Engineering Commons^™

A Parametric Analysis Of A Turbofan Engine With An Auxiliary Bypass Combustion Chamber – The Turboaux Engine, Kaleab Fetahi

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A parametric study of a novel turbofan engine with an auxiliary combustion chamber, nicknamed the TurboAux engine is presented. The TurboAux engine is conceived as an extension of a low-bypass turbofan engine with an auxiliary bypass annular combustion chamber around the core stream. The study presented in this thesis is motivated by the need to facilitate clean secondary burning of fuel at temperatures higher than conventionally realized, from air exiting the low-pressure compressor. The parametric study starts by analyzing the turbojet engine and its performance with and without an afterburner segment attached. Following that, the conventional turbofan and its mixing …

Enhanced Traffic Incident Analysis With Advanced Machine Learning Algorithms, Zhenyu Wang

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Traffic incident analysis is a crucial task in traffic management centers (TMCs) that typically manage many highways with limited staff and resources. An effective automatic incident analysis approach that can report abnormal events timely and accurately will benefit TMCs in optimizing the use of limited incident response and management resources. During the past decades, significant efforts have been made by researchers towards the development of data-driven approaches for incident analysis. Nevertheless, many developed approaches have shown limited success in the field. This is largely attributed to the long detection time (i.e., waiting for overwhelmed upstream detection stations; meanwhile, downstream stations …

Black-Swan Type Catastrophes And Antifragility/Supra-Resilience Of Urban Socio-Technical Infrastructures, S. A, Timashev

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper may be one of the first attempts dealing with the problem of creating, providing and maintaining antifragility of systems of interdependent urban critical infrastructures (CI) in the wake of black-swan type technological, ecological, economic or social catastrophes occurring in a municipality. A synonym is offered to describe antifragility from a positive psychology perspective, formulating the problem as the supraresilience problem. A brief description is given of the developed innovative approach for creating a supraresilient city/region using black-swan catastrophe and the antifragility concepts. Resilience metrics are formulated as well as methods of assessing damage, interdependence of infrastructures and convergent …

Macroeconomic Aspects Of Maintenance Optimization Of Critical Infrastructures, S. A. Timashev, A. V. Bushinskaya

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The main goal of maintenance is prevention, timely detection and elimination of failures and damage. From the point of view of critical infrastructures (CIs), the main purpose of their maintenance is to increase the safety of CIs and / or to ensure life safety. CIs should be optimal in terms of their purpose, cost, as a source of income and profit at all stages of their life cycle, and also acceptable in terms of possible loss of human lives or injuries. The paper considers the assessment of necessary optimal investments in the maintenance (time interval between subsequent maintenance), to increase …

Agent-Based Modelling Of Values: The Case Of Value Sensitive Design For Refugee Logistics, Christine Boshuijzen-Van Burken, Ross J. Gore, Frank Dignum, Lamber Royakkers, Phillip Wozny, F. Leron Shults

VMASC Publications

We have used value sensitive design as a method to develop an agent-based model of values in humanitarian logistics for refugees. Schwartz’s theory of universal values is implemented in the model in such a way that agents can make value trade-offs, which are operationalized into a measure of refugee wellbeing and a measure of public opinion about how the refugee logistics is being handled. By trying out different ‘value scenarios’, stakeholders who are responsible for, or involved in refugee logistics can have insights into the effects of various value choices. The model is visualized and made usable as a platform …

Towards Dynamic Vehicular Clouds, Aida Ghazizadeh

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Motivated by the success of the conventional cloud computing, Vehicular Clouds were introduced as a group of vehicles whose corporate computing, sensing, communication, and physical resources can be coordinated and dynamically allocated to authorized users. One of the attributes that set Vehicular Clouds apart from conventional clouds is resource volatility. As vehicles enter and leave the cloud, new computing resources become available while others depart, creating a volatile environment where the task of reasoning about fundamental performance metrics becomes very challenging. The goal of this thesis is to design an architecture and model for a dynamic Vehicular Cloud built on …

Backing Up Into Advocacy: The Case Of Smartphone Driver Distraction, Robert Rosenberger

The Journal of Sociotechnical Critique

For the last decade, I’ve been studying the topic of the driving impairment of smartphones. While this began as an exclusively academic project, it has increasingly compelled public engagement. One example of this came in an opinion piece I wrote in 2018 in response to a new traffic law. I take the opportunity here to fill out the academic backstory of this particular op-ed, reflect on how this larger project has evolved to include an unanticipated public-facing edge, and abstract some lessons about public writing.

Truck Trailer Classification Using Side-Fire Light Detection And Ranging (Lidar) Data, Olcay Sahin

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Classification of vehicles into distinct groups is critical for many applications, including freight and commodity flow modeling, pavement management and design, tolling, air quality monitoring, and intelligent transportation systems. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) developed a standardized 13-category vehicle classification ruleset, which meets the needs of many traffic data user applications. However, some applications need high-resolution data for modeling and analysis. For example, the type of commodity being carried must be known in the freight modeling framework. Unfortunately, this information is not available at the state or metropolitan level, or it is expensive to obtain from current resources.

Nevertheless, using …

A Rule Based Control Algorithm For On-Ramp Merge With Connected And Automated Vehicles, Ehsan Beheshtitabar

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

One of the designs for future highways with the flow of Connected Automated Vehicles (CAVs) cars will be a dedicated lane for the CAVs to form platoons and travel with higher speeds and lower headways. The connectivity will enable the formation of platoons of CAVs traveling beside non-platoon lanes. The advent of connectivity between vehicles and the infrastructure will enable advanced control strategies ̶ improving the performance of the traffic ̶ to be incorporated in the traffic system. The merge area in a multilane highway with CAVs is one of the sections which can be enhanced by the operation of …

Guidelines For Using Streetlight Data For Planning Tasks, Hong Yang, Mecit Cetin, Qingyu Ma

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has purchased a subscription to the StreetLight (SL) Data products that mainly offer origin-destination (OD) related metrics through crowdsourcing data. Users can manipulate a data source like this to quickly estimate origin-destination trip tables. Nonetheless, the SL metrics heavily rely on the data points sampled from smartphone applications and global positioning services (GPS) devices, which may be subject to potential bias and coverage issues. In particular, the quality of the SL metrics in relation to meeting the needs of various VDOT work tasks is not clear. Guidelines on the use of the SL metrics …

Systemic Methodology For Cyber Offense And Defense, C. Ariel Pinto, Matthew Zurasky

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper describes a systemic method towards standardization of a cyber weapon effectiveness and effectiveness prediction process to promote consistency and improve cyber weapon system evaluation accuracy – for both offensive and defensive postures. The approach included theoretical examination of existing effectiveness prediction processes for kinetic and directed energy weapons, complemented with technical and social aspects of cyber realm. The examination highlighted several paradigm-shifts needed to transition from purely kinetic-based processes and transition into the realm of combined kinetic and cyber weapons. Components of the new method for cyber weapons are cyber payload assessment, effects identification, and target assessment. The …

Disaster Damage Categorization Applying Satellite Images And Machine Learning Algorithm, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Special information has a significant role in disaster management. Land cover mapping can detect short- and long-term changes and monitor the vulnerable habitats. It is an effective evaluation to be included in the disaster management system to protect the conservation areas. The critical visual and statistical information presented to the decision-makers can help in mitigation or adaption before crossing a threshold. This paper aims to contribute in the academic and the practice aspects by offering a potential solution to enhance the disaster data source effectiveness. The key research question that the authors try to answer in this paper is how …