Is bus bunching serious in Sydney? Preliminary findings based on Opal card data analysis

 

By Bobby Du & Paul-Antonin Dublanche

 

An efficient and reliable public transit system plays an important role in mitigation of congestion and attraction of more users from private car. However, sophisticated traffic condition and dynamic travel demand often make public transit services unstable and uncertain, which results in longer waiting time especially during peak hours or special events. One common phenomenon called bus bunching (BB) or platooning usually happens when the headway between successive buses arriving at the same bus stop is less than the scheduled headway or a certain threshold. BB is a major source of congestion, which not only causes passengers’ travel time delayed and extra waiting time, but also degrades the bus operation performance. Most of the prior researches on BB were limited in a single or multiple bus lines, consequently, only a few studies were found that focused on the whole bus network in a city or even larger region. Recent advances in big data create new opportunities for exploring BB problem in a large-scale scope.

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Infrastructure Resilience: Planning for Future Extreme Events

By Sarah Dunn

Natural hazards have the potential to cause large-scale impacts and disruption to all countries and if these events occur in highly populated areas the impacts can be catastrophic.  This has been shown by previous earthquake events in Christchurch and Haiti and by hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.  The severity and lasting impact of these hazards are often linked to the resilience of critical infrastructure systems (including: water distribution networks, electrical systems and transportation networks) which underpin our communities and support social and economic development.  These systems are currently being subjected to a multitude of challenges – from a changing climate, to increasing population demands and economic austerity.  Therefore, we need new approaches to assess and manage the resilience of these critical systems.

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Human behaviour modelling and simulation for crisis management

By Carole Adam

The SWIFT project (funded by University Grenoble-Alps) investigates the somewhat irrational behaviour of citizens confronted with wildfire risk in Victoria. It relies on survey data from the Bushfire Research Commission created after the Black Saturday fires in 2009, to design a realistic model of this behaviour. An initial model focused on the mismatch between objective and subjective values of both the level of risk and the individual ability to face it; it proved valid against behaviour statistics, and also showed good explicative power despite its apparent simplicity, at the level of the global population. This model was also used to investigate the effects of different communication strategies.

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Consequence Forecasting for uncertain times

By Dr Sean Wilkinson

Infrastructure is so ubiquitous and reliable that most people do not realize that it is even there.  But when we do get a failure in one of our infrastructure systems, well then we really do notice.  Think about the last time there was a power cut, or you were caught in a traffic jam – or worse, you could not access social media.  It is amazing how upset most people get when they don’t have access to the services that our infrastructure usually provides – even for a short time.
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Closed-loop supply chain decisions using game theoretic particle swarm optimization

kalpit-patneBy Mr. Kalpit Patne

Closed loop supply chain management (CLSCM) is a relatively new field in the area of supply chain management and logistics which involves all the reverse logistics activities in addition to the forward logistics, like product acquisition, remanufacturing, redistribution, disposal etc. Continue reading

A spatial mircosimulation model to forecast health needs of elderlies in 2030 for Belgium (work in progress)

Morgane DumontBy Ms. Morgane Dumont

The forecasting of the population’s health needs is a big challenge in the current society, since the proportion of elderlies within the population is continually increasing. To allow each older person to live in a good health, health services need to be adapted. The project Virtual Belgium in Health (VBIH) aims to develop a platform based on a spatial micro-simulation that will approximate the health needs of elderlies in Belgium for 2030. Continue reading

Assessing the vulnerability of hydrological infrastructure to flood damage in coastal cities

Robert OgieBy Robert Ogie

Hydrological infrastructure such as pumps, floodgates (or sluice gates), dams, embankments, and other flood barriers are invaluable assets used in coastal cities for mitigating flooding. These infrastructure components are often vulnerable to damage or failure due to the impact of floodwaters, thus exacerbating the flood hazards and causing significant loss of life and destruction to property worth billions of dollars. Continue reading

Mining a System: The Use of Data Mining and System Dynamics to Explore Technology Integration

??????????????????????By Jack (Jie) Yang, Jun Ma & Sarah Howard

Technological innovation in schools has, as yet, resulted in relatively limited teacher and student engagement with new ways of learning supported through information and communication technologies (ICTs). One of the possible reasons for this is that educational research has struggled to grasp the complexity or dynamic nature of technology integration. Data mining techniques have drawn the attention of researchers from the education research area to understand some of the complexity of technology integration within a theoretical system model of technology integration. Continue reading

Development and comparison of two interaction indices between extractive activity and groundwater resources

SMART EduBlog- Johan Barthelemy – Traffic Micro-simulation- Image 1By Dr Johan Barthelemy

Groundwater and rock are intensively exploited in the world. Given the population density and environmental pressures, quarry lateral extension may be limited. Hence the only solution for the rock operators is to excavate deeper as long as the deposit structure makes it possible. Consequently the water table of the geological formation exploited might be reached when the quarry is deepened. A dewatering system is therefore installed so the quarry activities can continue, possibly impacting the nearby water catchments. Continue reading