Modelling Human Displacement through Movement Surfaces.

This paper introduces a new approach for predicting people displacement by means of movementsurfaces. These surfaces can allow the simulation of a person?s movement through the use of semanticmovement concepts such as those making up the environment, the people who are moving, eventsthat describe a human activity, and time of occurrences. In order to represent this movement we havetransformed the trajectory of a person or group of persons into a raindrop path over a surface. As araindrop flows over a surface looking for the maximum slopes, people flow over the landscapelooking for the maximum utility. The movement surfaces are the response to a chained succession of events describing the way a person moves from one destination to another passing through the mostaffine trajectory to his interest. The three construction phases of this modelling approach (exploration,reasoning and prediction) are presented in this paper. The model was implemented in Protégé and aJava application was developed to generate the movement surface based on a recreational scenario.The results had shown the opportunity to apply our approach to optimise the accessibility of recreational areas according to the preferences of the users of that location.

Improving simulation of soil water balance using lysimeter observations in a semiarid climate.

Water balance simulation in cropping systems is a very useful tool to study how water can be used efficiently. However this requires that models simulate an accurate water balance. Comparing model results with field observations will provide information on the performance of the models. The objective of this study was to test the performance of DSSAT model in simulating the water balance by comparing the simulations with observed measurements. The soil water balance in DSSAT uses a one dimensional ?tipping bucket? soil water balance approach where available soil water is determined by the drained upper limit (DUL), lower limit (LL) and saturated water content (SAT). A continuous weighing lysimeter was used to get the observed values of drainage and evapotranspiration (ET). An automated agrometeorological weather station close to the lisymeter was also used to record the climatic data. The model simulated accurately the soil water content after the optimization of the soil parameters. However it was found the inability of the model to capture small changes in daily drainage and ET. For that reason simulated cumulative values had larger errors as the time passed by. These results suggested the need to compare outputs of DSSAT and some hydrological model that simulates soil water movement with a more mechanistic approach. The comparison of the two models will allow us to find which mechanism can be modified or incorporated in DSSAT model to improve the simulations.

Let's Gain More Confidence Of Clinicians With Our Colorful Contours: Blood Flow Simulation In Arteries Using Abaqus & STAR-CCM+

The objective of the current work is to present the results of several numerical simulations of pulsatile blood flow in healthy and diseased arteries and compare with clinical expectations. Different realistic and physiological aspects such as blood flow interaction with arterial walls, effect of heart movement, cardiovascular autoregulation, arterial walls' hyperelasticity and cardiovascular disorders have been incorporated in the models thanks to a direct coupling of Abaqus and STAR-CCM+. Comparisons of implicit and explicit coupling methods in cardiovascular simulations have been discussed. An in-house methodology combined with explicit FSI coupling has reduced considerably calculation time while the simulations stay realistic and reliable for clinicians

Modeling and Simulation of Upper Brachial Plexus Injury

This article presents the first musculoskeletal model and simulation of upper plexus brachial injury. From this model is possible to analyse forces and movement ranges in order to develop a robotic exoskeleton to improve rehabilitation. The software that currently exists for musculoskeletal modeling is varied and most have advanced features for proper analysis and study of motion simulations. Whilst more powerful computer packages are usually expensive, there are other free and open source packages available which offer different tools to perform animations and simulations and which obtain forces and moments of inertia. Among them, Musculoskeletal Modeling Software was selected to construct a model of the upper limb, which has 7 degrees of freedom and 10 muscles. These muscles are important for two of the movements simulated in this article that are part of the post-surgery rehabilitation protocol. We performed different movement animations which are made using the inertial measurement unit to capture real data from movements made by a human being. We also performed the simulation of forces produced in elbow flexion-extension and arm abduction-adduction of a healthy subject and one with upper brachial plexus injury in a postoperative state to compare the force that is capable of being produced in both cases.