The Impact of Climate Change on Virginia\u27s Coastal Areas

As part of HJ47/SJ47 (2020), the Virginia General Assembly directed the Joint Commission on Technology and Science (JCOTS) to study the “safety, quality of life, and economic consequences of weather and climate-related events on coastal areas in Virginia.” In pursuit of this goal, the commission was to “accept any scientific and technical assistance provided by the nonpartisan, volunteer Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (VASEM). VASEM convened an expert study board with representation from the Office of the Governor, planning district commissions in coastal Virginia, The Port of Virginia, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, state universities, private industry, and law firms. In producing the report, the board followed methods similar to those used by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine by convening an expert committee tasked with studying and reporting on the topic. As a result, the report represents the views and perspectives of the study board members but was not submitted for public review or comment. This report is the product of those efforts. It finds that climate change will have an increasingly disruptive effect on people living in Virginia’s coastal areas during the 21st century — and that these disruptions will have repercussions across the Commonwealth. It includes an explanation of the physical forces driving climate change, an analysis of the current and projected effects of climate change on the Commonwealth, perspectives that legislators might consider as they face these challenges, and recommendations that could help Virginia implement more productive and effective strategies to address them

A Time-Saving Approach to Simulation Modeling for Traffic Incident Management Program Evaluation

In this paper, a three-stage time-saving process for conducting traffic incident management (TIM) program benefit evaluation is proposed. This process relies on a developed property-based incident generation (P-BIG) procedure designed to assist in generating a set of incident scenarios that are representative of the historical incident data set and simultaneously not overly large in number so as to induce extensive computational burden. The proposed procedure was applied in evaluating the benefits of an existing TIM program for the purpose of assessing the proposed procedure’s predictive power. Results of experiments show that the procedure results in benefit estimates within 5% of the value derived employing all historical incidents, while requiring only 18% of the computational effort

Adaptive routing considering delays due to signal operations

This work addresses the problem of determining optimal routing decisions in signalized traffic networks, where arc travel times vary over time and are known only probabilistically (i.e. in stochastic, time-varying (STV) networks) and additional delay due to signal operations is explicitly considered. While prior works in the literature address problems of routing in STV networks, none explicitly considers the additional delay that would be incurred due to signal operations at the intersections of the roadway network. In this paper, we consider an adaptive routing problem, where paths are adapted en route based on revealed information concerning the arc travel times and actual signal timings. We first discuss how concepts from existing procedures can be combined to solve the adaptive routing problem in signalized STV networks, where the signal timing plan and actual timings are known a priori. When actual timings or delays due to signal control are known only probabilistically, such techniques will be inefficient. Thus, we propose a more efficient algorithm for solving this latter problem. Results of numerical experiments conducted on a real-world-based signalized street network are presented. These results show that the solutions obtained by explicitly considering delays due to signal operations will likely be significantly different from those solutions generated by techniques that ignore such delays.