Microsimulation of urban land use

The project ILUMASS (Integrated Land-Use Modelling and Transportation System Simulation) aims at embedding a microscopic dynamic simulation model of urban traffic flows into a comprehensive model system incorporating both changes of land use and the resulting changes in transport demand. The land-use component of ILUMASS will be based on the land-use parts of an existing urban simulation model, but is to be microscopic like the transport parts of ILUMASS. Microsimulation modules will include models of demographic development, household formation, firm lifecycles, residential and non-residential construction, labour mobility on the regional labour market and household mobility on the regional housing market. These modules will be closely linked with the models of daily activity patterns and travel and goods movements modelled in the transport parts of ILUMASS developed by other partners of the project team. The design of the land use model takes into account that the collection of individual micro data (i.e. data which because of their micro location can be associated with individual buildings or small groups of buildings) or the retrieval of individual micro data from administrative registers for planning purposes is neither possible nor, for privacy reasons, desirable. The land use model therefore works with synthetic micro data which can be retrieved from generally accessible public data. ILUMASS is a group project of institutes of the universities of Aachen, Bamberg, Dortmund, Cologne and Wuppertal under the co-ordination of the Transport Research Institute of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR). Study region for tests and first applications of the model is the urban region of Dortmund. The common database will be compiled in co-operation with the City of Dortmund. After its completion the integrated model is to be used for assessing the impacts of potential transport and land use policies for the new land use plan of the city. The paper will focus on the land-use parts of the ILUMASS model. It will present the underlying behavioural theories and how they are made operational in the model design, explain how the synthetic population is generated, show first model results and demonstrate the potential usefulness of the model for the planning process.

Modelling policies for urban sustainability

The objective of the EU research project PROPOLIS (Planning and Research of Policies for Land Use and Transport for Increasing Urban Sustainability) is to assess urban strategies and to demonstrate their long-term effect in European cities. To reach this goal, a comprehensive framework of methodologies including integrated land use, transport and environmental modelling as well as indicator, evaluation and presentation systems have been developed. Sustainable development is viewed as comprising the environmental, socio-cultural and economic dimension. About thirty key indicators have been defined to measure the three dimensions of sustainability, such as air pollution, consumption of natural resources, quality of open space, population exposure to air pollution and noise, equity and opportunities and economic benefits from transport and land use. Indicator values are derived from state-of-the-art urban land use and transport models. A number of additional modules, including a justice evaluation module, an economic evaluation module and a GIS-based raster module, have been developed and integrated to provide further indicator values. Both multicriteria and cost-benefit analysis methods are used to consistently evaluate the impact of the policies. The environmental and social dimensions of sustainability are measured using multicriteria analysis for the evaluation of the indicators, whereas cost-benefit analysis is used for the economic dimension. The modelling and evaluation system is currently being implemented in seven European urban agglomerations: Bilbao (Spain), Brussels (Belgium), Dortmund (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Inverness (Scotland), Naples (Italy) and Vicenza (Italy). A large number of policies will be tested with the modelling and evaluation system in the seven urban regions. Policies to be investigated are land use policies, transport infrastructure policies, transport regulation and pricing policies and combinations of these. Besides a common policy set for all seven urban regions, city-specific local policies will be assessed as well. The first part of the paper will introduce the methodology and the modelling system developed. The second part will present first results of the policy testing and evaluation. The paper will conclude with initial conclusions on successful strategies to enhance the long-term sustainability of urban regions.

Evaluating Urban Sustainability Using Land-Use Transport Interaction Models

The objective of the EU research project PROPOLIS (Planning and Research of Policies for Land Use and Transport for Increasing Urban Sustainability) was to assess urban strategies and to demonstrate their long-term effects in European cities. To reach this goal, a comprehensive framework of methodologies including integrated land-use, transport and environmental models as well as indicator, evaluation and presentation systems was developed. Sustainable development is viewed as comprising the environmental, socio-cultural and economic dimension. Thirty-five indicators were defined to measure the three dimensions of sustainability, such as air pollution, consumption of natural resources, quality of open space, population exposure to air pollution and noise, equity and opportunities and economic benefits from transport and land use.  Indicator values are derived from state-of-the-art urban land-use and transport models. A number of additional modules, including a justice evaluation module, an economic evaluation module and a GIS-based raster module, were developed and integrated to provide further indicator values. Both multicriteria and cost-benefit analysis methods are used to consistently evaluate the impacts of the policies. The environmental and social dimensions of sustainability are measured using multicriteria analysis for the evaluation of the indicators, whereas cost-benefit analysis is used for the economic dimension. The modelling and evaluation system was implemented in seven European urban regions: Bilbao (Spain), Brussels (Belgium), Dortmund (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Inverness (Scotland), Naples (Italy) and Vicenza (Italy). A large number of policies were tested with the modelling and evaluation system in the seven urban regions. Policies investigated are land use policies, transport infrastructure policies, transport regulation and pricing policies and combinations of these. Besides a common set of policies examined in all seven urban regions, also city-specific local policies were assessed in each urban region.  The first part of the paper introduces the methodology and the model system developed. A particular focus is on the development of indicators describing urban sustainability derived from different indicator modules in the modelling system. The second part presents selected aggregated results of the policy testing and evaluation for Dortmund as one of the seven urban regions. The paper concludes with recommendations on how successful strategies to enhance the long-term  ustainability of urban regions should look like

Embedded Program Annotations for WCET Analysis

We present __builtin_ais_annot(), a user-friendly, versatile way to transfer annotations (also known as flow facts) written on the source code level to the machine code level. To do so, we couple two tools often used during the development of safety-critical hard real-time systems, the formally verified C compiler CompCert and the static WCET analyzer aiT. CompCert stores the AIS annotations given via __builtin_ais_annot() in a special section of the ELF binary, which can later be extracted automatically by aiT

Linear model-based testing of ADC nonlinearities

In this brief, we demonstrate the procedures of linear model-based testing for the example of a 12-b Nyquist-rate analog-to-digital converter (ADC). In a production test environment, we apply this technique to two wafer lots of devices, and we establish that the model is robust with respect to its ability to reduce the uncertainty of the test outcome. Reducing this uncertainty is particularly beneficial for higher resolution devices, for which measurement noise increasingly corrupts the measured "signal" that is the nonlinearity of the device under test

Elastic properties of highly anisotropic thin poly(propylene) foams

In this letter, elastic properties of highly anisotropic cellular poly(propylene) films are reported. The material shows peculiar elastic properties compared to other foams in the literature. The data is displayed as the relative Young's modulus $E^*/E_s$ versus relative density $\rho^*/\rho_s$. Almost all the data from the literature are located on the region $E^*/E_s=(\rho^*/\rho_s)^n$ with $1\le n\le6$. The introduced material on the other hand have lower relative Young's modulus at high relative densities, $n\ge6$