, drivers change their acceleration at so called action-points (AP), and keep it constant in between them. By investigating a large data-set of car-following data, the state- and time-distributions of the APs is analyzed. In the state-space spanned by speed-difference and distance to the lead vehicle, this distribution of APs is mostly proportional to the distribution of all data-points, with small deviations from this. Therefore, the APs are not concentrated around certain thresholds as is claimed by psycho-physical car-following models.Instead, small distances indicate a slightly higher probability of finding an AP than is the case for large distances. A SUMO simulation with SUMO's implementation of the Wiedemann model confirms this view: the AP's of the Wiedemann model follow a completely different distribution than the empirical ones