Design and implementation of a general software library for using NSGA-II with SWAT for multi-objective model calibration

Calibrating watershed-scale hydrologic models remains a critical but challenging step in the modeling process. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is one example of a widely used watershed-scale hydrologic model that requires calibration. The calibration algorithms currently available to SWAT modelers through freely available and open source software, however, are limited and do not include many multi-objective genetic algorithms (MOGAs). The Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) has been shown to be an effective and efficient MOGA calibration algorithm for a wide variety of applications including for SWAT model calibration. Therefore, the objective of this study was to create an open source software library for multi-objective calibration of SWAT models using NSGA-II. The design and implementation of the library are presented, followed by a demonstration of the library through a test case for the Upper Neuse Watershed in North Carolina, USA using six objective functions in the model calibration.     

天津智慧城市建设的对策研究

发展智慧产业,推进智慧管理,让城市运作更安全、更高效、更绿色,已成为一个城市发展抢占新优势的科学选择。文章分析了欧盟智慧城市发展战略,同时结合英国、法国和意大利的智慧城市建设,给出了建设智慧城市的对策与建议。     

基于Web服务的网格应用系统安全模型

分布式软件系统,特别是网络应用系统由于需要大量计算机节点的合作,因此该类系统的整体安全性比较难以控制.网格各计算节点之间需要进行接受来自网格系统的计算任务,节点之间的信任关系需要一种安全模型来进行统一处理.文章以基于SaaS模式的电子工程预算软件(SaasBudget)为研究对象,介绍了Web服务的安全问题以及网格平台下的安全解决方案,分析了目前网格平台常见安全性问题,提出了一种基于动态用户池的网格平台授权机制.     

Flexural behavior of stratified reinforced concrete: construction,testing, analysis,and design

Stratified concrete poses a promising alternative for construction. Its fresh and hardened properties have been studied at the material level; however, structural behavior in steel reinforced specimens has not been studied. This paper focuses on the flexural behavior of eight stratified reinforced concrete (SRC) specimens representing slices from a slab or non-bearing wall. Specimens with two stratified concrete designs and three steel ratios were tested and compared to estimates from a fiber element numerical model and rectangular stress-block design methods from ACI 318 and Eurocode 2. The results suggest that SRC has similar damage modes as ordinary reinforced concrete (ORC). The fiber element model accurately estimated the measured behavior, while ACI 318 and Eurocode 2 differed from the experimental results by <25%. These prediction accuracies are similar to those for ORC. Therefore, the flexural design of SRC can be done using both fiber element and rectangular stress-block approaches.     

Factors contributing to young moped rider accidents in Denmark

Young road users still constitute a high-risk group with regard to road traffic accidents. The crash rate of a moped is four times greater than that of a motorcycle, and the likelihood of being injured in a road traffic accident is 10–20 times higher among moped riders compared to car drivers. Nevertheless, research on the behaviour and accident involvement of young moped riders remains sparse.Based on analysis of 128 accident protocols, the purpose of this study was to increase knowledge about moped accidents. The study was performed in Denmark involving riders aged 16 or 17. A distinction was made between accident factors related to (1) the road and its surroundings, (2) the vehicle, and (3) the reported behaviour and condition of the road user. Thirteen accident factors were identified with the majority concerning the reported behaviour and condition of the road user. The average number of accident factors assigned per accident was 2.7. Riding speed was assigned in 45% of the accidents which made it the most frequently assigned factor on the part of the moped rider followed by attention errors (42%), a tuned up moped (29%) and position on the road (14%). For the other parties involved, attention error (52%) was the most frequently assigned accident factor. The majority (78%) of the accidents involved road rule breaching on the part of the moped rider.The results indicate that preventive measures should aim to eliminate violations and increase anticipatory skills among moped riders and awareness of mopeds among other road users. Due to their young age the effect of such measures could be enhanced by infrastructural measures facilitating safe interaction between mopeds and other road users.     

A rear-end collision risk assessment model based on drivers’ collision avoidance process under influences of cell phone use and gender—A driving simulator based study

Driver’s collision avoidance performance has a direct link to the collision risk and crash severity. Previous studies demonstrated that the distracted driving, such as using a cell phone while driving, disrupted the driver’s performance on road. This study aimed to investigate the manner and extent to which cell phone use and driver’s gender affected driving performance and collision risk in a rear-end collision avoidance process. Forty-two licensed drivers completed the driving simulation experiment in three phone use conditions: no phone use, hands-free, and hand-held, in which the drivers drove in a car-following situation with potential rear-end collision risks caused by the leading vehicle’s sudden deceleration. Based on the experiment data, a rear-end collision risk assessment model was developed to assess the influence of cell phone use and driver’s gender. The cell phone use and driver’s gender were found to be significant factors that affected the braking performances in the rear-end collision avoidance process, including the brake reaction time, the deceleration adjusting time and the maximum deceleration rate. The minimum headway distance between the leading vehicle and the simulator during the rear-end collision avoidance process was the final output variable, which could be used to measure the rear-end collision risk and judge whether a collision occurred. The results showed that although cell phone use drivers took some compensatory behaviors in the collision avoidance process to reduce the mental workload, the collision risk in cell phone use conditions was still higher than that without the phone use. More importantly, the results proved that the hands-free condition did not eliminate the safety problem associated with distracted driving because it impaired the driving performance in the same way as much as the use of hand-held phones. In addition, the gender effect indicated that although female drivers had longer reaction time than male drivers in critical situation, they were more quickly in braking with larger maximum deceleration rate, and they tended to keep a larger safety margin with the leading vehicle compared to male drivers. The findings shed some light on the further development of advanced collision avoidance technologies and the targeted intervention strategies about cell phone use while driving.     

Effects of parallelogram-shaped pavement markings on vehicle speed and safety of pedestrian crosswalks on urban roads in China

The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of parallelogram-shaped pavement markings on vehicle speed and crashes in the vicinity of urban pedestrian crosswalks. The research team measured speed data at twelve sites, and crash data at eleven sites. Observational cross-sectional studies were conducted to identify if the effects of parallelogram-shaped pavement markings on vehicle speeds and speed violations were statistically significant. The results showed that parallelogram-shaped pavement markings significantly reduced vehicle speeds and speed violations in the vicinity of pedestrian crosswalks. More specifically, the speed reduction effects varied from 1.89 km/h to 4.41 km/h with an average of 3.79 km/h. The reduction in the 85th percentile speed varied from 0.81 km/h to 5.34 km/h with an average of 4.19 km/h. Odds ratios (OR) showed that the parallelogram-shaped pavement markings had effects of a 7.1% reduction in the mean speed and a 6.9% reduction in the 85th percentile speed at the pedestrian crosswalks. The reduction of proportion of drivers exceeding the speed limit varied from 8.64% to 14.15% with an average of 11.03%. The results of the crash data analysis suggested that the use of parallelogram-shaped pavement markings reduced both the frequency and severity of crashes at pedestrian crosswalks. The parallelogram-shaped pavement markings had a significant effect on reducing the vehicle–pedestrian crashes. Two crash prediction models were developed for vehicle–pedestrian crashes and rear-end crashes. According to the crash models, the presence of parallelogram-shaped pavement markings reduced vehicle–pedestrian crashes at pedestrian crosswalks by 24.87% with a 95% confidence interval of [10.06–30.78%]. However, the model results also showed that the presence of parallelogram-shaped pavement markings increased rear-end crashes at pedestrian crosswalks by 5.4% with a 95% confidence interval of [0–11.2%].     

Prediction of deflection of reinforced concrete shear walls

Reinforced concrete shear walls are used in tall buildings for efficiently resisting lateral loads. Due to the low tensile strength of concrete, reinforced concrete shear walls tend to behave in a nonlinear manner with a significant reduction in stiffness, even under service loads. To accurately assess the lateral deflection of shear walls, the prediction of flexural and shear stiffness of these members after cracking becomes important. In the present study, an iterative analytical procedure which considers the cracking in the reinforced concrete shear walls has been presented. The effect of concrete cracking on the stiffness and deflection of shear walls have also been investigated by the developed computer program based on the iterative procedure. In the program, the variation of the flexural stiffness of a cracked member has been evaluated by ACI and probability-based effective stiffness model. In the analysis, shear deformation which can be large and significant after development of cracks is also taken into account and the variation of shear stiffness in the cracked regions of members has been considered by using effective shear stiffness model available in the literature. Verification of the proposed procedure has been confirmed from series of reinforced concrete shear wall tests available in the literature. Comparison between the analytical and experimental results shows that the proposed analytical procedure can provide an accurate and efficient prediction of both the deflection and flexural stiffness reduction of shear walls with different height to width ratio and vertical load. The results of the analytical procedure also indicate that the percentage of shear deflection in the total deflection increases with decreasing height to width ratio of the shear wall.     

Global output‐feedback stabilization for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems via sampled‐data control

In this paper, the global sampled‐data output‐feedback stabilization problem is considered for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems. First, based on output‐feedback domination technique and emulation approach, a systematic design procedure for sampled‐data output‐feedback controller is proposed for a class of stochastic lower‐triangular nonlinear systems. It is proved that the proposed sampled‐data output‐feedback controller will stabilize the given stochastic nonlinear system in the sense of mean square exponential stability. Because of the domination nature of the proposed control approach, it is shown that the proposed control approach can also be used to handle the global sampled‐data output‐feedback stabilization problems for a more general class of stochastic non‐triangular nonlinear systems. Finally, simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improved learning of I2C distance and accelerating the neighborhood search for image classification

Image-to-class (I2C) distance is a novel measure for image classification and has successfully handled datasets with large intra-class variances. However, due to the lack of a training phase, the performance of this distance is easily affected by irrelevant local features that may hurt the classification accuracy. Besides, the success of this I2C distance relies heavily on the large number of local features in the training set, which requires expensive computation cost for classifying test images. On the other hand, if there are small number of local features in the training set, it may result in poor performance.In this paper, we propose a distance learning method to improve the classification accuracy of this I2C distance as well as two strategies for accelerating its NN search. We first propose a large margin optimization framework to learn the I2C distance function, which is modeled as a weighted combination of the distance from every local feature in an image to its nearest-neighbor (NN) in a candidate class. We learn these weights associated with local features in the training set by constraining the optimization such that the I2C distance from image to its belonging class should be less than that to any other class. We evaluate the proposed method on several publicly available image datasets and show that the performance of I2C distance for classification can significantly be improved by learning a weighted I2C distance function. To improve the computation cost, we also propose two methods based on spatial division and hubness score to accelerate the NN search, which is able to largely reduce the on-line testing time while still preserving or even achieving a better classification accuracy.