Engineering Commons^™

Connected And Automated Vehicles: Their Implication On Capacity Of A Basic Freeway Section And Impacts On Walkway Safety, Sia Macmillan Lyimo

Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles have recently gained the attention of researchers due to their expected potential benefits on highway traffic streams, such as improving roadway capacity, among others. It is imperative to investigate how these expected benefits can be leveraged in the transportation sector. Understanding the safety and operational benefits helps the concerned transportation agencies and other key stakeholders to make necessary infrastructural and policy adjustments to accommodate such future traffic operation changes. The main goal of this dissertation is to study the impact of connected and automated vehicles on freeway capacity. The simulated environment was created to emulate autonomous vehicle behaviors, …

Performance Evaluation Of Transportation Systems For Sustainability And Smart-Growth Of Cities: An Integrated Assessment Of Health Impacts, Ahmad Feizi

Dissertations

The performance of transportation systems is a significant component that influences the quality of life. The performance evaluation refers to a process of determining how well transportation systems perform regarding their intended goals and objectives. The advancement of information and communication technology and the integration between transportation systems and advanced technologies have directed more attention to the concept of smart cities. Smart cities are constituted of several interrelated components. Therefore, this offers comprehensive and integrated frameworks to evaluate the transportation performance and understanding of multifaceted interactions between the components from a transportation engineering perspective in four sections.

In the first …

Data Mining Of Unstructured Textual Information In Transportation Safety Domain: Exploring Methods, Opportunities And Limitations, Keneth Morgan Kwayu

Dissertations

The unprecedented increase in volume and influx of structured and unstructured data has overwhelmed conventional data management system capabilities in organizing, analyzing, and procuring useful information in a timely fashion. Structured data sources have a pre-defined pattern that makes data preprocessing and information retrieval tasks relatively easy for the current technologies that have been designed to handle structured and repeatable data. Unlike structured data, unstructured data usually exists in an unorganized format that offers no or little insight unless indexed and stored in an organized fashion. The inherent format of unstructured data exacerbates difficulties in data preprocessing and information extraction. …

Analyzing Impacts Of Transportation And Non-Transportation Activities On Human Health With An Advanced Platform For Collecting Travel And Physical Activity Data, Raed Abdullah Hasan

Dissertations

Recently much attention is paid to the lack of physical activities that may cause the health problems in many counties. Travel activities provide a certain amount of physical activities, and the active transportation, such as walking and cycling, becomes more important as an essential element of transportation. The active transportation is expected to contribute to improving human health by reducing cardiovascular disease, obesity, and premature death. However, detailed relationship between the transportation choices and human health has not been well understood. Therefore, there is a need for investigating traveler behaviors and how their choices affect physical activities and public health. …

Fatigue Performance Of Rc Beams Strengthened With Near Surface Mounted Cfrp Composites, Tamer Ghaith Mousa Eljufout

Dissertations

Bridges have a fundamental role in improving the effectiveness of highways and providing an expedient and express traffic system. Over time, Reinforced Concrete (RC) bridges degrade due to gradually increased traffic loads and environmental deteriorations. Subsequently, service loads might cause higher stresses in concrete and steel reinforcement than stresses considered in the design stage. This affects the structural performance of RC beams and leads to sudden fatigue failure. As such, there is an essential need for rehabilitation to avoid hazards and tragedies.

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer (CFRP) composites are becoming widely used to strengthen RC bridges. Near Surface Mounted (NSM) …

Assessing Infrastructure Elements Using Automated Object Detection Technique In Smart City Applications, Majid Mastali

Dissertations

Nowadays, road features are becoming more complex leading to more complicated complaints regarding urban environments. Point Cloud Data (PCD) processing is an essential element for detecting objects and analysing human driving behavior to identify the variables defining challenging objects and maneuvers in smart cities. PCDs include a range of processing, including indirect processing (e.g., data converting, cleaning process) and direct process (e.g., pass through elevation filter, statistical outlier removal, normal estimation as well as classification). Static and dynamic object detection and analysis are typically considered the most sophisticated options subsumed under PCDs. They involve direct evaluation of both static and …

Deterioration Prediction Modeling For The Condition Assessment Of Concrete Bridge Decks, Aqeed Moshin Chyad

Dissertations

Bridges are key elements in the US transportation system. There are more than six hundred thousand bridges on the highway system in the United States. Approximately one third of these bridges are in need of maintenance and will cost more than $120 billion to rehabilitate or repair. Several factors affect the performance of bridges over their life spans. Identifying these factors and accurately assessing the condition of bridges are critical in the development of an effective maintenance program. While there are several methods available for condition assessment, selecting the best technique remains a challenge. Therefore, developing an accurate and reliable …