Improving the robustness of the railway system in Brussels

In order to improve the robustness of a railway system in station areas, this paper introduces an iterative approach to successively solve the route choice problem in station areas to optimality and to improve this solution by applying some changes to the timetable in a tabu search environment. Using a discrete event simulation model, the performance of our algorithms is evaluated based on a case study for the Brussels' area. The railway network of the Brussels' area is introduced and its relevance is emphasized. Computational results indicate an improvement in robustness of about 10%, a decrease in knock-on delay of more than 15%, and a 25% reduction in the number of trains that are confronted with conflicts

Modeling real-world vehicle routing problems with dependencies

C

Multimedia search without visual analysis: the value of linguistic and contextual information

This paper addresses the focus of this special issue by analyzing the potential contribution of linguistic content and other non-image aspects to the processing of audiovisual data. It summarizes the various ways in which linguistic content analysis contributes to enhancing the semantic annotation of multimedia content, and, as a consequence, to improving the effectiveness of conceptual media access tools. A number of techniques are presented, including the time-alignment of textual resources, audio and speech processing, content reduction and reasoning tools, and the exploitation of surface features

A Prototype ATM Network for Real Time Control of the LHC

The LHC accelerator aims at injecting, accelerating and colliding beams with very well controlled beam parameters (e.g. momentum, orbit, tune and chromaticity). This is a non-trivial task since the super conducting main bending magnets will generate field errors with dynamic effects that may result in beam loss. To overcome this problem, real time control of beam parameters via the Power Converters has been proposed. This requires site wide deterministic communication of control data. In this paper we will outline some aspects of a prototype deterministic network for the LHC with a core based on ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) communication technology