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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Resource Allocation In Subsidy Welfare Programs: Managerial Insights For Nonprofits, Governments, And Service Providers, Wei Wei Nov 2023

Resource Allocation In Subsidy Welfare Programs: Managerial Insights For Nonprofits, Governments, And Service Providers, Wei Wei

Doctoral Dissertations

Subsidy welfare programs provide financial assistance to economically disadvantaged individuals and families to access essential and life-altering services (e.g., education, child care, and housing) that they might not otherwise have access to. Access to these services is considered critical to achieving a better and more sustainable future for all. As such, these high-quality services are directly related to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted as a universal call to action to end poverty, save the planet and improve the lives and prospects of everyone, everywhere." In particular, the need for these affordable and high-quality services has been …


Evaluation Of The Erodibility Of Soft Clays And The Influence Of Biopolymers, Pamela Judge Oct 2018

Evaluation Of The Erodibility Of Soft Clays And The Influence Of Biopolymers, Pamela Judge

Doctoral Dissertations

Erosion of silts and clays is less well understood than erosion of sands. Further, current and anticipated climate change impacts along coastlines compel consideration of new approaches to coastal protection measures; seawalls and breakwaters designs now include natural and nature-based measures. The first research topic consists of the Adaptive Gradients Framework which was a theoretically-informed facilitation tool. The framework was intended to aid a collaborative and interdisciplinary decision-making process to encourage inclusion of natural and nature-based measures in coastal protection planning and design. This research is the culmination of a series of workshops and fieldtrips executed by the Sustainable Adaptive …


Impact Of Perceptual Speed Calming Curve Countermeasures On Drivers’ Anticipation & Mitigation Ability – A Driving Simulator Study, Krishna Valluru Oct 2018

Impact Of Perceptual Speed Calming Curve Countermeasures On Drivers’ Anticipation & Mitigation Ability – A Driving Simulator Study, Krishna Valluru

Masters Theses

A potential factor for curve accidents are anticipatory skills. Horizontal curves have been recognized as a significant safety issue for many years. This study investigates the impact and effectiveness of three curve based perceptual speed calming countermeasures (advanced curve warning signs, chevron sign, and heads-up display(HUD) sign) on drivers’ hazard anticipation and mitigation behavior across both left and right-winding curves, and sharp (radius 200m) and flat (radius 500m) curves. Experimental results show that the speed and lateral control in the horizontal curves differed with respect to curve radii, direction, and the type of countermeasure presented. These differences in behavior are …


A Study On Modelling Spatial-Temporal Human Mobility Patterns For Improving Personalized Weather Warning, Yue Xu Jul 2018

A Study On Modelling Spatial-Temporal Human Mobility Patterns For Improving Personalized Weather Warning, Yue Xu

Masters Theses

Understanding human mobility patterns is important for severe weather warning since these patterns can help identify where people are in time and in space when flash floods, tornados, high winds and hurricanes are occurring or are predicted to occur. A GIS (Geographic Information Science) data model was proposed to describe the spatial-temporal human activity. Based on this model, a metric was designed to represent the spatial-temporal activity intensity of human mobility, and an index was generated to quantitatively describe the change in human activities. By analyzing high-resolution human mobility data, the paper verified that human daily mobility patterns could be …


Evaluation Of New England Bridges For Bat Roosting Including Methodology And Case Studies, Angela Berthaume Jul 2017

Evaluation Of New England Bridges For Bat Roosting Including Methodology And Case Studies, Angela Berthaume

Masters Theses

Bats are known and documented to use bridge structures as roosts in various locations throughout the United States and abroad, but there is limited knowledge of how bats use bridges in New England. Significant population declines due to White-Nose Syndrome have resulted in several bat species being listed as state or federally threatened or endangered. If bats are using bridges as roosts, significant effort is required to ensure they are not disturbed or harmed during construction or maintenance work, requiring knowledge of assessment methods to identify likely roost locations in bridges. This thesis describes a two summer study evaluating the …


An Evaluation Of Traffic Control Devices And Driver Distraction On Driver Behavior At Railway-Highway Grade Crossings, Radhameris A. Gomez Gabriel Jul 2017

An Evaluation Of Traffic Control Devices And Driver Distraction On Driver Behavior At Railway-Highway Grade Crossings, Radhameris A. Gomez Gabriel

Doctoral Dissertations

At-grade crossings (grade crossings) are those crossings in which any part of a roadway intersects with railroad tracks. Safety at these railroad-highway grade crossings is a major concern, with traffic control warning devices serving as the main mechanisms for improving safety. There are three factors that influence a driver’s behavior at a given crossing. First, traffic control devices, including warning devices at the railroad-highway grade crossings, provide the driver with information whose impact will depend in part on the likelihood that the driver knows whether to glance in the direction of the device based on prior experience, and in part …


Multi-Criteria Decision Making When Planning Sustainable Multimodal Transportation Routes In A Linear Corridor, Marie Louis Jul 2017

Multi-Criteria Decision Making When Planning Sustainable Multimodal Transportation Routes In A Linear Corridor, Marie Louis

Doctoral Dissertations

In urban and suburban locations, public transit can be seen as an effective mode of daily transportation. The majority of the time, travelers would seek the cheapest, shortest, and possibly most eco-friendly means of transit. When designing public transit network systems, transportation planners and decision-makers, with input from stakeholders, should strive to optimize transportation services to meet the needs of the population most efficiently and at the lowest cost, that is, providing a transportation system that s the three E's of the sustainability concept: environment, social equity, and economic. Previous studies have focused on sustainability as the primary concern in …


The Effect Of Interruptions On Primary Task Performance In Safety-Critical Environments, Cheryl Ann Nicholas Nov 2016

The Effect Of Interruptions On Primary Task Performance In Safety-Critical Environments, Cheryl Ann Nicholas

Doctoral Dissertations

Safety critical systems in medicine utilize alarms to signal potentially life threatening situations to professionals and patients. In particular, in the medical field multiple alarms from equipment are activated daily and often simultaneously. There are a number of alarms which require caregivers to take breaks in complex, primary tasks to attend to the interruption task which is signaled by the alarm. The motivation for this research is the knowledge that, in general, interrupting tasks can have a potentially negative impact on performance and outcomes of the primary task. The focus of this research is on the effect of an interrupting …


Modeling Choice Problems With Heterogeneous User Preferences In The Transportation Network, Mahyar Amirgholy Jul 2016

Modeling Choice Problems With Heterogeneous User Preferences In The Transportation Network, Mahyar Amirgholy

Doctoral Dissertations

Users of transportation systems need to make a variety of different decisions for their trips in the network, while their objective is to keep the generalized costs of their own trips minimized. In the transportation network, there is a diversity of different factors that can influence the decisions of the users, while the relative importance of these factors varies among the heterogeneous users with different trip purposes. Nonetheless, the cumulative result of the individual decisions of the users seeking to minimize their costs according to their own preferences leads to the user equilibrium condition in which no one can reduce …


Developing An Ecological Sanitation Transect, Ian Kolesinskas Mar 2016

Developing An Ecological Sanitation Transect, Ian Kolesinskas

Masters Theses

A sanitation problem exists for people across the globe: basic human waste collection and treatment is inaccessible to much of the world’s population; and the status-quo gray infrastructure system of sanitation is unsustainable and unsuitable for widespread application. A paradigm shift is needed: this thesis makes the case for developing an Ecological Sanitation Transect to bring back the closed loop that connects consumption, waste excretion, sanitation, and food production. The Ecological Sanitation Transect is a synthesis of ecological sanitation, where human excreta is reused, and the urban transect, where development density is conceptualized along a continuum from rural to urban. …


Evaluation Of A Training Program (Strap) Designed To Decrease Young Drivers Secondary Task Engagement In High Risk Scenarios, Akhilesh Krishnan Nov 2015

Evaluation Of A Training Program (Strap) Designed To Decrease Young Drivers Secondary Task Engagement In High Risk Scenarios, Akhilesh Krishnan

Masters Theses

Distracted driving involving secondary tasks is known to lead to an increased likelihood of being involved in motor vehicle crashes. Some secondary tasks are unnecessary and should never be performed. But other secondary tasks, e.g., operating the defroster, are critical to safe driving. Ideally, the driver should schedule when to perform the critical tasks such that the likelihood of a hazard materializing is relatively small during the performance of the secondary task. The current study evaluates a training program -- STRAP (Secondary Task Regulatory & Anticipatory Program) -- which is designed to make drivers aware of latent hazards …


Investigating Teenage Drivers' Driving Behavior Before And After Lag (Less Aggressive Goals) Training Program, Jingyi Zhang Nov 2014

Investigating Teenage Drivers' Driving Behavior Before And After Lag (Less Aggressive Goals) Training Program, Jingyi Zhang

Masters Theses

Motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of death during adolescence, with the fatal crash rate per mile-driven for 16-19 years old drivers being nearly 3 times larger than the rate for drivers age 20 and older. High gravitational events among teenage drivers, such as quick starts, and hard stops, have been shown to be highly correlated with crash rates. The current younger driver training programs developed in the late 1990s, however, do not appear to be especially effective in regard to many skills which are critical to avoiding crashes. With this in mind, a simulator-based training program aimed at …


Were Neandertal Humeri Adapted For Spear Thrusting Or Throwing? A Finite Element Study, Michael Anthony Berthaume Nov 2014

Were Neandertal Humeri Adapted For Spear Thrusting Or Throwing? A Finite Element Study, Michael Anthony Berthaume

Masters Theses

An ongoing debate concerning Neandertal ecology is whether or not they utilized long range weaponry. The anteroposteriorly expanded cross-section of Neandertal humeri have led some to argue they thrusted their weapons, while the rounder cross-section of Late Upper Paleolithic modern human humeri suggests they threw their weapons. We test the hypothesis that Neandertal humeri were built to resist strains engendered by thrusting rather than throwing using finite element models of one Neandertal, one Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) human and three recent human humeri, representing a range of cross-sectional shapes and sizes. Electromyography and kinematic data and articulated skeletons were used …


Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent Aug 2014

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …


Travelers' Route Choice Behavior In Risky Networks, Hengliang Tian Sep 2013

Travelers' Route Choice Behavior In Risky Networks, Hengliang Tian

Open Access Dissertations

The accurate modeling of travelers’ route choice decision making when faced with unreliable (risky) travel times is necessary for the assessment of policies aimed at improving travel time reliability. Two major objectives are studied in this thesis. The first objective is to evaluate the applicability of a process model to route choice under risk where the actual process of decision making is captured. Traditionally, we adopt “as-if” econometric models to predict people’s route choice decisions. The second objective is to investigate travelers’ capability to incorporate future real-time traffic information into their current route choice decision making. Two separate stated preference …