Integrating engineering systems research and undergraduate education through a term-length case study

Introduction The MIT-Portugal Program (MPP) was launched in 2007 with the dual objectives of conducting innovative research and establishing leading academic degree programs through international collaboration across a range of technical disciplines. Among the first attempts to integrate the research and teaching objectives of the MPP was the Spring 2009 offering of Engineering System Design, a required course for third- and fourth-year undergraduates in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The course employed a semester-long case study, drawing heavily on active MPP transportation and engineering systems research for teaching and assignment content

Service Reliability Measurement Using Automated Fare Card Data Application to the London Underground

This paper explores the potential of using automated fare card data to quantify the reliability of service as experienced by passengers of rail transit systems. The distribution of individual passenger journey times can be accurately estimated for those systems requiring both entry and exit fare card validation. With the use of this information, a set of service reliability measures is developed that can be used to routinely monitor performance, gain insights into the causes of unreliability, and serve as an input into the evaluation of transit service. An estimation methodology is proposed that classifies performance into typical and nonrecurring conditions, which allows analysts to estimate the level of unreliability attributable to incidents. The proposed measures are used to characterize the reliability of one line in the London Underground under typical and incident-affected conditions with the use of data from the Oyster smartcard system for the morning peak period. A validation of the methodology with the use of incident-log data confirms that a large proportion of the unreliability experienced by passengers can be attributed to incidentrelated disruptions. In addition, the study revealed that the perceived reliability component of the typical Underground trip exceeds its platform wait time component and equals about half of its on-train travel time as well as its station access and egress time components, suggesting that sizable improvements in overall service quality can be attained through reliability improvements

Service reliability measurement framework using smart card data : application to the London Underground

Thesis (S.M. in Transportation)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and, (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 162-165).Service reliability is an important dimension of performance to transit passengers, affecting not only their perceptions of service quality, but their travel behaviour as well. The ability of transit operators to understand and improve reliability relies on their ability to measure it. Until recently, efforts to quantify this attribute of service from the perspective of passengers were limited by the small sample sizes obtained from manual surveys, or the use of supply-side data to indirectly capture the passenger experience. With the emergence of data from automated fare media, it becomes possible under certain conditions to directly observe travel times experienced by passengers and obtain improved estimates of the reliability of transit service. A framework is developed to estimate service reliability on heavy rail transit systems with both entry and exit fare control using data from Automated Fare Collection systems. A methodology is proposed as part of the framework to classify performance into incident-related and recurrent conditions in order to both gain new insight into the contribution of the different causes of unreliability as well as develop more robust measures of service reliability. The classification methodology is validated against incident log data corresponding to three origin-destination (O-D) pairs on the London Underground. Subsequently, the proposed framework is used to characterize the reliability of 800 Underground O-D pairs representing the highest-volume journeys on the system. Furthermore, models are estimated to quantify the effects of journey length, interchanges, and incident-related disruptions on reliability.(cont.) Two practical applications of the framework are also developed for the Underground. First, an extension of the existing service quality measurement system is proposed in order to quantify reliability as part of routine performance monitoring efforts. An application of this extension to the Victoria line during the morning peak reveals that reliability is an important part of service quality, with a contribution to total perceived travel times comparable to that of various average travel time components. Second, a way to provide passengers with reliability information through Transport for London's trip planning software is presented, in order to mitigate the negative impact of uncertain journey times. The potential benefits from the provision of this additional information are found to be appreciable relative to the current ability of the trip planning software to reduce uncertainty for Underground passengers.by David Louis Uniman.M.C.P.S.M.in Transportatio

Federal litigation guide ::New York and Connecticut.

Federal litigation guide: New York and Connecticut provides full coverage of civil litigation practice and procedure, from the filing of the lawsuit through judgment with emphasis on pretrial procedure

Federal litigation guide ::New York and Connecticut - index.

Federal litigation guide: New York and Connecticut provides full coverage of civil litigation practice and procedure, from the filing of the lawsuit through judgment with emphasis on pretrial procedure