Repository of the University of Namur
Not a member yet
94692 research outputs found
Sort by
Autonomous Traffic Management:Integrating Vissim Traffic Model with a Swarm of Drones
No full textIn this research, we propose a system for monitoring and efficiently managing traffic congestion at the intersection of Park Avenue and E 72nd Street, New York, USA. This methodology is applied to a realistic traffic scenario where all intersections are controlled by fixed traffic signals. The method is based on a data-driven approach deploying a swarm of drones to measure the number of vehicles on roads. The collected information by the drones is sent to traffic lights and simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) method is used to minimize traffic congestion by adapting the green traffic light durations. More precisely, we simulate the scenario thanks to the Vissim traffic software and Python. The simulation results highlight the effects of traffic light optimization to reduce traffic jams in contrast to the baseline case, where the duration of green lights is fixed.</p
Determinants of viral haemorrhagic fever risk in Africa’s tropical moist forests:A scoping review of spatial, socio-economic, and environmental factors
Get PDFBackground Viral haemorrhagic fevers (VHFs) are identified by international health authorities as priorities for research and development, as they pose a threat to global health and econ-omy. VHFs are zoonotic diseases whose acute forms in humans present a haemorrhagic syndrome and shock, with mortality rates of up to 90%. This work aims at synthetizing existing knowledge on spatial and spatially aggregable determinants that support the emergence and maintenance of VHFs in African countries covered by tropical moist forest, to better identify and map areas at risk. Methodology/principal findings Using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines, extension for scoping reviews, we searched the PubMed, Embase, CAB Abstracts, and Scopus databases. English and French peer-reviewed documents were retrieved using Boolean logic and keyword search terms. The analysis of 79 arti-cles published between 1993 and 2023 offers a comprehensive overview of the complex interactions among abiotic, biotic, demographic, socio-economic, cultural, and political risk factors in driving the emergence and maintenance of VHFs in African countries covered by tropical moist forests. Human-to-human transmission is mainly driven by socio-economic, political, and demographic factors, whereas zoonotic spillover is determined by almost all groups of factors, especially those of an anthropogenic nature. Conclusions/significance Many questions remain unanswered regarding the epidemiology of VHFs in tropical for-ests. By elucidating spatially relevant determinants which have already been studied, this review seeks to advance VHFs hotspot predictions, risk mapping for disease surveillance and control systems improvement.</p
Discourse Markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB) Dialogues and Their Translation into French:A Corpus-Based Study
Get PDFDiscourse markers have been extensively studied in spoken languages from different perspectives, covering monolingual, contrastive, and translation studies. However, research on these items remains limited for signed languages, with only a handful of scattered publications. Following a corpus-based approach, this paper aims to investigate discourse markers in French Belgian Sign Language (LSFB), including their types, functions, and translation/s into written French. An 18 min sample of three dialogues and six signers was analyzed using a two-level independent taxonomy (domain and function) previously applied to spoken and signed data. Overall, 251 discourse markers were identified in the LSFB sample. They can be manual, nonmanual, or a combination of both, the latter type being the most frequent. In contrast to the previous literature, discourse markers cannot be spatial in LSFB. Regarding their functional spectrum, most discourse markers belong to the sequential domain (i.e., they are mostly used to structure discourse) and express ‘addition’ (i.e., providing more information) or ‘monitoring’ (i.e., keeping control over one’s turn or over the interaction). When examining the translation of DMs, most are either omitted or substituted by other non-discourse marking items in the target texts. Although these results are generally similar to previous studies on DMs in spoken languages, more research on these items in other signed languages is needed to obtain a precise overview of their role in human communication.</p
Robust Reflection Asymmetry Across Rhombohedral–Bernal Stacking Boundaries in Trilayer Graphene
Get PDFWe report a pronounced direction-dependent quantum transport phenomenon across stacking domain boundaries in trilayer graphene, revealed by large-scale wave packet dynamics simulations. Employing molecular statics with realistic interatomic force fields, we construct an ABC–ABA grain boundary geometry with structural features – such as soliton width and corrugation amplitude – that closely match experimental observations. To mimic a transport device geometry, we injected electrons from a graphene electrode into the outer layer of our ABC-ABA junction. We demonstrate that this configuration shows a striking asymmetry in transport behavior: wave packets incident from the rhombohedral (ABC) side transmit with minimal reflection, while those originating from the Bernal (ABA) side are strongly backscattered. The total reflection probability measured in the graphene electrode differs by more than a factor of 20 between the two incidence directions, and the energy-dependent transmission function reveals that the main differences are concentrated withinthe ±0.5 eV energy range around the Fermi level. We prove that this rectification is robust across grain boundaries of varying thicknesses and morphologies, as it originates from the distinct electronic structures – effective masses, sublattice-, and layer polarizations – of the two stacking configurations. These differences inthe electronic structure of the two stacking configurations are rooted in their lattice symmetries: the mirrorsymmetric ABA and the inversion-symmetric ABC trilayers, which give rise to distinct reflection behavior at both the graphene-trilayer contact and the ABA–ABC grain boundary. The precise energy dependence of the reflection function, however, depends on the specific atomic structure of the domain boundary, yet, without altering the overall value of the reflection. Our results show that contacted ABC–ABA stacking domainboundaries could lead to directional quantum transport — opening a pathway toward quantum diode-like functionalities
A Network History of Historical Network Analysis:Using a Citation Network to Explore Historiography
No full textOptimizing Bipartite Matching with Interleaved and Injective Mappings:Implementing and Evaluating the k-swap Heuristic
Get PDFBipartite matching problems play a crucial role in various software engineering tools, including resource allocation and task assignment. In this paper, we address a specific variant of the bipartite matching problem, called the Double Assignment Problem (DAP), focusing on the allocation of machines to workers in a production environment. The objective is to maximize the number of worker-machine associations, subject to a second, orthogonal matching problem: associating some worker W to a machine M implies that the (ordered) list of servers employed by M are dedicated to the respective programs used by the worker W. Since DAP is, in general, NP-hard, we introduce a heuristic that quickly approximates candidate results. The heuristic is called k-swap stability and has originally been formalized to tackle a specific DAP instance arising in the niche field of anti-unification. We extend the definition to our more general setting and give promising preliminary results obtained by applying our k-swap implementation on a testbed of examples