No Arabic abstract
The performance of multimodal mobility systems relies on the seamless integration of conventional mass transit services and the advent of Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) services. Prior work is limited to individually improving various transport networks operations or linking a new mode to an existing system. In this work, we attempt to solve transit network design and pricing problems of multimodal mobility systems en masse. An operator (public transit agency or private transit operator) determines the frequency settings of the mass transit system, flows of the MoD service, and prices for each trip to optimize the overall welfare. A primal-dual approach, inspired by the market design literature, yields a compact mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. However, a key computational challenge remains in allocating an exponential number of hybrid modes accessible to travelers. We provide a tractable solution approach through a decomposition scheme and approximation algorithm that accelerates the computation and enables optimization of large-scale problem instances. Using a case study in Nashville, Tennessee, we demonstrate the value of the proposed model. We also show that our algorithm reduces the average runtime by 60% compared to advanced MILP solvers. This result seeks to establish a generic and simple-to-implement way of revamping and redesigning regional mobility systems in order to meet the increase in travel demand and integrate traditional fixed-line mass transit systems with new demand-responsive services.
With the increasing adoption of Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) and Automatic Passenger Count (APC) technologies by transit agencies, a massive amount of time-stamped and location-based passenger boarding and alighting count data can be collected on a continuous basis. The availability of such large-scale transit data offers new opportunities to produce estimates for Origin-Destination (O-D) flows, helping inform transportation planning and transit management. However, the state-of-the-art methodologies for AVL/APC data analysis mostly tackle the O-D flow estimation problem within routes and barely infer the transfer activities across the entire transit network. This paper proposes three optimization models to identify transfers and approximate network-level O-D flows by minimizing the deviations between estimated and observed proportions or counts of transferring passengers: A Quadratic Integer Program (QIP), a feasible rounding procedure for the Quadratic Convex Programming (QCP) relaxation of the QIP, and an Integer Program (IP). The inputs of the models are readily available by applying the various route-level flow estimation algorithms to the automatically collected AVL/APC data and the output of the models is a network O-D estimation at varying geographical resolutions. The optimization models were evaluated on a case study for Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area in Michigan. The IP model outperforms the QCP approach in terms of accuracy and remains tractable from an efficiency standpoint, contrary to the QIP. Its estimated O-D matrix achieves an R-Squared metric of 95.57% at the Traffic Analysis Zone level and 92.39% at the stop level, compared to the ground-truth estimates inferred from the state-of-practice trip-chaining methods.
In the industrial practice, additive manufacturing processes are often followed by post-processing operations such as subtractive machining, milling, etc. to achieve the desired surface quality and dimensional accuracy. Hence, a given part must be 3D printed with extra material to enable such finishing phase. This combined additive/subtractive technique can be optimized to reduce manufacturing costs by saving printing time and reducing material and energy usage. In this work, a numerical methodology based on parametric shape optimization is proposed for optimizing the thickness of the extra material, allowing for minimal machining operations while ensuring the finishing requirements. Moreover, the proposed approach is complemented by a novel algorithm for generating inner structures leading to reduced distortion and improved weight reduction. The computational effort induced by classical constrained optimization methods is alleviated by replacing both the objective and constraint functions by their sparse-grid surrogates. Numerical results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Logistics has gained great attentions with the prosperous development of commerce, which is often seen as the classic optimal vehicle routing problem. Meanwhile, electric vehicle (EV) has been widely used in logistic fleet to curb the emission of green house gases in recent years. Solving the optimization problem of joint routing and charging of multiple EVs is in a urgent need, whose objective function includes charging time, charging cost, EVs travel time, usage fees of EV and revenue from serving customers. This joint problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming (MIP) problem, which, however, is NP-hard due to integer restrictions and bilinear terms from the coupling between routing and charging decisions. The main contribution of this paper lies at proposing an efficient two stage algorithm that can decompose the original MIP problem into two linear programming (LP) problems, by exploiting the exactness of LP relaxation and eliminating the coupled term. This algorithm can achieve a nearoptimal solution in polynomial time. In addition, another variant algorithm is proposed based on the two stage one, to further improve the quality of solution.
With the explosively increasing demands on the network capacity, throughput and number of connected wireless devices, massive connectivity is an urgent problem for the next generation wireless communications. In this paper, we propose a grant-free access protocol for massive connectivity that utilizes a large number of antennas in a base station (BS) and is expected to be widely deployed in cellular networks. The scheme consists of a sparse structure in sparse code multiple access (SCMA) and receiver processing based on dictionary learning (DL). A large number of devices can transmit data without any scheduling process. Unlike existing schemes, whose signal schedulings require a lot of overhead, the scheduling overhead required by the proposed scheme is negligible, which is attractive for resource utilization and transmission power efficiency. The numerical results show that the proposed scheme has promising performance in massive connectivity scenario of cellular networks.
Many techniques were proposed for detecting software misconfigurations in cloud systems and for diagnosing unintended behavior caused by such misconfigurations. Detection and diagnosis are steps in the right direction: misconfigurations cause many costly failures and severe performance issues. But, we argue that continued focus on detection and diagnosis is symptomatic of a more serious problem: configuration design and implementation are not yet first-class software engineering endeavors in cloud systems. Little is known about how and why developers evolve configuration design and implementation, and the challenges that they face in doing so. This paper presents a source-code level study of the evolution of configuration design and implementation in cloud systems. Our goal is to understand the rationale and developer practices for revising initial configuration design/implementation decisions, especially in response to consequences of misconfigurations. To this end, we studied 1178 configuration-related commits from a 2.5 year version-control history of four large-scale, actively-maintained open-source cloud systems (HDFS, HBase, Spark, and Cassandra). We derive new insights into the software configuration engineering process. Our results motivate new techniques for proactively reducing misconfigurations by improving the configuration design and implementation process in cloud systems. We highlight a number of future research directions.