The Roles of ‘Conventional’ and Demand-Responsive Bus Services

Purpose - The roles of ‘conventional’ (fixed-route and fixed-timetable) bus services is examined and compared to demand-responsive services, taking rural areas in England as the basis for comparison. It adopts a ‘rural’ definition of settlements under a population of 10,000. Design/methodology/approach - Evidence from the National Travel Survey, technical press reports and academic work is brought together to examine the overall picture. Findings - Inter-urban services between towns can provide a cost-effective way of serving rural areas where smaller settlements are suitably located. The cost structures of both fixed-route and demand-responsive services indicate that staff time and cost associated with vehicle provision are the main elements. Demand-responsive services may enable larger areas to be covered, to meet planning objectives of ensuring a minimum of level of service, but experience often shows high unit cost and public expenditure per passenger trip. Economic evaluation indicates user benefits per passenger trip of similar magnitude to existing average public expenditure per trip on fixed-route services. Considerable scope exists for improvements to conventional services through better marketing and service reliability. Practical implications - The main issue in England is the level of funding for rural services in general, and the importance attached to serving those without access to cars in such areas. Social implications - The boundary between fixed-route and demand-responsive operation may lie at relatively low population densities. Originality/value - The chapter uses statistical data, academic research and operator experience of enhanced conventional bus services to provide a synthesis of outcomes in rural areas.

Commercial Use of WS-PGRADE/gUSE

Although originally an academic and research product, the WS-PGRADE/gUSE framework is increasingly applied by commercial institutions too. Within the SCI-BUS project, several commercial gateways have been developed by various companies. WS-PGRADE/gUSE is also intensively used within another European research project, CloudSME (Cloud-based Simulation Platform for Manufacturing and Engineering). This chapter provides an overview and de-scribes in detail some commercial WS-PGRADE/gUSE based gateway implemen-tations. Two representative case studies from the SCI-BUS project, the Build and Test portal and the eDOX Archiver Gateway are introduced. An overview of WS-PGRADE/gUSE based gateways for running simulation applications in the cloud within the CloudSME project is also provided.

WS-PGRADE/gUSE in European Projects

Besides core project partners, the SCI-BUS project also supported several external user communities in developing and setting up customized science gateways. The focus was on large communities typically represented by other European research projects. However, smaller local efforts with the potential of generalizing the solution to wider communities were also supported. This chapter gives an overview of support activities related to user communities external to the SCI-BUS project. A generic overview of such activities is provided followed by the detailed description of three gateways developed in collaboration with European projects: the agINFRA Science Gateway for Workflows for agricultural research, the VERCE Science Gateway for seismology, and the DRIHM Science Gateway for weather research and forecasting.

Sharing science gateway artefacts through repositories

Researchers want to run scientific experiments focusing on their disciplines. They do not want to know how and where the experiments are executed. Science gateways hide details by coordinating the execution of experiments using different infrastructures and workflow systems. ER-flow/SHIWA and SCI-BUS project developed repositories to share artefacts such as applications, portlets, workflows, etc. inside and among research communities. Sharing artefacts in re-positories enable gateway developers to reuse them when building a new gateway and/or creating a new application.

A case study in identifying acceptable bitrates for human face recognition tasks

Face recognition from images or video footage requires a certain level of recorded image quality. This paper derives acceptable bitrates (relating to levels of compression and consequently quality) of footage with human faces, using an industry implementation of the standard H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and the Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recording systems on London buses. The London buses application is utilized as a case study for setting up a methodology and implementing suitable data analysis for face recognition from recorded footage, which has been degraded by compression. The majority of CCTV recorders on buses use a proprietary format based on the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video coding standard, exploiting both spatial and temporal redundancy. Low bitrates are favored in the CCTV industry for saving storage and transmission bandwidth, but they compromise the image usefulness of the recorded imagery. In this context, usefulness is determined by the presence of enough facial information remaining in the compressed image to allow a specialist to recognize a person. The investigation includes four steps: (1) Development of a video dataset representative of typical CCTV bus scenarios. (2) Selection and grouping of video scenes based on local (facial) and global (entire scene) content properties. (3) Psychophysical investigations to identify the key scenes, which are most affected by compression, using an industry implementation of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC. (4) Testing of CCTV recording systems on buses with the key scenes and further psychophysical investigations. The results showed a dependency upon scene content properties. Very dark scenes and scenes with high levels of spatial–temporal busyness were the most challenging to compress, requiring higher bitrates to maintain useful information.