Large area noise evaluation

A software tool (DRONE) has been developed to evaluate road traffic noise in a large area with the consideration of network dynamic traffic flow and the buildings. For more precise estimation of noise in urban network where vehicles are mainly in stop and go running conditions, vehicle sound power level (for acceleration/deceleration cruising and ideal vehicle) is incorporated in DRONE. The calculation performance of DRONE is increased by evaluating the noise in two steps of first estimating the unit noise database and then integrating it with traffic simulation. Details of the process from traffic simulation to contour maps are discussed in the paper and the implementation of DRONE on Tsukuba city is presented

A distributed denial of service testbed

The Denial of Service Testing Framework (dosTF) being developed as part of the joint India-Australia research project for ‘Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Denial of Service Attacks’ allows for the construction, monitoring and management of emulated Distributed Denial of Service attacks using modest hardware resources. The purpose of the testbed is to study the effectiveness of different DDoS mitigation strategies and to allow for the testing of defense appliances. Experiments are saved and edited in XML as abstract descriptions of an attack/defense strategy that is only mapped to real resources at run-time. It also provides a web-application portal interface that can start, stop and monitor an attack remotely. Rather than monitoring a service under attack indirectly, by observing traffic and general system parameters, monitoring of the target application is performed directly in real time via a customised SNMP agent.

Development of accident prediction models for rural highway intersections

A study was done to develop macrolevel crash prediction models that can be used to understand and identify effective countermeasures for improving signalized highway intersections and multilane stop-controlled highway intersections in rural areas. Poisson and negative binomial regression models were fit to intersection crash data from Georgia, California, and Michigan. To assess the suitability of the models, several goodness-of-fit measures were computed. The statistical models were then used to shed light on the relationships between crash occurrence and traffic and geometric features of the rural signalized intersections. The results revealed that traffic flow variables significantly affected the overall safety performance of the intersections regardless of intersection type and that the geometric features of intersections varied across intersection type and also influenced crash type.

Peak power demand reduction under moving block signalling using an expert system

The concept of moving block signallings (MBS) has been adopted in a few mass transit railway systems. When a dense queue of trains begins to move from a complete stop, the trains can re-start in very close succession under MBS. The feeding substations nearby are likely to be overloaded and the service will inevitably be disturbed unless substations of higher power rating are used. By introducing starting time delays among the trains or limiting the trains’ acceleration rate to a certain extent, the peak energy demand can be contained. However, delay is introduced and quality of service is degraded. An expert system approach is presented to provide a supervisory tool for the operators. As the knowledge base is vital for the quality of decisions to be made, the study focuses on its formulation with a balance between delay and peak power demand.

Coasting control of train operation by genetic algorithm

Balancing between the provision of high quality of service and running within a tight budget is one of the biggest challenges for most metro railway operators around the world. Conventionally, one possible approach for the operator to adjust the time schedule is to alter the stop time at stations, if other system constraints, such as traction equipment characteristic, are not taken into account. Yet it is not an effective, flexible and economical method because the run-time of a train simply cannot be extended without limitation, and a balance between run-time and energy consumption has to be maintained. Modification or installation of a new signalling system not only increases the capital cost, but also affects the normal train service. Therefore, in order to procure a more effective, flexible and economical means to improve the quality of service, optimisation of train performance by coasting point identification has become more attractive and popular. However, identifying the necessary starting points for coasting under the constraints of current service conditions is no simple task because train movement is attributed by a large number of factors, most of which are non-linear and inter-dependent. This paper presents an application of genetic algorithms (GA) to search for the appropriate coasting points and investigates the possible improvement on computation time and fitness of genes.

Restarting trains under moving block signalling : an expert system approach

A high peak power demand at substations will result under Moving Block Signalling (MBS) when a dense queue of trains begins to start from a complete stop at the same time in an electrified railway system. This may cause the power supply interruption and in turn affect the train service substantially. In a recent study, measures of Starting Time Delay (STD) and Acceleration Rate Limit (ARL) are the possible approaches to reduce the peak power demand on the supply system under MBS. Nevertheless, there is no well-defined relationship between the two measures and peak power demand reduction (PDR). In order to attain a lower peak demand at substations on different traffic conditions and system requirements, an expert system is one of the possible approaches to procure the appropriate use of peak demand reduction measures. The main objective of this paper is to study the effect of the train re-starting strategies on the power demand at substations and the time delay suffered by the trains with the aid of computer simulation. An expert system is a useful tool to select various adoptions of STD and ARL under different operational conditions and system requirements.

'I am smart and I am not joking': Aiming high in the middle years of schooling

In this paper, we draw on accounts from students to inform a Middle Schooling movement that has been variously described as "arrested", "unfinished" and "exhausted". We propose that if the Middle Schooling movement is to understand the changing worlds of students and develop new approaches in the middle years of schooling, then it is important to draw on the insights that individual students can provide by conducting research with "students-as-informants". The early adolescent informants to this paper report high hopes for their futures (despite their lower socio-economic surroundings), which reinforces the importance of supporting successful learner identities and highlights the role of schooling in the decline of adolescent student aspirations. However, their insights did not stop at the individual learner, with students also identifying cultural and structural constraints to reform. As such, we argue that students may be both an important resource for inquiry into individual school reform and for the Middle Schooling movement internationally.

The record producer as nexus : creative inspiration, technology and the recording industry

What is a record producer? There is a degree of mystery and uncertainty about just what goes on behind the studio door. Some producers are seen as Svengali-like figures manipulating artists into mass consumer product. Producers are sometimes seen as mere technicians whose job is simply to set up a few microphones and press the record button. Close examination of the recording process will show how far this is from a complete picture. Artists are special—they come with an inspiration, and a talent, but also with a variety of complications, and in many ways a recording studio can seem the least likely place for creative expression and for an affective performance to happen. The task of the record producer is to engage with these artists and their songs and turn these potentials into form through the technology of the recording studio. The purpose of the exercise is to disseminate this fixed form to an imagined audience—generally in the hope that this audience will prove to be real. Finding an audience is the role of the record company. A record producer must also engage with the commercial expectations of the interests that underwrite a recording. This dissertation considers three fields of interest in the recording process: the performer and the song; the technology of the recording context; and the commercial ambitions of the record company—and positions the record producer as a nexus at the interface of all three. The author reports his structured recollection of five recordings, with three different artists, that all achieved substantial commercial success. The processes are considered from the author’s perspective as the record producer, and from inception of the project to completion of the recorded work. What were the processes of engagement? Do the actions reported conform to the template of nexus? This dissertation proposes that in all recordings the function of producer/nexus is present and necessary—it exists in the interaction of the artistry and the technology. The art of record production is to engage with these artists and the songs they bring and turn these potentials into form.

(Dia)logics of difference : disability, performance & spectatorship

In this paper I examine the way artists with disabilities use performances in public spaces to encourage people to reflect on their own contribution to the construction of publics, or counter-publics, during and after the moment of encounter. I focus on Liz Crow’s Resistance on the Plinth. This is the title Crow gave her performance on the Forth Plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other project in 2009. Described as a public art project presenting a portrait of the U.K., Gormley’s One and Other gave 2400 people selected at random via a lottery the chance to do whatever they chose for an hour on the vacant Forth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. In her hour, Crow chose to present herself in a Nazi uniform, in her wheelchair. In this paper, I discuss how Crow’s performance used a counterposition of images – the Nazi uniform, associated with eugenics and a desire to eliminate people who do not accord with the Arayan ‘norm’, counterposed with her wheelchair – to encourage passersby to “stop, look, think.” I examine how Crow used this counterposition to prevent passersby from attributing a single, stable, monologic meaning to the image – forestalling the risk that passersby would read the image as a Nazi on the Plinth – and instead draw passersby into a dialogue in which the impossibility of reconciling the contradictory images, ideologies and cultural logics Crow embodied encouraged people to continue thinking and talking about these cultural logics during and after the encounter.

Modelling bus lost time : an additional parameter influencing bus dwell time and station platform capacity at a BRT station platform

The common approach to estimate bus dwell time at a BRT station is to apply the traditional dwell time methodology derived for suburban bus stops. In spite of being sensitive to boarding and alighting passenger numbers and to some extent towards fare collection media, these traditional dwell time models do not account for the platform crowding. Moreover, they fall short in accounting for the effects of passenger/s walking along a relatively longer BRT platform. Using the experience from Brisbane busway (BRT) stations, a new variable, Bus Lost Time (LT), is introduced in traditional dwell time model. The bus lost time variable captures the impact of passenger walking and platform crowding on bus dwell time. These are two characteristics which differentiate a BRT station from a bus stop. This paper reports the development of a methodology to estimate bus lost time experienced by buses at a BRT platform. Results were compared with the Transit Capacity and Quality of Servce Manual (TCQSM) approach of dwell time and station capacity estimation. When the bus lost time was used in dwell time calculations it was found that the BRT station platform capacity reduced by 10.1%.

An assessment system for evaluation of driving competencies

Automobiles have deeply impacted the way in which we travel but they have also contributed to many deaths and injury due to crashes. A number of reasons for these crashes have been pointed out by researchers. Inexperience has been identified as a contributing factor to road crashes. Driver’s driving abilities also play a vital role in judging the road environment and reacting in-time to avoid any possible collision. Therefore driver’s perceptual and motor skills remain the key factors impacting on road safety. Our failure to understand what is really important for learners, in terms of competent driving, is one of the many challenges for building better training programs. Driver training is one of the interventions aimed at decreasing the number of crashes that involve young drivers. Currently, there is a need to develop comprehensive driver evaluation system that benefits from the advances in Driver Assistance Systems. A multidisciplinary approach is necessary to explain how driving abilities evolves with on-road driving experience. To our knowledge, driver assistance systems have never been comprehensively used in a driver training context to assess the safety aspect of driving. The aim and novelty of this thesis is to develop and evaluate an Intelligent Driver Training System (IDTS) as an automated assessment tool that will help drivers and their trainers to comprehensively view complex driving manoeuvres and potentially provide effective feedback by post processing the data recorded during driving. This system is designed to help driver trainers to accurately evaluate driver performance and has the potential to provide valuable feedback to the drivers. Since driving is dependent on fuzzy inputs from the driver (i.e. approximate distance calculation from the other vehicles, approximate assumption of the other vehicle speed), it is necessary that the evaluation system is based on criteria and rules that handles uncertain and fuzzy characteristics of the driving tasks. Therefore, the proposed IDTS utilizes fuzzy set theory for the assessment of driver performance. The proposed research program focuses on integrating the multi-sensory information acquired from the vehicle, driver and environment to assess driving competencies. After information acquisition, the current research focuses on automated segmentation of the selected manoeuvres from the driving scenario. This leads to the creation of a model that determines a “competency” criterion through the driving performance protocol used by driver trainers (i.e. expert knowledge) to assess drivers. This is achieved by comprehensively evaluating and assessing the data stream acquired from multiple in-vehicle sensors using fuzzy rules and classifying the driving manoeuvres (i.e. overtake, lane change, T-crossing and turn) between low and high competency. The fuzzy rules use parameters such as following distance, gaze depth and scan area, distance with respect to lanes and excessive acceleration or braking during the manoeuvres to assess competency. These rules that identify driving competency were initially designed with the help of expert’s knowledge (i.e. driver trainers). In-order to fine tune these rules and the parameters that define these rules, a driving experiment was conducted to identify the empirical differences between novice and experienced drivers. The results from the driving experiment indicated that significant differences existed between novice and experienced driver, in terms of their gaze pattern and duration, speed, stop time at the T-crossing, lane keeping and the time spent in lanes while performing the selected manoeuvres. These differences were used to refine the fuzzy membership functions and rules that govern the assessments of the driving tasks. Next, this research focused on providing an integrated visual assessment interface to both driver trainers and their trainees. By providing a rich set of interactive graphical interfaces, displaying information about the driving tasks, Intelligent Driver Training System (IDTS) visualisation module has the potential to give empirical feedback to its users. Lastly, the validation of the IDTS system’s assessment was conducted by comparing IDTS objective assessments, for the driving experiment, with the subjective assessments of the driver trainers for particular manoeuvres. Results show that not only IDTS was able to match the subjective assessments made by driver trainers during the driving experiment but also identified some additional driving manoeuvres performed in low competency that were not identified by the driver trainers due to increased mental workload of trainers when assessing multiple variables that constitute driving. The validation of IDTS emphasized the need for an automated assessment tool that can segment the manoeuvres from the driving scenario, further investigate the variables within that manoeuvre to determine the manoeuvre’s competency and provide integrated visualisation regarding the manoeuvre to its users (i.e. trainers and trainees). Through analysis and validation it was shown that IDTS is a useful assistance tool for driver trainers to empirically assess and potentially provide feedback regarding the manoeuvres undertaken by the drivers.

Of ivory towers and boundary spanners

We all live in a yellow submarine… When I go to work in the morning, in the office building that hosts our BPM research group, on the way up to our level I come by this big breakout room that hosts a number of computer scientists, working away at the next generation software algorithms and iPad applications (I assume). I have never actually been in that room, but every now and then the door is left ajar for a while and I can spot couches, lots (I mean, lots!) of monitors, the odd scientist, a number of Lara Croft posters, and the usual room equipment you’d probably expect from computer scientists (and, no, it’s not like that evil Dennis guy from the Jurassic Park movie, buried in chips, coke, and flickering code screens… It’s also not like the command room from the Nebuchadnezzar, Neo’s hovercraft in the Matrix movies, although I still strongly believe these green lines of code make a good screensaver).

Strategic technology management : case study development in innovative building products

National and international competition demands that Australian organisations become more competent at making the strategic technological decisions that impact their future in the international business economy. A new subject unit, Management of Technology is now offered in the popular Master of Project Management and Master of Business Administration programs at the Queensland University of Technology. This cross-disciplinary subject provides students with a theoretical foundation and practical tools to improve the efficiency and competitiveness of technically-oriented organisations. Applied case studies—shown to be the most appropriate mode of learning for mature-age students—form an integral component of the teaching program. In the first offerings of this subject during 1995 and 1996, American case studies were used. QUT has now supported the development of Australian case study packages for technology management through its Teaching and Learning Grants Scheme. The first case developed—Inland Oil Refiners’ Microstill Project—was completed in early 1996. A newly developed case—Automated Door Opening System for Wheelchair Access—is currently being completed. This case (comprising case study documentation and video presentation) tracks a cross-disciplinary product development driven by legislative and community pressures. It also reinforces the importance of personal relationships in the technology and business development that has taken this young Brisbane-based company from its embryonic beginnings on the Queensland Cultural Centre in 1994 to a national and export-focussed organisation in 1997. This paper reviews the need to develop Australian case material in Management of Technology, discusses the case study documentation and supporting video developed, and application of the case study approach in this teaching initiative in QUT’s Master of Project Management and Master of Business Administration programs.

Impact of traffic oscillations on freeway crash occurrences

Traffic oscillations are typical features of congested traffic flow that are characterized by recurring decelerations followed by accelerations (stop-and-go driving). The negative environmental impacts of these oscillations are widely accepted, but their impact on traffic safety has been debated. This paper describes the impact of freeway traffic oscillations on traffic safety. This study employs a matched case-control design using high-resolution traffic and crash data from a freeway segment. Traffic conditions prior to each crash were taken as cases, while traffic conditions during the same periods on days without crashes were taken as controls. These were also matched by presence of congestion, geometry and weather. A total of 82 cases and about 80,000 candidate controls were extracted from more than three years of data from 2004 to 2007. Conditional logistic regression models were developed based on the case-control samples. To verify consistency in the results, 20 different sets of controls were randomly extracted from the candidate pool for varying control-case ratios. The results reveal that the standard deviation of speed (thus, oscillations) is a significant variable, with an average odds ratio of about 1.08. This implies that the likelihood of a (rear-end) crash increases by about 8% with an additional unit increase in the standard deviation of speed. The average traffic states prior to crashes were less significant than the speed variations in congestion.

Freeway traffic oscillations : microscopic analysis of formations and propagations using Wavelet Transform

In this paper we identify the origins of stop-and-go (or slow-and-go) driving and measure microscopic features of their propagations by analyzing vehicle trajectories via Wavelet Transform. Based on 53 oscillation cases analyzed, we find that oscillations can be originated by either lane-changing maneuvers (LCMs) or car-following behavior (CF). LCMs were predominantly responsible for oscillation formations in the absence of considerable horizontal or vertical curves, whereas oscillations formed spontaneously near roadside work on an uphill segment. Regardless of the trigger, the features of oscillation propagations were similar in terms of propagation speed, oscillation duration, and amplitude. All observed cases initially exhibited a precursor phase, in which slow-and-go motions were localized. Some of them eventually transitioned into a well developed phase, in which oscillations propagated upstream in queue. LCMs were primarily responsible for the transition, although some transitions occurred without LCMs. Our findings also suggest that an oscillation has a regressive effect on car following behavior: a deceleration wave of an oscillation affects a timid driver (with larger response time and minimum spacing) to become less timid and an aggressive driver less aggressive, although this change may be short-lived. An extended framework of Newell’s CF is able to describe the regressive effects with two additional parameters with reasonable accuracy, as verified using vehicle trajectory data.