Search results for: Urban Retail Logistics.

Authors: C. Ardil

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Aircraft selection decisions can be challenging due to their multidimensional and interdisciplinary nature. They involve multiple stakeholders with conflicting objectives and numerous alternative options with uncertain outcomes. This study focuses on the analysis of aerial firefighting aircraft that can be chosen for the Air Fire Service to extinguish forest fires. To make such a selection, the characteristics of the fire zones must be considered, and the capability to manage the logistics involved in such operations, as well as the purchase and maintenance of the aircraft, must be determined. The selection of firefighting aircraft is particularly complex because they have longer fleet lives and require more demanding operation and maintenance than scheduled passenger air service. This paper aims to use the fuzzy proximity measure method to select the most appropriate aerial firefighting aircraft based on decision criteria using multiple attribute decision making analysis. Following fuzzy decision analysis, the most suitable aerial firefighting aircraft is ranked and determined for the Air Fire Service.

Keywords: Aerial firefighting aircraft selection, multiple criteria decision making, fuzzy sets, standard fuzzy sets, determinate fuzzy sets, indeterminate fuzzy sets, proximity measure method, Minkowski distance family function, Hausdorff distance function, MCDM, PMM, PMM-F

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Authors: Roberto Rosenhaim, Marcos Antonio Crus Moreira, Robson da Cunha, Gerson Gomes Cunha

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This work provides details on the wind speed behavior within cities of Arraial do Cabo and São Pedro da Aldeia located in the Lakes Region of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This region has one of the best potentials for wind power generation. In interurban layer, wind conditions are very complex and depend on physical geography, size and orientation of buildings and constructions around, population density, and land use. In the same context, the fundamental surface parameter that governs the production of flow turbulence in urban canyons is the surface roughness. Such factors can influence the potential for power generation from the wind within the cities. Moreover, the use of wind on a small scale is not fully utilized due to complexity of wind flow measurement inside the cities. It is difficult to accurately predict this type of resource. This study demonstrates how fuzzy logic can facilitate the assessment of the complexity of the wind potential inside the cities. It presents a decision support tool and its ability to deal with inaccurate information using linguistic variables created by the heuristic method. It relies on the already published studies about the variables that influence the wind speed in the urban environment. These variables were turned into the verbal expressions that are used in computer system, which facilitated the establishment of rules for fuzzy inference and integration with an application for smartphones used in the research. In the first part of the study, challenges of the sustainable development which are described are followed by incentive policies to the use of renewable energy in Brazil. The next chapter follows the study area characteristics and the concepts of fuzzy logic. Data were collected in field experiment by using qualitative and quantitative methods for assessment. As a result, a map of the various points is presented within the cities studied with its wind viability evaluated by a system of decision support using the method multivariate classification based on fuzzy logic.

Keywords: Behavior of winds, wind power, fuzzy logic, sustainable development.

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Authors: David Julian Bernal Melgarejo

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Inland Waterway Transportation (IWT) is playing an important role in national transport systems, water transportation is considered to be safe, energy efficient and environmentally friendly mode of transport, all benefits of IWT cause national awareness increase, for instance the Colombian government is planning to restore the navigability of the most important river of the country, the Magdalena’s River navigability, embrace waterway transportation in Colombia could strength competitiveness while reduce most of the transport externalities. However, the current situation of the Magdalena is deplorable, the most important river of Colombia has been abandoned for decades and the solution is beyond of a single administrative entity. This paper analyzes the outcomes of the Navigation And Inland Waterway Action and Development in Europe program (NAIADES) as a prospective to develop a similar program in Colombia with similar objectives and guidelines, considering sustainability, guarantying the long-term future results and adaptability of the program. Identifying stakeholders and policy experts, a set of individual interviews were carried out; findings support the idea of lack of integration within governmental institutions and lack of importance in marketing promotion as possible drawbacks on the implementation of IWT projects.

Keywords: Inland waterway transportation, Logistics, Sustainability, Multimodal transport systems, Water transportation.

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Authors: Gabriela V. Angeles Perez, Jose Castillejos Lopez, Araceli L. Reyes Cabello, Emilio Bravo Grajales, Adriana Perez Espinosa, Jose L. Quiroz Fabian

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Road traffic accidents are among the principal causes of traffic congestion, causing human losses, damages to health and the environment, economic losses and material damages. Studies about traditional road traffic accidents in urban zones represents very high inversion of time and money, additionally, the result are not current. However, nowadays in many countries, the crowdsourced GPS based traffic and navigation apps have emerged as an important source of information to low cost to studies of road traffic accidents and urban congestion caused by them. In this article we identified the zones, roads and specific time in the CDMX in which the largest number of road traffic accidents are concentrated during 2016. We built a database compiling information obtained from the social network known as Waze. The methodology employed was Discovery of knowledge in the database (KDD) for the discovery of patterns in the accidents reports. Furthermore, using data mining techniques with the help of Weka. The selected algorithms was the Maximization of Expectations (EM) to obtain the number ideal of clusters for the data and k-means as a grouping method. Finally, the results were visualized with the Geographic Information System QGIS.

Keywords: Data mining, K-means, road traffic accidents, Waze, Weka.

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Authors: Ke Wang, Zhu Wang

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Coordinating and promoting urban and rural development has been a new round of institutional change in Zhejiang province since 2004. And this plan was fully implemented, which showed that the isolation between the urban and rural areas had gradually diminished. Little by little, an infiltration interface that is dynamic, flexible and interactive is formed, and this morphological structure starts to appear on the landscape form in the surrounding villages. In order to study the specific function and formation of the structure in the context of industrial revolution, Bimen village located on the interface between Anji Township, Huzhou and Yuhang District, Hangzhou is taken as the case. Anji township is in the cross area between Yangtze River delta economic circle and innovation center in Hangzhou. Awarded with ‘Chinese beautiful village’, Bimen has witnessed the growing process of infiltration in ecology, economy, technology and culture on the interface. Within the opportunity, Bimen village presents internal reformation to adapt to the energy exchange with urban areas. In the research, the reformation is to adjust the industrial structure, to upgrade the local special bamboo crafts, to release space for activities, and to establish infrastructures on the interface. The characteristic of an interface is elasticity achieved by introducing an Internet platform using ‘O2O’ agriculture method to connect cities and farmlands. There is a platform of this kind in Bimen named ‘Xiao Mei’. ‘Xiao’ in Chinese means small, ‘Mei’ means beautiful, which indicates the method to refine the landscape form. It turns out that the new agriculture mode will strengthen the interface by orienting the Third Party Platform upon the old dynamic basis and will bring new vitality for economy development in Bimen village. The research concludes opportunities and challenges generated by the evolution of the infiltration interface. It also proposes strategies for how to organically adapt to the urbanization process. Finally it demonstrates what will happen by increasing flexibility in the landscape forms of suburbs in the Bimen village.

Keywords: Bimen Village, infiltration interface, flexibility, suburban landscape form.

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Authors: Mohammad Saber Eslamlou

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Morphology of Islamic cities has been extensively studied by researchers. In this regard, there exist much difference in method of analysis, classification, recognition, confrontation and comparative method of urban morphology. The present paper aims to examine the previous methods, approaches and insights and how Dr. Giulia Annalinda Neglia dealt with the analysis of morphology of Islamic cities. Neglia is assistant professor in University of Bari, Italy (UNIBA) who has published numerous papers and books on Islamic cities. We introduce the works in the field of morphology of Islamic cities and then, her thoughts, insights and research methodologies are presented and analyzed in critical perspective. This is a qualitative research on her written works, which have been classified in three major categories. The present paper focuses mainly on her works regarding morphology and physical shape of Islamic cities. The results of her works’ review suggest that she has used Moratoria typology in investigating morphology of Islamic cities. Moreover, overall structure of the cities under investigation is often described linear; however, she is against to define a single framework for the recognition of morphology in Islamic cities. She believes that fabric of each region in the city follows from the principles of a specific period or urban pattern, in particular, Hellenistic and Roman structures. Furthermore, she believes that it is impossible to understand the morphology of a city without taking into account the obvious and hidden developments associated with it, because form of building and their surrounding open spaces are written history of the city.

Keywords: City, Islamic city, morphology of city, Giulia Annalinda Neglia.

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Authors: D. B. L. Bong, K.C. Lai, A. Joseph

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The uses of road map in daily activities are numerous but it is a hassle to construct and update a road map whenever there are changes. In Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, research on Automatic Road Extraction (ARE) was explored to solve the difficulties in updating road map. The research started with using Satellite Image (SI), or in short, the ARE-SI project. A Hybrid Simple Colour Space Segmentation & Edge Detection (Hybrid SCSS-EDGE) algorithm was developed to extract roads automatically from satellite-taken images. In order to extract the road network accurately, the satellite image must be analyzed prior to the extraction process. The characteristics of these elements are analyzed and consequently the relationships among them are determined. In this study, the road regions are extracted based on colour space elements and edge details of roads. Besides, edge detection method is applied to further filter out the non-road regions. The extracted road regions are validated by using a segmentation method. These results are valuable for building road map and detecting the changes of the existing road database. The proposed Hybrid Simple Colour Space Segmentation and Edge Detection (Hybrid SCSS-EDGE) algorithm can perform the tasks fully automatic, where the user only needs to input a high-resolution satellite image and wait for the result. Moreover, this system can work on complex road network and generate the extraction result in seconds.

Keywords: Road Network Recognition, Colour Space, Edge Detection, Urban Planning.

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Authors: Nihad Chakri, Btissam El Amrani, Faouzi Berrada, Fouad Amraoui

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In Morocco, water scarcity requires the exploitation of non-conventional resources. Rural areas are under-equipped with sanitation infrastructure, unlike urban areas. Decentralized and low-cost solutions could improve the quality of life of the population and the environment. In this context, the Faculty of Sciences Ain Chock (FSAC) has undertaken an integrated project to treat part of its wastewater using a decentralized compact system. The project will propose alternative solutions that are inexpensive and adapted to the context of peri-urban and rural areas in order to treat the wastewater generated and to use it for irrigation, watering and cleaning. For this purpose, several tests were carried out in the laboratory in order to develop a liquid waste treatment system optimized for local conditions. Based on the results obtained at laboratory scale of the different proposed scenarios, we designed and implemented a prototype of a mini wastewater treatment plant for the faculty. In this article, we will outline the steps of dimensioning, construction and monitoring of the mini-station in our faculty.

Keywords: Wastewater, purification, response methodology surfaces optimization, vertical filter, Moving Bed Biofilm Reactors, MBBR process, sizing, prototype, Faculty of Sciences Ain Chock, decentralized approach, mini wastewater treatment plant, reuse of treated wastewater reuse, irrigation, sustainable development.

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Authors: Pariwat Somnuek

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This study focused on tourism logistic services in the border areas of Thailand by an analysis and comparison of the opinions of tourists, villagers, and entrepreneurs of these services. Sample representatives of this study were a total of 600 villagers and 15 entrepreneurs in the three border areas consisting of Chong Anma, Chong Sa-Ngam, and Chong Jom checkpoints. For methodology, survey questionnaires, situation analysis, TOWS matrix, and focus group discussions were used for data collection, as well as descriptive analysis and statistics such as arithmetic means and standard deviations, were employed for data analysis. The findings revealed that business potential was at the medium level and entrepreneurs were satisfied with their turnovers. However, perspectives of transportation and tourism services provided for tourists need to be immediately improved. Recommendations for the potential development included promotion of border tourism destinations and foreign investments into accommodation, restaurants, and transport, as well as the establishment of business networks between Thailand and Cambodia, along with the introduction of new tourism destinations by co-operation between entrepreneurs in both countries. These initiatives may lead to increased visitors, collaboration of security offices, and an improved image of tourism security.

Keywords: Business potential, potential development, tourism logistics, services.

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Authors: E. Asgharizadeh, M. Ajalli Geshlajoughi, S. R. Safavi Mirmahalleh

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Amazing development of the information technology, communications and internet expansion as well as the requirements of the city managers to new ideas to run the city and higher participation of the citizens encourage us to complete the electronic city as soon as possible. The foundations of this electronic city are in information technology. People-s participation in metropolitan management is a crucial topic. Information technology does not impede this matter. It can ameliorate populace-s participation and better interactions between the citizens and the city managers. Citizens can proffer their ideas, beliefs and votes through digital mass media based upon the internet and computerization plexuses on the topical matters to receive appropriate replies and services. They can participate in urban projects by becoming cognizant of the city views. The most significant challenges are as follows: information and communicative management, altering citizens- views, as well as legal and office documents Electronic city obstacles have been identified in this research. The required data were forgathered through questionnaires to identify the barriers from a statistical community comprising specialists and practitioners of the ministry of information technology and communication, the municipality information technology organization. The conclusions demonstrate that the prioritized electronic city application barriers in Iran are as follows: The support quandaries (non-financial ones), behavioral, cultural and educational plights, the security, legal and license predicaments, the hardware, orismological and infrastructural curbs, the software and fiscal problems.

Keywords: Electronic city, urban management, populace's participation, electronic government, electronic services, electronic organization, electronic infrastructure.

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Authors: F. Mehran

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With the rapid popularization of internet services, it is apparent that the next generation terrestrial communication systems must be capable of supporting various applications like voice, video, and data. This paper presents the performance evaluation of turbo- coded mobile terrestrial communication systems, which are capable of providing high quality services for delay sensitive (voice or video) and delay tolerant (text transmission) multimedia applications in urban and suburban areas. Different types of multimedia information require different service qualities, which are generally expressed in terms of a maximum acceptable bit-error-rate (BER) and maximum tolerable latency. The breakthrough discovery of turbo codes allows us to significantly reduce the probability of bit errors with feasible latency. In a turbo-coded system, a trade-off between latency and BER results from the choice of convolutional component codes, interleaver type and size, decoding algorithm, and the number of decoding iterations. This trade-off can be exploited for multimedia applications by using optimal and suboptimal performance parameter amalgamations to achieve different service qualities. The results are therefore proposing an adaptive framework for turbo-coded wireless multimedia communications which incorporate a set of performance parameters that achieve an appropriate set of service qualities, depending on the application's requirements.

Keywords: Mobile communications, Turbo codes, wireless multimedia communication systems.

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Authors: M. A. N. Rasanjalee Perera

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The world is facing several problems due to increasing elderly population. In Sri Lanka, along with the complexity of the modern society and structural and functional changes of the family, “caring for elders” seems as an emerging social problem. This situation may intensify as the county is moving into a middle income society. Seeking higher education and related career opportunities, and urban living in modern housing are new trends, through which several problems are generated. Among many issues related with elders, “lack of accessible and appropriate facilities in their houses as well as public buildings” can be identified as a major problem. This study argues that welfare facilities provided for the elderly people, particularly in the home environment, in the country are not adequate. Modern housing features such as bathrooms, pantries, lobbies, and leisure areas etc. are questionable as to whether they match with elders’ physical and mental needs. Consequently, elders have to face domestic accidents and many other difficulties within their living environments. Records of hospitals in the country also proved this fact. Therefore, this study tries to identify how far modern houses are suited with elders’ needs. The study further questioned whether “aging” is a considerable matter when people are buying, planning and renovating houses. A randomly selected sample of 50 houses were observed and 50 persons were interviewed around the Maharagama urban area in Colombo district to obtain primary data, while relevant secondary data and information were used to have a depth analysis. The study clearly found that none of the houses included to the sample are considering elders’ needs in planning, renovating, or arranging the home. Instead, most of the families were giving priority to the rich and elegant appearance and modern facilities of the houses. Particularly, to the bathrooms, pantry, large setting areas, balcony, parking slots for two vehicles, ad parapet walls with roller-gates are the main concerns. A significant factor found here is that even though, many children of the aged are in middle age and reaching their older years at present, they do not plan their future living within a safe and comfortable home, despite that they are hoping to spent the latter part of their lives in the their current homes. This fact highlights that not only the other responsible parts of the society, but also those who are reaching their older ages are ignoring the problems of the aged. At the same time, it was found that more than 80% of old parents do not like to stay at their children’s homes as the living environments in such modern homes are not familiar or convenient for them. Due to this context, the aged in Sri Lanka may have to be alone in their own homes due to current trend of society of migrating to urban living in modern houses. At the same time, current urban families who live in modern houses may have to face adding accessible facilities in their home environment, as current modern housing facilities may not be appropriate them for a better life in their latter part of life.

Keywords: Aging population, elderly care, home environment, housing facilities.

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Authors: M. C. Venter, G. Hitge, S. C. Krygsman, J. Thiart

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For decades, South Africa has been planning transportation systems from a supply, rather than a demand side, perspective. In terms of parking, this relates to requiring the minimum parking provision that is enforced by city officials. Newer insight is starting to indicate that South Africa needs to re-think this philosophy in light of a new policy environment that desires a different outcome. Urban policies have shifted from reliance on the private car for access, to employing a wide range of alternative modes. Car dominated travel is influenced by various parameters, of which the availability and location of parking plays a significant role. The question is therefore, what is the right strategy to achieve the desired transport outcomes for SA. The focus of this paper is used to assess this issue with regard to parking provision, and specifically at a tertiary institution. A parking audit was conducted at the Stellenbosch campus of Stellenbosch University, monitoring occupancy at all 60 parking areas, every hour during business hours over a five-day period. The data from this survey was compared with the prescribed number of parking bays according to the Stellenbosch Municipality zoning scheme (requiring a minimum of 0.4 bays per student). The analysis shows that by providing 0.09 bays per student, the maximum total daily occupation of all the parking areas did not exceed an 80% occupation rate. It is concluded that the prevailing parking standards are not supportive of the new urban and transport policy environment, but that it is extremely conservative from a practical demand point of view.

Keywords: Parking provision, parking requirements, travel behaviour, travel demand management.

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Authors: A. W. J. Wong, I. H. Ibrahim

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Increasing urbanisation has driven building designers to incorporate natural ventilation in the designs of sustainable buildings. This project utilises Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to investigate the natural ventilation of an academic building, SIT@SP, using an assessment criterion based on daily mean temperature and mean velocity. The areas of interest are the pedestrian level of first and fourth levels of the building. A reference case recommended by the Architectural Institute of Japan was used to validate the simulation model. The validated simulation model was then used for coupled simulations on SIT@SP and neighbouring geometries, under two wind speeds. Both steady and transient simulations were used to identify differences in results. Steady and transient results are agreeable with the transient simulation identifying peak velocities during flow development. Under a lower wind speed, the first level was sufficiently ventilated while the fourth level was not. The first level has excessive wind velocities in the higher wind speed and the fourth level was adequately ventilated. Fourth level flow velocity was consistently lower than those of the first level. This is attributed to either simulation model error or poor building design. SIT@SP is concluded to have a sufficiently ventilated first level and insufficiently ventilated fourth level. Future works for this project extend to modifying the urban geometry, simulation model improvements, evaluation using other assessment metrics and extending the area of interest to the entire building.

Keywords: Buildings, CFD simulation, natural ventilation, urban airflow.

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Authors: Vilas P. Mahatme, K. K. Bhoyar

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Nowadays, education cannot be imagined without digital technologies. It broadens the horizons of teaching learning processes. Several universities are offering online courses. For evaluation purpose, e-examination systems are being widely adopted in academic environments. Multiple-choice tests are extremely popular. Moving away from traditional examinations to e-examination, Moodle as Learning Management Systems (LMS) is being used. Moodle logs every click that students make for attempting and navigational purposes in e-examination. Data mining has been applied in various domains including retail sales, bioinformatics. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the use of data mining in e-learning environment. It has been applied to discover, extract, and evaluate parameters related to student’s learning performance. The combination of data mining and e-learning is still in its babyhood. Log data generated by the students during online examination can be used to discover knowledge with the help of data mining techniques. In web based applications, number of right and wrong answers of the test result is not sufficient to assess and evaluate the student’s performance. So, assessment techniques must be intelligent enough. If student cannot answer the question asked by the instructor then some easier question can be asked. Otherwise, more difficult question can be post on similar topic. To do so, it is necessary to identify difficulty level of the questions. Proposed work concentrate on the same issue. Data mining techniques in specific clustering is used in this work. This method decide difficulty levels of the question and categories them as tough, easy or moderate and later this will be served to the desire students based on their performance. Proposed experiment categories the question set and also group the students based on their performance in examination. This will help the instructor to guide the students more specifically. In short mined knowledge helps to support, guide, facilitate and enhance learning as a whole.

Keywords: Data mining, e-examination, e-learning, moodle.

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Authors: Basavaraj Kabade, K. T. Nagaraja, Swathi Ramanathan, A. Veeraragavan, P. S. Reashma

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Deteriorating quality of the pedestrian environment and the increasing risk of pedestrian crashes are major concerns for most of the cities in India. The recent shift in the priority to motorized transport and the abating condition of existing pedestrian facilities can be considered as prime reasons for the increasing pedestrian related crashes in India. Bengaluru City – the IT capital hub of the nation is not much different from this. The increase in number of pedestrian crashes in Bengaluru reflects the same. To resolve this issue and to ensure safe, sustainable and pedestrian friendly sidewalks, Govt. of Karnataka, India has implemented newfangled pedestrian sidewalks popularized programme named Tender S.U.R.E. (Specifications for Urban Road Execution) projects. Tender SURE adopts unique urban street design guidelines where the pedestrians are given prime preference. The present study presents an assessment of the quality and performance of the pedestrian side walk and the walkability index of the newly built pedestrian friendly sidewalks. Various physical and environmental factors affecting pedestrian safety are identified and studied in detail. The pedestrian mobility is quantified through Pedestrian Level of Service (PLoS) and the pedestrian walking comfort is measured by calculating the Walkability Index (WI). It is observed that the new initiatives taken in reference to improving pedestrian safety have succeeded in Bengaluru by attaining a level of Service of ‘A’ and with a good WI score.

Keywords: Pedestrian safety, pedestrian level of service, right of way, Tender SURE, walkability index, walkway facilities.

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Authors: A.L. Seetharam, B.L. Udaya Simha

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The Bangalore City is facing the acute problem of pollution in the atmosphere due to the heavy increase in the traffic and developmental activities in recent years. The present study is an attempt in the direction to assess trend of the ambient air quality status of three stations, viz., AMCO Batteries Factory, Mysore Road, GRAPHITE INDIA FACTORY, KHB Industrial Area, Whitefield and Ananda Rao Circle, Gandhinagar with respect to some of the major criteria pollutants such as Total Suspended particular matter (SPM), Oxides of nitrogen (NOx), and Oxides of sulphur (SO2). The sites are representative of various kinds of growths viz., commercial, residential and industrial, prevailing in Bangalore, which are contributing to air pollution. The concentration of Sulphur Dioxide (SO2) at all locations showed a falling trend due to use of refined petrol and diesel in the recent years. The concentration of Oxides of nitrogen (NOx) showed an increasing trend but was within the permissible limits. The concentration of the Suspended particular matter (SPM) showed the mixed trend. The correlation between model and observed values is found to vary from 0.4 to 0.7 for SO2, 0.45 to 0.65 for NOx and 0.4 to 0.6 for SPM. About 80% of data is observed to fall within the error band of ±50%. Forecast test for the best fit models showed the same trend as actual values in most of the cases. However, the deviation observed in few cases could be attributed to change in quality of petro products, increase in the volume of traffic, introduction of LPG as fuel in many types of automobiles, poor condition of roads, prevailing meteorological conditions, etc.

Keywords: Bangalore, urban air pollution, time series analysis.

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Authors: Deng Tingting

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The coordinated and integrated development of regions is an inevitable requirement for China to move towards high-quality sustainable development. As one of the regions with the best economic foundation and the strongest economic strength in the western China, it is a typical area with national importance and strong network connection characteristics in terms of the comprehensive effect of linking the inland hinterland and connecting the western and national urban networks. The integrated development of the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle is of great strategic significance for the rapid and high-quality development of the western region. In the context of new urbanization, this paper takes 16 urban units within the economic circle as the research object, based on the 5-year panel data of population, regional economy and spatial construction and development from 2016 to 2020, using the entropy method and Theil index to analyze the three target layers, and cause analysis. The research shows that there are temporal and spatial differences in the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, and there are significant differences between the core city and the surrounding cities. Therefore, by reforming and innovating the regional coordinated development mechanism, breaking administrative barriers, and strengthening the "polar nucleus" radiation function to release the driving force for economic development, especially in the gully areas of economic development belts, will not only promote the coordinated development of internal regions, but also promote the coordinated and sustainable development of the western region and toward a high-quality development path.

Keywords: Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, new urbanization, coordinated regional development, Theil Index.

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Authors: Celso L. Fernando, Toshio Yoshii, Takahiro Tsubota

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Understanding the causes of a road accident and predicting their occurrence is key to prevent deaths and serious injuries from road accident events. Traditional statistical methods such as the Poisson and the Logistics regressions have been used to find the association of the traffic environmental factors with the accident occurred; recently, an artificial neural network, ANN, a computational technique that learns from historical data to make a more accurate prediction, has emerged. Although the ability to make accurate predictions, the ANN has difficulty dealing with highly unbalanced attribute patterns distribution in the training dataset; in such circumstances, the ANN treats the minority group as noise. However, in the real world data, the minority group is often the group of interest; e.g., in the road traffic accident data, the events of the accident are the group of interest. This study proposes a combination of the k-means with the ANN to improve the predictive ability of the neural network model by alleviating the effect of the unbalanced distribution of the attribute patterns in the training dataset. The results show that the proposed method improves the ability of the neural network to make a prediction on a highly unbalanced distributed attribute patterns dataset; however, on an even distributed attribute patterns dataset, the proposed method performs almost like a standard neural network. 

Keywords: Accident risks estimation, artificial neural network, deep learning, K-mean, road safety.

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Authors: Abid I. Abu-Tair, Gavin M. Wilde, John M. Kinuthia

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Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) is a functional capability that has been developed to allow the United Kingdom Fire and Rescue Service to deal with ‘major incidents’ primarily involving structural collapse. The nature of the work undertaken by USAR means that staying out of a damaged or collapsed building structure is not usually an option for search and rescue personnel. As a result there is always a risk that they themselves could become victims. For this paper, a systematic and investigative review using desk research was undertaken to explore the role which structural engineering can play in assisting search and rescue personnel to conduct structural assessments when in the field. The focus is on how search and rescue personnel can assess damaged and collapsed building structures, not just in terms of structural damage that may been countered, but also in relation to structural stability. Natural disasters, accidental emergencies, acts of terrorism and other extreme events can vary significantly in nature and ferocity, and can cause a wide variety of damage to building structures. It is not possible or, even realistic, to provide search and rescue personnel with definitive guidelines and procedures to assess damaged and collapsed building structures as there are too many variables to consider. However, understanding what implications damage may have upon the structural stability of a building structure will enable search and rescue personnel to better judge and quantify risk from a life-safety standpoint. It is intended that this will allow search and rescue personnel to make informed decisions and ensure every effort is made to mitigate risk, so that they themselves do not become victims.

Keywords: Damaged and collapsed building structures, life safety, quantifying risk, search and rescue personnel, structural assessments in the field.

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Authors: Ambalika Ekka

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In today’s world, the growing demand for urban built forms has resulted in the production and consumption of building materials i.e. embodied energy in building construction, leading to pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Therefore, new buildings will offer a unique opportunity to implement more energy efficient building without compromising on building performance of the building. Embodied energy of building materials forms major contribution to embodied energy in buildings. The paper results in an approach towards designing an energy efficient apartment building through embodied energy assessment. This paper discusses the trend of residential development in Rourkela, which includes three case studies of the contemporary houses, followed by architectural elements, number of storeys, predominant material use and plot sizes using primary data. It results in identification of predominant material used and other characteristics in urban area. Further, the embodied energy coefficients of various dominant building materials and alternative materials manufactured in Indian Industry is taken in consideration from secondary source i.e. literature study. The paper analyses the embodied energy by estimating materials and operational energy of proposed building followed by altering the specifications of the materials based on the building components i.e. walls, flooring, windows, insulation and roof through res build India software and comparison of different options is assessed with consideration of sustainable parameters. This paper results that autoclaved aerated concrete block only reaches the energy performance Index benchmark i.e. 69.35 kWh/m² yr i.e. by saving 4% of operational energy and as embodied energy has no particular index, out of all materials it has the highest EE 23206202.43  MJ.

Keywords: Energy efficient, embodied energy, energy performance index, building materials.

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Authors: Dibya Jivan Pati, Kazuhisa Iki, Riken Homma

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Unlike other metro cities of India, Bhubaneswar–the capital city of Odisha, is expected to reach 1-million-mark population by now. The demands of dwelling unit requirement mostly among urban poor belonging to Economically Weaker section (EWS) and Low Income groups (LIG) is becoming a challenge due to high housing cost and rents. As a matter of fact, it’s also noted that, with increase in population, the solid waste generation also increases subsequently affecting the environment due to inefficiency in collection of waste by local government bodies. Methods of utilizing Solid Waste - especially in form of Plastic bottles, Glass bottles and Metal cans (PGM) are now widely used as an alternative material for construction of low-cost building by Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in developing countries like India to help the urban poor afford a shelter. The application of disposed plastic bottle used in construction of single dwelling significantly reduces the overall cost of construction to as much as 14% compared to traditional construction material. Therefore, considering its cost-benefit result, it’s possible to provide housing to EWS and LIGs at an affordable price. In this paper, we estimated the quantity of plastic bottles generated in Bhubaneswar which further helped to estimate the possible number of single dwelling unit that can be constructed on yearly basis so as to refrain from further housing shortage. The estimation results will be practically used for planning and managing low-cost housing business by local government and NGOs.

Keywords: Construction, dwelling unit, plastic bottle, solid waste generation, groups.

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Authors: M. Magrini, D. Moroni, G. Palazzese, G. Pieri, D. Azzarelli, A. Spada, L. Fanucci, O. Salvetti

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Railway crossings are complex entities whose optimal management cannot be addressed unless with the help of an intelligent transportation system integrating information both on train and vehicular flows. In this paper, we propose an integrated system named SIMPLE (Railway Safety and Infrastructure for Mobility applied at level crossings) that, while providing unparalleled safety in railway level crossings, collects data on rail and road traffic and provides value-added services to citizens and commuters. Such services include for example alerts, via variable message signs to drivers and suggestions for alternative routes, towards a more sustainable, eco-friendly and efficient urban mobility. To achieve these goals, SIMPLE is organized as a System of Systems (SoS), with a modular architecture whose components range from specially-designed radar sensors for obstacle detection to smart ETSI M2M-compliant camera networks for urban traffic monitoring. Computational unit for performing forecast according to adaptive models of train and vehicular traffic are also included. The proposed system has been tested and validated during an extensive trial held in the mid-sized Italian town of Montecatini, a paradigmatic case where the rail network is inextricably linked with the fabric of the city. Results of the tests are reported and discussed.

Keywords: Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), railway, railroad crossing, smart camera networks, radar obstacle detection, real-time traffic optimization, IoT, ETSI M2M, transport safety.

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Authors: Chen Chou, Feng-Tyan Lin

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Big Data has been attracted a lot of attentions in many fields for analyzing research issues based on a large number of maternal data. Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) is one of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications in Taiwan, used to record starting point, end point, distance and travel time of vehicle on the national freeway. This study, taking advantage of ETC big data, combined with urban planning theory, attempts to explore various phenomena of inter-city transportation activities. ETC, one of government's open data, is numerous, complete and quick-update. One may recall that living area has been delimited with location, population, area and subjective consciousness. However, these factors cannot appropriately reflect what people’s movement path is in daily life. In this study, the concept of "Living Area" is replaced by "Influence Range" to show dynamic and variation with time and purposes of activities. This study uses data mining with Python and Excel, and visualizes the number of trips with GIS to explore influence range of Tainan city and the purpose of trips, and discuss living area delimited in current. It dialogues between the concepts of "Central Place Theory" and "Living Area", presents the new point of view, integrates the application of big data, urban planning and transportation. The finding will be valuable for resource allocation and land apportionment of spatial planning.

Keywords: Big Data, ITS, influence range, living area, central place theory, visualization.

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Authors: M. A. Abou Donia, A. A. K. Abou-Arab, Nevin E. Sharaf, A. K. Enab, Sherif R. Mohamed

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Lead (Pb) poisoning is one of the most common and preventable environmental health problems. There are different sources of environmental pollution with lead as lead alkyl additives in petrol and manufacturing processes. Pb in the atmosphere can be deposited in urban soils, and may then be re-suspended to re-enter the atmosphere. This could increase human exposure to Pb and cause long-term health effects. Thus, monitoring Pb pollution is considered one of the major tasks in controlling pollution. Scalp hair can be utilized for the determination of lead (Pb) concentration. It provides a lasting record of metal intakes of weeks or even months, and for most metals, their accumulation in hair reflects their accumulation in the whole body. This work was conducted to investigate the concentration of lead in male scalp hair of Cairo (residential-traffic and residential-industrial) and rural residents after twenty years of phasing out of leaded gasoline. Results indicated that the mean concentration of lead in hair of residential-traffic (9.7552 μg/g ±0.71) and residential-industrial (12.3288 μg/g ±1.13) was significantly higher than that in rural residents (4.7327 μg/g ±0.67). The mean concentration of lead in hair of resident’s industrial areas was the highest among Cairo residents and not the traffic areas as it was before phasing out of leaded gasoline. Twenty years of phasing out of leaded gasoline in Cairo has greatly improved the lead pollution among residents of traffic areas, but industrial areas residents were still suffering from lead pollution, which needs more efforts to control the sources of lead pollution.

Keywords: Heavy metals, lead, hair, biological sample, urban pollution, rural pollution.

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Authors: Syed Salman Ahmed, Zahid Halim, Rauf Baig, Shariq Bashir

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With the rapid growth in business size, today's businesses orient towards electronic technologies. Amazon.com and e-bay.com are some of the major stakeholders in this regard. Unfortunately the enormous size and hugely unstructured data on the web, even for a single commodity, has become a cause of ambiguity for consumers. Extracting valuable information from such an everincreasing data is an extremely tedious task and is fast becoming critical towards the success of businesses. Web content mining can play a major role in solving these issues. It involves using efficient algorithmic techniques to search and retrieve the desired information from a seemingly impossible to search unstructured data on the Internet. Application of web content mining can be very encouraging in the areas of Customer Relations Modeling, billing records, logistics investigations, product cataloguing and quality management. In this paper we present a review of some very interesting, efficient yet implementable techniques from the field of web content mining and study their impact in the area specific to business user needs focusing both on the customer as well as the producer. The techniques we would be reviewing include, mining by developing a knowledge-base repository of the domain, iterative refinement of user queries for personalized search, using a graphbased approach for the development of a web-crawler and filtering information for personalized search using website captions. These techniques have been analyzed and compared on the basis of their execution time and relevance of the result they produced against a particular search.

Keywords: Data mining, web mining, search engines, knowledge discovery.

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Authors: Yananda Siraphatthada

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The current study was the succession of a previous study on value added of recycling business management. Its aims are to 1) explore conditions on how to increasing value add of Thai recycling business, and 2) exam the implementation of the 3-staged plan (short, medium, and long term), suggested by the former study, to increase value added of the recycling business as immediate mechanisms to accelerate government operation. Quantitative and qualitative methods were utilized in this research. A qualitative research consisted of in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Responses were obtained from owners of the waste separation plants, and recycle shops, as well as officers in relevant governmental agencies. They were randomly selected via Quota Sampling. Data was analyzed via content analysis. The sample used for quantitative method consisted of 1,274 licensed recycling operators in eight provinces. The operators were randomly stratified via sampling method. Data were analyzed via descriptive statistics frequency, percentage, average (Mean) and standard deviation.The study recommended three-staged plan: short, medium, and long terms. The plan included the development of logistics, the provision of quality market/plants, the amendment of recycling rules/regulation, the restructuring recycling business, the establishment of green-purchasing recycling center, support for the campaigns run by the International Green Purchasing Network (IGPN), conferences/workshops as a public forum to share insights among experts/concern people.

Keywords: Strategies, Value Added, Recycle Business.

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Authors: Jefrey Pilusa, Tumisang Seodigeng

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This research discusses a South African case study for the potential of utilizing refuse-derived fuel (RDF) obtained from non-burn treatment of health care risk waste (HCRW) as potential feedstock for green energy production. This specific waste stream can be destroyed via non-burn treatment technology involving high-speed mechanical shredding followed by steam or chemical injection to disinfect the final product. The RDF obtained from this process is characterised by a low moisture, low ash, and high calorific value which means it can be potentially used as high-value solid fuel. Due to the raw feed of this RDF being classified as hazardous, the final RDF has been reported to be non-infectious and can blend with other combustible wastes such as rubber and plastic for waste to energy applications. This study evaluated non-burn treatment technology as a possible solution for on-site destruction of HCRW in South African private and public health care centres. Waste generation quantities were estimated based on the number of registered patient beds, theoretical bed occupancy. Time and motion study was conducted to evaluate the logistics viability of on-site treatment. Non-burn treatment technology for HCRW is a promising option for South Africa, and successful implementation of this method depends upon the initial capital investment, operational cost and environmental permitting of such technology; there are other influencing factors such as the size of the waste stream, product off-take price as well as product demand.

Keywords: Autoclave, disposal, fuel, incineration, medical waste.

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Authors: María D. Groppa, Andrea Trentini, Myriam Zawoznik, Roxana Bigi, Carlos Nadra, Patricia L. Marconi

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In the present work, a remediation bioprocess based on the use of a local isolate of the microalgae Chlorella vulgaris immobilized in alginate beads is proposed. This process was shown to be effective for the reduction of several chemical and microbial contaminants present in Cildáñez stream, a water course that is part of the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin (Buenos Aires, Argentina). The bioprocess, involving the culture of the microalga in autotrophic conditions in a stirred-tank bioreactor supplied with a marine propeller for 6 days, allowed a significant reduction of Escherichia coli and total coliform numbers (over 95%), as well as of ammoniacal nitrogen (96%), nitrates (86%), nitrites (98%), and total phosphorus (53%) contents. Pb content was also significantly diminished after the bioprocess (95%). Standardized cytotoxicity tests using Allium cepa seeds and Cildáñez water pre- and post-remediation were also performed. Germination rate and mitotic index of onion seeds imbibed in Cildáñez water subjected to the bioprocess was similar to that observed in seeds imbibed in distilled water and significantly superior to that registered when untreated Cildáñez water was used for imbibition. Our results demonstrate the potential of this simple and cost-effective technology to remove urban-water contaminants, offering as an additional advantage the possibility of an easy biomass recovery, which may become a source of alternative energy.

Keywords: Bioreactor, bioremediation, Chlorella vulgaris, Matanza-Riachuelo basin, microalgae.

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Authors: Tebogo Emma Makaba, Barnabas Ndlovu Gatsheni

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The cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria both located in the Gauteng province are separated by a distance of 58 km. The traffic queues on the Ben Schoeman freeway which connects these two cities can stretch for almost 1.5 km. Vehicle traffic congestion impacts negatively on the business and the commuter’s quality of life. The goal of this paper is to identify variables that influence the flow of traffic and to design a vehicle traffic prediction model, which will predict the traffic flow pattern in advance. The model will unable motorist to be able to make appropriate travel decisions ahead of time. The data used was collected by Mikro’s Traffic Monitoring (MTM). Multi-Layer perceptron (MLP) was used individually to construct the model and the MLP was also combined with Bagging ensemble method to training the data. The cross—validation method was used for evaluating the models. The results obtained from the techniques were compared using predictive and prediction costs. The cost was computed using combination of the loss matrix and the confusion matrix. The predicted models designed shows that the status of the traffic flow on the freeway can be predicted using the following parameters travel time, average speed, traffic volume and day of month. The implications of this work is that commuters will be able to spend less time travelling on the route and spend time with their families. The logistics industry will save more than twice what they are currently spending.

Keywords: Bagging ensemble methods, confusion matrix, multi-layer perceptron, vehicle traffic flow.

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