Freeway Service Patrols: A Stated Preference Analysis of Insurance Values

Highway assistance services, also called the freeway service patrols (FSPs), are one of the main approaches used by incident management programs. The objective of this study was to investigate the factors that contribute to people choosing to rely on the highway assistance services (FSP) in comparison to private assistance services such as the Automobile Association of America (AAA). Further the effectiveness of the Freeway Service Patrol was studied by carrying out a Benefit-Cost Analysis using Los Angeles as a test case. The results indicate that the probability that an individual would choose to depend on the highway assistance services depends on the key attributes like the annual fee of the program, the fee at the time of assistance, the time of waiting for assistance and cost of breakdown. The B/ C ratio for the Los Angeles FSP was calculated to be 5.91.Freeway Service Patrols, Evaluation, Insurance, Mobility.

Post-Construction Evaluation of Traffic Forecast Accuracy

This research evaluates the accuracy of demand forecasts using a sample of recently-completed projects in Minnesota and identiÞes the factors inßuencing the inaccuracy in forecasts. The forecast traffic data for this study is drawn from Environmental Impact Statements(EIS), Transportation Analysis Reports (TAR) and other forecast reports produced by the Minnesota Department of Transportation (Mn/DOT) with a horizon forecast year of 2010 or earlier. The actual traffic data is compiled from the database of traffic counts maintained by the Office of Traffic Forecasting and Analysis section at Mn/DOT. Based on recent research on forecast accuracy, the (in)accuracy of traffic forecasts is estimated as a ratio of the forecast traffic to the actual traffic. The estimation of forecast (in)accuracy also involves a comparison of the socioeconomic and demographic assumptions, the assumed networks to the actual in-place networks and other travel behavior assumptions that went into generating the traffic forecasts against actual conditions. The analysis indicates a general trend of underestimation in roadway traffic forecasts with factors such as highway type, functional classiÞcation, direction playing an inßuencing role. Roadways with higher volumes and higher functional classiÞcations such as freeways are subject to underestimation compared to lower volume roadways/functional classiÞcations. The comparison of demographic forecasts shows a trend of overestimation while the comparison of travel behavior characteristics indicates a lack of incorporation of fundamental shifts and societal changes.Minnesota, Minneapolis, Travel Demand Model, Transportation Planning, Forecasting

The Importance of Being Early

The assumption that the penalty for being early is less than that for being late was put forward by Vickrey (1963) who analyzed how commuters compare penalties in the form of schedule delay (due to peak hour congestion), against penalties in the form of reaching their destination (ahead or behind their desired time of arrival). This assumption has been tested by many researchers since then for various applications, especially in modeling congestion pricing (Arnott et al., 1990) where it is critical to understand the tradeoff between schedule delay and travel delay. Key findings are summarized in the second section of this paper. This research aims to test this hypothesis of earliness being less expensive than lateness using empirical data at different levels and across different regions. New methods to estimate the ratio of earliness to lateness for different types of datasets are developed, which could be used by agencies to implement control policies like congestion pricing or other schemes more accurately. Travel survey data from metropolitan areas provide individual travel patterns while loop detector data provide link level traffic flow data.Schedule Delay, Travel Time, Traffic, Travel Behavior.

Patching task-level robot controllers based on a local µ-calculus formula

We present a method for mending strategies for GR(1) specifications. Given the addition or removal of edges from the game graph describing a problem (essentially transition rules in a GR(1) specification), we apply a µ-calculus formula to a neighborhood of states to obtain a “local strategy” that navigates around the invalidated parts of an original synthesized strategy. Our method may thus avoid global resynthesis while recovering correctness with respect to the new specification. We illustrate the results both in simulation and on physical hardware for a planar robot surveillance task

Ergonomic Assessment and Musculoskeletal Health of the Underpri¬vileged School Children in Pune, India

Background: Musculoskeletal health in schoolchildren is a global health problem. The objective of the current study was to assess ergonomic be¬havior and muscu-loskeletal health in urban poor schoolchildren in Pune, India. Methods: Sixty-five (29 male students) slum dwelling schoolchildren were assessed for their ergonomics using a validated and reliable tool. Results: Average age was 13 years. Out of 65 students, 36 reported pres¬ence of musculoskeletal pain. In addition, 78.5% had bad ergonomics when lifting books. Sitting posture was poor in 67.7%, while 50.8% dem¬onstrated bad posture while using a computer. As far as the female stu¬dents were concerned, it was seen that out of 36 students, 55.6% com¬plained of presence of pain. Out of the 20 students who reported pain, 70% had a score lower than 7.5 on ergonomic score assessment (indicative of bad ergonomics). When the male students were considered, out of 29 students, 65.5% reported presence of pain. Out of the 19 students who reported pain, close to 79% demonstrated bad ergonomics. Conclusion: There is presence of musculoskeletal aches and pains in this under-privileged section of the society, including demonstration of bad er¬gonomics and postures while performing activities in school. Thus, mus¬culoskeletal health prob-lems exist in urban slum schoolchildren. It is im¬portant to identify health problems at an early stage in both boys and girls. Children are the future of the nation and hence, identification of health issues early in life and preventing them from becoming chronic is of utmost importance

The Influence of Network Structure on Travel Distance

The objective of this research is to identify the role of network architecture in influencing individual travel behavior using travel survey data from two urban areas in Florida: Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Various measures of network structure, compiled from existing sources, are used to quantify roadway networks, capture the arrangement and connectivity of nodes and links in the networks and the temporal and spatial variations that exist among and within networks. The results from the regression models estimated show that network design influences how people travel and make decisions. Results from this analysis can be used to understand how changes in network can be used to bring about desired changes in travel behavior.Network structure, travel behavior, transport geography, commuting, circuity

Near Optimal Channel Assignment for Interference Mitigation in Wireless Mesh Networks

In multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) WMNs, interference alleviation is affected through several network design techniques e.g., channel assignment (CA), link scheduling, routing etc., intelligent CA schemes being the most effective tool for interference mitigation. CA in WMNs is an NP-Hard problem, and makes optimality a desired yet elusive goal in real-time deployments which are characterized by fast transmission and switching times and minimal end-to-end latency. The trade-off between optimal performance and minimal response times is often achieved through CA schemes that employ heuristics to propose efficient solutions. WMN configuration and physical layout are also crucial factors which decide network performance, and it has been demonstrated in numerous research works that rectangular/square grid WMNs outperform random or unplanned WMN deployments in terms of network capacity, latency, and network resilience. In this work, we propose a smart heuristic approach to devise a near-optimal CA algorithm for grid WMNs (NOCAG). We demonstrate the efficacy of NOCAG by evaluating its performance against the minimal-interference CA generated through a rudimentary brute-force technique (BFCA), for the same WMN configuration. We assess its ability to mitigate interference both, theoretically (through interference estimation metrics) and experimentally (by running rigorous simulations in NS-3). We demonstrate that the performance of NOCAG is almost as good as the BFCA, at a minimal computational overhead of O(n) compared to the exponential of BFCA