A Virtual Platform for Improving Coordination and Promoting Cooperation on Traffic Safety

ABSTRACTSuccessful management of traffic safety requires effective community participation in the process of traffic awareness, planning and management along with the executive bodies concerned with traffic planning and management. Just as important to reinforcing a shared vision among people and management bodies is the idea of people participation in decision-making. There is a strong need for cooperation among traffic users, planners and managers. Traffic users play a significant role in running the traffic and have been vocal about management issues. Users should be encouraged to be as involved and active as possible in all decisions that affect their traffic safety. Community Corporations go further and encourage participation by forming user organizations. Encouraging user participation also requires training for oversight and conflict resolution, in order to work through unresolved problems. It is also as important that users should try out their ideas in an open exchange, see how the ideas fare; and hopefully, the best ones will survive and users learn through each other. Therefore, there is a great need to provide users, traffic planners and managers with a platform that fosters such activities and allows traffic users to discuss, report and document their views, events, experiences related to their traffic safety, i.e. report on faults, cracks, breakdown, damages, etc. Making a good use of such data can substantially assist in improving the operation and management of traffic safety. Virtual environments can provide traffic users, planners and managers with an atmosphere to participate in a computer generated world. Virtual environments run on multiple processes in which information are shared among processes. Traffic users, planners and managers will be able to visualize and navigate the virtual traffic modeled in distributed virtual environments. Traffic management is essential to achieve better reliability and availability of traffic safety. It is important to minimize the obstacles that will impact the successful achievement of traffic safety. This paper proposes a virtual platform for encouraging users' participation in traffic safety in terms of awareness, operation and management developed and to be implemented in an interactive 3D virtual environment. This virtual environment promotes multiple participants and can be remotely accessed synchronously by different users within 3D object-oriented virtual models while they are aware of the presence of others and communicate with them. This virtual environment encourages users, planners and managers to participate in fostering the sense of community partnership and shared responsibility, while traffic managers will benefit from the users' views

Analysis of The Driving Forces of Urban Expansion in Luxor City by Remote Sensing Monitoring

Luxor in Egypt is a city of great historical importance, rich in archaeological sites and natural resources. To ensure sustainable development in Luxor city, it is essential to understand the driving forces of its growth. Both Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and satellite Remote Sensing (RS) were successfully used to evaluate these overall driving forces. This paper is aimed at monitoring the growth dynamics of the urbanization process that occurred in Luxor city during a 20-year period from 1996 to 2017. The archived time series medium resolution Landsat ETM+ and TM satellite imagery are used to study and analyze spatial patterns of urban in order to improve understanding the impact of driving forces of urban expansion in Luxor. The GIS was not only used to identify the driving forces but also to provide an integrated monitoring of the study area. This offered a unique advantage to simultaneously store and manipulate spatial and attribute data of a large amount. A very significant increase in urban area has taken place in the last decade in Luxor city, which was revealed an important outcome. A net increase of 36.7 km2 was witnessed in the last 20 years (especially in recent years), in the built-up urban area. The built-up urban area in 2017 saw an increase that was twice that in 1996, with an annual average increase of 1.75 km2, and an annual change rate of 4.6%. The analysis of this dramatic change revealed that city infrastructure, economic growth, population growth, topographic elements, and city planning, and policies were the major driving forces for the rapid expansion of built-up urban area, albeit with different weights for these different forces. In this study, we explored a method of monitoring parameters related to the architectural heritage of Luxor governorate using “remote sensing big data†to provide data support for the city’s urban planning and policy formulation

The role of tangible interaction to communicate tacit knowledge of built heritage

Meanings and values of built heritage vary from factual and explicit meanings which are relatively easy to present, to more tacit knowledge, which is typically more challenging to communicate due to its implicit and often abstract character. In this paper, we investigate how tangible interaction influences the communication of this tacit knowledge of built heritage, and howit affects the experience of visitors. Through a between-group comparative study in a real-world museum context, we examined howthe tangible characteristics of an interactive prototypemuseuminstallation influence how visitors perceive a particular story containing tacit heritage knowledge. The communicated story relates a historical journey in ancient Egypt to the physical and architectural characteristics of the entrance colonnade at the Djoser Complex in Saqqara. Our experimental conditions consisted of an interactive navigation (input) and a passive representation (output) components, ranging from traditional digital displays to fully tangible means of interaction. We report on our findings, which showed various differences and commonalities between our three experimental conditions. We conclude with a number of discussion points and design recommendations: (a) to strive for balance between navigation and representation modalities in terms of affordance and the required cognitive effort; (b) to take advantage of physical representation and grasping, such as conveying particular physical details and characteristics; and (c) to consider design aspects of embodiment, physical abstraction and materiality for future research or potential further development of communicating the meanings and values of heritage

Improving the management of building life cycle : a data mining approach

The construction industry has adapted information technology in its processes in terms of computer aided design and drafting, construction documentation and maintenance. The data generated within the construction industry has become increasingly overwhelming. Data mining is a sophisticated data search capability that uses classification algorithms to discover patterns and correlations within a large volume of data. This paper presents the selection and application of data mining techniques on maintenance data of buildings. The results of applying such techniques and potential benefits of utilising their results to identify useful patterns of knowledge and correlations to support decision making of improving the management of building life cycle are presented and discussed

An Intelligent Computational Real-time Virtual Environment Model for Efficient Crowd Management

During the annual Islamic pilgrimage (Hajj), the movement of vehicles and pedestrians from Arafat to Muzdalifah during the Nafrah of pilgrims is known to suffer from severe bottlenecks that often result in arrival of thousands of pilgrims to Muzdalifah well after dawn. This paper proposes a framework for developing an intelligent real-time virtual environment model for facilitating efficient and timely vehicles traffic movement during the Nafrah utilizing various movement scenarios, simulation and optimization methods. The model utilizes intelligent agents within a real-time 3D virtual environment that represents the Nafrah from Arafat location coverage. The proposed framework has three primary phases each of which has specific components: (a) spatial analysis of current pedestrians and vehicles access in the Nafrah location coverage from Arafat to Muzdalifah; (b) evaluation of movement efficiency of current scenarios of the Nafrah using computational simulation; and (c) development of a multi-agents system within a real-time 3D virtual environment for improving the movement efficiency of vehicles traffic in the Nafrah. The proposed model can be used by decision makers (Hajj authorities) during the Nafrah from Arafat to Muzdalifah in order to achieve an efficient performance of crowd management

Improving the management of building life cycle : a data mining approach

The construction industry has adapted information technology in its processes in terms of computer aided design and drafting, construction documentation and maintenance. The data generated within the construction industry has become increasingly overwhelming. Data mining is a sophisticated data search capability that uses classification algorithms to discover patterns and correlations within a large volume of data. This paper presents the selection and application of data mining techniques on maintenance data of buildings. The results of applying such techniques and potential benefits of utilising their results to identify useful patterns of knowledge and correlations to support decision making of improving the management of building life cycle are presented and discussed