Transport analytics in action: a cloud-based decision support system for efficient city bus transportation

Optimising city bus transport operations helps conserve fuel by providing the urban transport service as efficiently as possible. This study develops a Cloud-based Decision Support System (C-DSS) for transport analytics. The C-DSS is based on an intelligent model on location of depots for opening new depots and/or closing a few existing depots and allocation of city-buses to depots. The C-DSS is built on the Cloud Computing architecture with three layers and includes an efficient and simple greedy heuristic algorithm. Using modern information and communications technology tools, the proposed C-DSS minimizes the cost of city bus transport operations and in turn to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions in urban passenger transport. The proposed C-DSS is demonstrated for its workability and evaluated for its performance on 25 large scale pseudo data generated based on the observation from Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) in India

Determination of recruitment age in Markov manpower systems

The chronological age of members in an organisation has been found to be one of the determinants of their effectiveness, efficiency and performance, and organisational planners find it advantageous to monitor the age distributions in the hierarchical grades of the organisation, to maintain homogeneity and proper flow of personnel up the hierarchy. In this paper, methods have been devised to maintain specified age distributions for hierarchical systems in general, and also for a class of hierarchical organisations which follow 'proportionality' policies. Proportionality policies are those that restrict the recruitment to every level of the hierarchy to be in proportion to the promotions into that level, and are of relevance to organisations which outsource a part of their work, the outsourced workforce being notionally viewed as recruits to the system, and also to those which ostensibly aim to protect the career interests of their existing employees through such policies. The required or specified age characteristics are maintained by selecting recruits of the appropriate ages to the system. The theoretical analyses have been illustrated with numerical examples, and validated with real-world data. The results extend in an identical and simple manner to aggregate tenure distributions also.manpower planning; Markov models; manpower systems; age distribution; recruitment age.

Laboratory Studies on Stone Mastic Asphalt with varying fillers

Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) is based on the concept of designing a coarse aggregate skeleton in order to attain stone -on -stone contact is obtained, which provides a highly rut resistant bituminous course for heavy traffic loads. It is a homogeneous mixture of selected gap graded aggregate, filler and bitumen in such proportion as to yield a plastic and void less mix. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the effect of different fillers (stone dust, bagasse ash and palm oil fuel ash) on the SMA mixes in terms of Marshall Stability values. A comprehensive laboratory tests were conducted on aggregates, Bitumen (VG-30) and fillers. The prepared SMA specimens with varying combination of filers such as 10% of stone dust, 5% of stone dust and 5% of Bagasse ash, 5% of stone dust and 5% of palm oil fuel as along with 0.3% of mineral additive (waste plastic) were subjected to marshall stability tests and results indicates that use of partial replacement of bagasse ash for stone dust as a filler material gives more stability values and less voids when compared to absolute stone dust (10%)