Electric Vehicle Routing Problem in Urban Logistics

Due to the impact of global warming, diesel locomotives that use fossil energy as fuel are gradually being replaced by electric vehicles. At present, many countries at home and abroad are actively promoting the development of the electric vehicle industry in response to the call of the Paris Agreement. However, electric vehicles have a maximum mileage limit, so the reasonable layout of electric vehicle charging stations is also a problem to be solved today. In this article, the author analyzes the research background of the electric vehicle routing problem. After introducing several new research directions in the current electric vehicle routing problem, we propose an optimization algorithm for solving those types of problem. It brings certain theoretical significance for future generations to solve the problem of electric vehicle routing in real life

How Design Influences Older Adults’ Outdoor Space Usage and Satisfaction: A Case Study of Outdoor Environments in Chinese Facilities for the Elderly

Along with the rapidly increasing Chinese elderly population, the demand for sound practices that improve elderly people’s health and well-being in Chinese long-term care facilities grows synchronously. Spending time in outdoor spaces positively influences senior adults’ physical and psychological health. The design of outdoor spaces in senior living facilities has an important impact on elderly people’s use of outdoor spaces and their satisfaction. It is suggested that physical environment should support users’ needs from five domains, including accessing to nature, outdoor comfort and safety, walking and outdoor activities, indoor-outdoor connection, and connection to the world. Although many published research supported this theory, most of these studies were conducted in long-term care facilities in western countries. More specifically, there is limited research written in English that examines whether this theory is applicable in a different cultural context, such as China. This study examined whether environmental features in these five domains influence senior adults’ outdoor space usage and their satisfaction in a Chinese context. An exploratory case study was conducted in two Chinese long-term care facilities, Huishan Elderly Home (HEH), and Nanshan Charity Home (NCH). Both facilities located in Wuxi, China, and have more than 300 residents. Three outdoor spaces in each facility were studied. A triangulation approach was applied to collect data, which is composed of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Data collection methods included environmental audit, behavior mapping, focus group, and survey. The research findings contributed in three aspects. First, it uses qualitative methods (focused group and open-ended questions in the questionnaire) to show Chinese cultural preferences for outdoor features in Chinese long-term care facilities. Second, it uses qualitative methods (focus groups and open-ended questions in the questionnaire) to modify the Seniors’ Outdoor Survey (SOS tool) for Chinese long-term care facilities. Third, it finds a descriptive correlation between SOS findings and resident satisfaction

t-Deletion-s-Insertion-Burst Correcting Codes

Motivated by applications in DNA-based storage and communication systems, we study deletion and insertion errors simultaneously in a burst. In particular, we study a type of error named $t$-deletion-$s$-insertion-burst ($(t,s)$-burst for short) which is a generalization of the $(2,1)$-burst error proposed by Schoeny {\it et. al}. Such an error deletes $t$ consecutive symbols and inserts an arbitrary sequence of length $s$ at the same coordinate. We provide a sphere-packing upper bound on the size of binary codes that can correct a $(t,s)$-burst error, showing that the redundancy of such codes is at least $\log n+t-1$. For $t\geq 2s$, an explicit construction of binary $(t,s)$-burst correcting codes with redundancy $\log n+(t-s-1)\log\log n+O(1)$ is given. In particular, we construct a binary $(3,1)$-burst correcting code with redundancy at most $\log n+9$, which is optimal up to a constant.Comment: Part of this work (the (t,1)-burst model) was presented at ISIT2022. This full version has been submitted to IEEE-IT in August 202

An Argumentation-Based Legal Reasoning Approach for DL-Ontology

Ontology is a popular method for knowledge representation in different domains, including the legal domain, and description logics (DL) is commonly used as its description language. To handle reasoning based on inconsistent DL-based legal ontologies, the current paper presents a structured argumentation framework particularly for reasoning in legal contexts on the basis of ASPIC+, and translates the legal ontology into formulas and rules of an argumentation theory. With a particular focus on the design of autonomous vehicles from the perspective of legal AI, we show that using this combined theory of formal argumentation and DL-based legal ontology, acceptable assertions can be obtained based on inconsistent ontologies, and the traditional reasoning tasks of DL ontologies can also be accomplished. In addition, a formal definition of explanations for the result of reasoning is presented.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

PCFGaze: Physics-Consistent Feature for Appearance-based Gaze Estimation

Although recent deep learning based gaze estimation approaches have achieved much improvement, we still know little about how gaze features are connected to the physics of gaze. In this paper, we try to answer this question by analyzing the gaze feature manifold. Our analysis revealed the insight that the geodesic distance between gaze features is consistent with the gaze differences between samples. According to this finding, we construct the Physics- Consistent Feature (PCF) in an analytical way, which connects gaze feature to the physical definition of gaze. We further propose the PCFGaze framework that directly optimizes gaze feature space by the guidance of PCF. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework alleviates the overfitting problem and significantly improves cross-domain gaze estimation accuracy without extra training data. The insight of gaze feature has the potential to benefit other regression tasks with physical meanings

Similarity Learning via Kernel Preserving Embedding

Data similarity is a key concept in many data-driven applications. Many algorithms are sensitive to similarity measures. To tackle this fundamental problem, automatically learning of similarity information from data via self-expression has been developed and successfully applied in various models, such as low-rank representation, sparse subspace learning, semi-supervised learning. However, it just tries to reconstruct the original data and some valuable information, e.g., the manifold structure, is largely ignored. In this paper, we argue that it is beneficial to preserve the overall relations when we extract similarity information. Specifically, we propose a novel similarity learning framework by minimizing the reconstruction error of kernel matrices, rather than the reconstruction error of original data adopted by existing work. Taking the clustering task as an example to evaluate our method, we observe considerable improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, our proposed framework is very general and provides a novel and fundamental building block for many other similarity-based tasks. Besides, our proposed kernel preserving opens up a large number of possibilities to embed high-dimensional data into low-dimensional space.Comment: Published in AAAI 201

Impact of the Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine in Hindering Antimicrobial Resistance in China

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a serious threat to global public health. Yet vaccinations have been largely undervalued as a method to hinder AMR progression. This study examined the AMR impact of increasing pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) coverage in China. China has one of the world’s highest rates of antibiotic use and low PCV coverage. We developed an agent-based DREAMR (Dynamic Representation of the Economics of AMR) model to examine the health and economic benefits of slowing AMR against commonly used antibiotics. We simulated PCV coverage, pneumococcal infections, antibiotic use, and AMR accumulation. Four antibiotics to treat pneumococcal diseases (penicillin, amoxicillin, 3rd generation cephalosporins, and meropenem) were modeled with antibiotic utilization, pharmacokinetics, and pharmacodynamics factored into predicting AMR accumulation. Three PCV coverage scenarios were simulated over five years: (1) status quo with no change in coverage, (2) scaled coverage increase to 99% in 5 years, and (3) accelerated coverage increase to 85% over 2 years followed by 3 years to reach 99% coverage. Compared to the status quo, we found that AMR against penicillin, amoxicillin, and 3rd generation cephalosporins was significantly reduced by 1.74%, 19.19%, and 14.87% in the scaled scenario and by 2.87%, 29.97%, and 23.35% in the accelerated scenario. Cumulative costs due to AMR, including direct and indirect costs to patients and caretakers, were reduced by $2.76 billion in the scaled and$4.46 billion in the accelerated scenarios compared to the status quo. AMR benefits of vaccines are essential to quantify in order to drive appropriate investment.Doctor of Pharmac

How Design Influences Older Adults’ Outdoor Space Usage and Satisfaction: A Case Study of Outdoor Environments in Chinese Facilities for the Elderly

Along with the rapidly increasing Chinese elderly population, the demand for sound practices that improve elderly people’s health and well-being in Chinese long-term care facilities grows synchronously. Spending time in outdoor spaces positively influences senior adults’ physical and psychological health. The design of outdoor spaces in senior living facilities has an important impact on elderly people’s use of outdoor spaces and their satisfaction. It is suggested that physical environment should support users’ needs from five domains, including accessing to nature, outdoor comfort and safety, walking and outdoor activities, indoor-outdoor connection, and connection to the world. Although many published research supported this theory, most of these studies were conducted in long-term care facilities in western countries. More specifically, there is limited research written in English that examines whether this theory is applicable in a different cultural context, such as China. This study examined whether environmental features in these five domains influence senior adults’ outdoor space usage and their satisfaction in a Chinese context. An exploratory case study was conducted in two Chinese long-term care facilities, Huishan Elderly Home (HEH), and Nanshan Charity Home (NCH). Both facilities located in Wuxi, China, and have more than 300 residents. Three outdoor spaces in each facility were studied. A triangulation approach was applied to collect data, which is composed of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Data collection methods included environmental audit, behavior mapping, focus group, and survey. The research findings contributed in three aspects. First, it uses qualitative methods (focused group and open-ended questions in the questionnaire) to show Chinese cultural preferences for outdoor features in Chinese long-term care facilities. Second, it uses qualitative methods (focus groups and open-ended questions in the questionnaire) to modify the Seniors’ Outdoor Survey (SOS tool) for Chinese long-term care facilities. Third, it finds a descriptive correlation between SOS findings and resident satisfaction