87 research outputs found
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.
Interaction Quench in the Hubbard model
Motivated by recent experiments in ultracold atomic gases that explore the
nonequilibrium dynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems, we
investigate the opposite limit of Landau's Fermi liquid paradigm: We study a
Hubbard model with a sudden interaction quench, that is the interaction is
switched on at time t=0. Using the flow equation method, we are able to study
the real time dynamics for weak interaction U in a systematic expansion and
find three clearly separated time regimes: i) An initial buildup of
correlations where the quasiparticles are formed. ii) An intermediate
quasi-steady regime resembling a zero temperature Fermi liquid with a
nonequilibrium quasiparticle distribution function. iii) The long time limit
described by a quantum Boltzmann equation leading to thermalization with a
temperature T proportional to U.Comment: Final version as publishe
Exploiting the nonlinear impact dynamics of a single-electron shuttle for highly regular current transport
The nanomechanical single-electron shuttle is a resonant system in which a
suspended metallic island oscillates between and impacts at two electrodes.
This setup holds promise for one-by-one electron transport and the
establishment of an absolute current standard. While the charge transported per
oscillation by the nanoscale island will be quantized in the Coulomb blockade
regime, the frequency of such a shuttle depends sensitively on many parameters,
leading to drift and noise. Instead of considering the nonlinearities
introduced by the impact events as a nuisance, here we propose to exploit the
resulting nonlinear dynamics to realize a highly precise oscillation frequency
via synchronization of the shuttle self-oscillations to an external signal.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Estimating Grassland Biomass - Potentials and Limitations of Point Cloud Analysis
Quantifying above ground biomass of grasslands is important information for grassland management and the understanding of ecological processes in grassland habitats. Often, allometric relationships between grassland height and biomass are used for biomass estimation. While these methods may be used in intensively used grassland with a homogenous canopy surface, in heterogenous grasslands it is not possible to repeat these measurements on larger areas. Recent technological advances in active and passive remote sensing offering new opportunities for estimations of grassland biomass. Many studies using remote sensing data for biomass estimation are based on the analysis of optical remote sensing sensors and are situated in forests and agricultural crops. Small temporal and spatially heterogenous grasslands were often neglected due to their complex vegetation structure. Just recently, point cloud data based either on terrestrial laser measurements (TLS) or on photogrammetric image analysis (SfM) approaches were investigated for their potential of biomass estimation in grasslands. The focus of this talk will be on evaluating the potential of TLS and SfM derived point clouds in deriving biomass estimation of grasslands with very different land use intensities. Both approaches show promising results for predicting grassland biomass (R2 ranging from 0.48 to 0.79 and from 0.35 to 0.81 for TLS and SfM respectively). TLS always performs better, which could be explained by the higher point densities and thus higher information content about the vegetation structure. However, under consideration of price and expert knowledge UAV based point clouds also produce satisfying results. Another aspect of the talk will be the comparison of performance aspects (e.g. computing time) of different point cloud analysis strategies. It can be shown that two scans of the same location from different aspects already provide detailed information about biomass and additional scans only lead to an unnecessary increase in data volume while maintaining consistent prediction quality. Various analysis methods will be test for extracting information from the point clouds. Here methods based on canopy surface height show the best prediction performance for biomass. Concluding, it is possible to say that both TLS and SfM-based point clouds have a good potential for deriving biomass information of grasslands, independent of land use intensity. However, to derive final conclusions the stability of the statistical relationships needs to be test over several growing periods. For the future, also the fusion of point cloud information with spectral information should be tested, as better biomass prediction models can be expected from this
implementation of an in-house management routine
Background Coma of unknown origin is an emergency caused by a variety of
possibly life-threatening pathologies. Although lethality is high, there are
currently no generally accepted management guidelines. Methods We implemented
a new interdisciplinary standard operating procedure (SOP) for patients
presenting with non-traumatic coma of unknown origin. It includes a new in-
house triage process, a new alert call, a new composition of the clinical
response team and a new management algorithm (altogether termed âcoma alarmâ).
It is triggered by two simple criteria to be checked with out-of-hospital
emergency response teams before the patient arrives. A neurologist in
collaboration with an internal specialist leads the in-hospital team.
Collaboration with anaesthesiology, trauma surgery and neurosurgery is
organised along structured pathways that include standardised laboratory tests
and imaging. Patients were prospectively enrolled. We calculated response
times as well as sensitivity and false positive rates, thus proportions of
over- and undertriaged patients, as quality measures for the implementation in
the SOP. Results During 24 months after implementation, we identified 325
eligible patients. Sensitivity was 60 % initially (months 1â4), then
fluctuated between 84 and 94 % (months 5â24). Overtriage never exceeded 15 %
and undertriage could be kept low at a maximum of 11 % after a learning
period. We achieved a median door-to-CT time of 20 minutes. 85 % of patients
needed subsequent ICU treatment, 40 % of which required specialised neuro-
ICUs. Discussion Our results indicate that our new simple in-house triage
criteria may be sufficient to identify eligible patients before arrival. We
aimed at ensuring the fastest possible proceedings given high portions of
underlying time-sensitive neurological and medical pathologies while using all
available resources as purposefully as possible. Conclusions Our SOP may
provide an appropriate tool for efficient management of patients with non-
traumatic coma. Our results justify the assignment of the initial diagnostic
workup to neurologists and internal specialists in collaboration with
anaesthesiologists
Renal recovery following orthotopic liver transplant after prolonged kidney injury: Perspectives on diagnosing hepatorenal syndrome and determining which patients should undergo simultaneous liver kidney transplantation
We present a case of an individual with cirrhosis and renal failure. This case is notable because the patient was found to have hepatorenal syndrome (HRS) superimposed on Immunoglobulin A (IgA) nephropathy. After 8 months of dialysis, the patient had significant renal recovery following orthotopic liver transplant (OLT). Cases such as this are not likely to be rare, as case series have shown that IgA deposits are a common occurrence in patients with cirrhosis, including those who have HRS. While current diagnostic criteria for HRS emphasize the importance of excluding glomerular lesions, we argue that this approach should be reconsidered. More specifically, we feel that the diagnostic approach to HRS should be more inclusive of cases in which patients have simultaneous HRS and glomerular injury. In addition, our case highlights the challenges in determining which patients will benefit most from simultaneous liverâkidney transplants over OLTs alone
Crossover from adiabatic to sudden interaction quenches in the Hubbard model: Prethermalization and nonequilibrium dynamics
The recent experimental implementation of condensed matter models in optical
lattices has motivated research on their nonequilibrium behavior. Predictions
on the dynamics of superconductors following a sudden quench of the pairing
interaction have been made based on the effective BCS Hamiltonian; however,
their experimental verification requires the preparation of a suitable excited
state of the Hubbard model along a twofold constraint: (i) a sufficiently
nonadiabatic ramping scheme is essential to excite the nonequilibrium dynamics,
and (ii) overheating beyond the critical temperature of superconductivity must
be avoided. For commonly discussed interaction ramps there is no clear
separation of the corresponding energy scales. Here we show that the matching
of both conditions is simplified by the intrinsic relaxation behavior of
ultracold fermionic systems: For the particular example of a linear ramp we
examine the transient regime of prethermalization [M. Moeckel and S. Kehrein,
Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 175702 (2008)] under the crossover from sudden to
adiabatic switching using Keldysh perturbation theory. A real-time analysis of
the momentum distribution exhibits a temporal separation of an early energy
relaxation and its later thermalization by scattering events. For long but
finite ramping times this separation can be large. In the prethermalization
regime the momentum distribution resembles a zero temperature Fermi liquid as
the energy inserted by the ramp remains located in high energy modes. Thus
ultracold fermions prove robust to heating which simplifies the observation of
nonequilibrium BCS dynamics in optical lattices.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures Second version with small modifications in
section
Real-time evolution for weak interaction quenches in quantum systems
Motivated by recent experiments in ultracold atomic gases that explore the
nonequilibrium dynamics of interacting quantum many-body systems, we
investigate the nonequilibrium properties of a Fermi liquid. We apply an
interaction quench within the Fermi liquid phase of the Hubbard model by
switching on a weak interaction suddenly; then we follow the real-time dynamics
of the momentum distribution by a systematic expansion in the interaction
strength based on the flow equation method. In this paper we derive our main
results, namely the applicability of a quasiparticle description, the
observation of a new type of quasi-stationary nonequilibrium Fermi liquid like
state and a delayed thermalization of the momentum distribution. We explain the
physical origin of the delayed relaxation as a consequence of phase space
constraints in fermionic many-body systems. This brings about a close relation
to similar behavior of one-particle systems which we illustrate by a discussion
of the squeezed oscillator; we generalize to an extended class of systems with
discrete energy spectra and point out the generic character of the
nonequilibrium Fermi liquid results for weak interaction quenches. Both for
discrete and continuous systems we observe that particular nonequilibrium
expectation values are twice as large as their corresponding analogues in
equilibrium. For a Fermi liquid, this shows up as an increased
correlation-induced reduction of the quasiparticle residue in nonequilibrium.Comment: 54 page
Dynamical evolution of star-forming regions
We model the dynamical evolution of star-forming regions with a wide range of initial properties.
We follow the evolution of the regionsâ substructure using the Q-parameter, we search
for dynamical mass segregation using the !MSR technique, and we also quantify the evolution
of local density around stars as a function of mass using the "LDR method. The amount of
dynamical mass segregation measured by !MSR is generally only significant for subvirial and
virialized, substructured regions â which usually evolve to form bound clusters. The "LDR
method shows that massive stars attain higher local densities than the median value in all
regions, even those that are supervirial and evolve to form (unbound) associations. We also
introduce the Q â "LDR plot, which describes the evolution of spatial structure as a function
of mass-weighted local density in a star-forming region. Initially dense (>1000 stars pcâ2),
bound regions always have Q > 1, "LDR > 2 after 5 Myr, whereas dense unbound regions
always have Q 2 after 5 Myr. Less dense regions (<100 stars pcâ2) do not usually
exhibit "LDR > 2 values, and if relatively high local density around massive stars arises
purely from dynamics, then the Q â "LDR plot can be used to estimate the initial density of a
star-forming region
Dynamical population synthesis: Constructing the stellar single and binary contents of galactic field populations
[abridged] The galactic field's late-type stellar single and binary
population is calculated on the supposition that all stars form as binaries in
embedded star clusters. A recently developed tool (Marks, Kroupa & Oh) is used
to evolve the binary star distributions in star clusters for a few Myr so that
a particular mixture of single and binary stars is achieved. On cluster
dissolution the population enters the galactic field with these
characteristics. The different contributions of single stars and binaries from
individual star clusters which are selected from a power-law embedded star
cluster mass function are then added up. This gives rise to integrated galactic
field binary distribution functions (IGBDFs) resembling a galactic field's
stellar content (Dynamical Population Synthesis). It is found that the binary
proportion in the galactic field of a galaxy is larger the lower the minimum
cluster mass, the lower the star formation rate, the steeper the embedded star
cluster mass function and the larger the typical size of forming star clusters
in the considered galaxy. In particular, period-, mass-ratio- and eccentricity
IGBDFs for the Milky Way are modelled. The afore mentioned theoretical IGBDFs
agree with independently observed distributions. Of all late-type binaries, 50%
stem from M<300M_sun clusters, while 50% of all single stars were born in
M>10^4M_sun clusters. Comparison of the G-dwarf and M-dwarf binary population
indicates that the stars formed in mass-segregated clusters. In particular it
is pointed out that although in the present model all M-dwarfs are born in
binary systems, in the Milky Way's Galactic field the majority ends up being
single stars. This work predicts that today's binary frequency in elliptical
galaxies is lower than in spiral and in dwarf-galaxies. The period and
mass-ratio distributions in these galaxies are explicitly predicted.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
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