1,721,012 research outputs found

    Cross-border critical transportation infrastructure: a multi-level index for resilience assessment

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    Today, more than ever before, our society depends on interdependent infrastructure systems, such as transportation, energy, water, and telecommunications networks. These systems are often considered critical because they are necessary for the organization, functionality, and stability of a modern industrialized country. However, these infrastructures are vulnerable to accidents, malicious failures, and disruptions that could generate consequences impacting on the economy, health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of a country or of several neighboring countries. The disruption of critical cross-border transportation infrastructure, road or rail, as a result of a major event can affect the area where the event occurs and a wider area. Depending on the type and duration of an event, which can be natural or anthropogenic in origin, it is possible to estimate the impacts on the mobility of people and goods in terms of delays (alternative routes), increased traffic (congestion), and a potential increase in accidents. For instance, in 2019 there was an accident in Rastatt (Germany) that affected rail traffic on the Karlsruhe-Basel line of the Rhine-Alpine corridor in Europe. The rail line was disrupted for more than 50 days, causing disservices and about 2 billion Euro in economic losses in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The extended disruption of road and rail sections can have consequences (impacts) not only on the transport system but also on the socio-economic system in a macro-regional context. The research is part of the SICt project - Resilience of Critical Cross-Border Infrastructure developed in the Interreg VA Italy-Switzerland Programme 2014-2020. The work aims to define a RI - Resilience Index for the road and rail transport network falling within the study area. The RI index describes the capability of each network element (i-th link) to cope with a relevant event. The formulation of the index involves the calculation of three independent indicators: i) RIRM - Rescue Management related to the resources that can be activated and used to cope with an event; ii) RIPP - Plans & Management related to the speed with which the necessary resources can be activated and in fact, considers management aspects such as the presence of plans and procedures; iii) RIRN - Network & Traffic related to the robustness of the elements of the transport network. This work aims to present the proposed model and its application to the project area that includes the Lombardy Region (Italy) and the Canton Ticino (Switzerland) within the SICt Project

    Cross-Task and Cross-Lightpath Failure Detection and Localization in Optical Networks Using Transfer Learning

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    Practical deployments of Machine-Learning(ML)-based solutions for failure management in optical networks often suffer from limited data availability, due to, especially, scarcity of labelled data describing different failure scenarios. Transfer Learning (TL) is regarded as a promising direction in cases of data scarcity, thanks to its ability to transfer knowledge from a Source Domain (SD) (e.g. SD could be a digital twin or a laboratory testbed) to a Target Domain (TD) (e.g., the infield network). In this paper, we focus on cross-lightpath and cross-task application of TL for failure localization and failure detection in optical networks. We found that, depending on the number of retrained parameters in the ML model, cross-lightpath TL for failure localization provides satisfactory accuracy (higher than 90%, in some cases) with limited amounts of TD data, and is also convenient in terms of TD retraining duration with respect to cases where TL is not used. Moreover, we found that cross-task failure detection/localization reaches up to 12% or 25% improvement in TD accuracy when considering failure localization and detection as TD task, respectively

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Cooperative messages to enhance the performance of L3 vehicles approaching roadworks

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    Introduction: In the near future, automated vehicles will drive on public roads together with traditional vehicles. Even though almost the whole academia agrees on that statement, the possible interferences between the two different kinds of driver are still to be analyzed and the real impacts on the traffic flow to be under-stood. Objectives: Aim of this paper is to study one of the most likely L3 automated system to be deployed on public roads in the short term: Highway Chauffeur. The analysis of this system is carried out on a roadwork scenario to assess the positive impacts arising from a joint implementation of the automated system and the C-ITS Use Case signaling the closure of a lane. In fact, the main contribution of this paper is the assessment of the possible benefits in travel times and driving regime arising from the joint implementation of the Highway Chauffeur system and of C-ITS messages, both for the vehicles equipped with both technologies and for the surrounding traffic. Methods: The assessment is achieved through traffic simulations carried out with the VISSIM software and a Python script developed by the authors. The overall process is described and the obtained results are provided, commented and compared to define the implementation of the C-ITS Use Case that could maximize the benefits of L3 driving. Results: These results showed how triggering the take-over maneuver in ad-vance fosters the bottleneck efficiency (the same speed values reached between 80 and 100% Market Penetration for around 700 m range of the C-ITS message are reached at 50% Market Penetration with a 1500 m range). Besides, an in-creased speed up to 30 km/h at the bottleneck is recorded, depending on the mar-ket penetration and the message range. Finally, the delay upstream the roadworks entrance is reduced by 6% and arises at around 700 m, without the need to deploy the message up to 1500 m. Conclusions: The paper investigates the impacts of take-over maneuvers and of automated driving while considering different operational parameters such as the message range. The results suggest all the potentialities of the Use Case while providing interesting figures that frame the trends related to the different imple-mentations. Finally, the tool developed to carry out the presented analysis is re-ported and made available so that hopefully the Use Case may be explored further and a precise impact assessment may be carried out with different prototypes of AVs and on different infrastructures

    Cross-border Digital Platform for Transport Critical Infrastructure Resilience: Functionalities and Use-case

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    The resilience of increasingly interdependent Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems hugely depends on the stakeholder organizations’ ability to exchange information and coordinate, while CI’s cross-border dimension further increases the complexity and challenges. This paper presents the progress in the Lombardy Region (Italy) and Canton Ticino (Switzerland) on the joint capacity to manage disruptive events involving transportation CI between the two countries. We present a cross-border digital platform (Critical Infrastructure Platform – PIC) and its main functionalities for improved cross-border risk and resilience management of CI. A use case, based on a scenario of an intense snowfall along the transboundary motorway impacting both countries, demonstrates how PIC advances the exchange of information, its visualization and analysis in real-time. The use case also shows the practical value of the digital platform and its potential to support the management of cross-border events (and their cascading events) that require the cooperation of Italian and Swiss actors
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