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Robust Synthesis Methods For Cooperative Systems, Baris Taner

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Cooperative systems, like any other dynamic systems, suffer in performance because of uncertainty yet there is an added layer of uncertainty due to the communication among agents. Therefore, analytic solution to these problems are hard if not impossible. With the advancements in the linear and non-linear methods, i.e. linear matrix inequalities (LMI) and non-linear transformations, robust performance analysis and controller synthesis for cooperative systems can be reformulated as optimization problems with LMI constraints as has been done in the last two decades. Another aspect of the problem becomes visible as the cooperative system grows larger and that necessitates faster solution …

Study Of The Impact Of Atmospheric Variability On Subsurface Methane Emissions: Application To Leak Detection And Quantification For Underground Natural Gas Pipeline Leaks, Shanru Tian

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Natural gas (NG), taken as a bridging fuel for achieving a low-carbon future, has rapidly grown to be a significant component of the global energy system and requires extensive pipeline infrastructures, most of them buried underground. Fugitive methane (CH4) emissions from NG pipeline leaks pose environmental, safety, and economic threats to the public. An effective leak detection and quantification (LDAQ) survey method is critical to identifying a leak and assessing the size when it has occurred, thus initiating appropriate response actions to repair it and accounting for the environmental risks accurately. However, gaps exist between LDAQ survey methods, and the …

The Rise Of Terrorism In Africa And What It Means For U.S. Policymakers, Bridget Mary Hughes

Master's Theses

This thesis utilizes three case studies to measure the rise of terrorism in Africa. This qualitative data leads the reader to one ultimate question: what does the rise in terrorism in Africa mean for the United States (U.S.) and U.S. policymakers, National Security academia, students in National Security, if anything at all? The answer is: if civilian and military compounds are being targeted by these violent extremists, as these three case studies demonstrate, it is my recommendation that U.S. policymakers cease sending troops to the African theater and, instead, allocate funding to the citizens and nonprofits of the countries whom …

Measuring Impacts And Vibrations On A Volumetric Modular House During Transportation, Seung Ho Song

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The U.S. construction industry is experiencing an increase in demand for further implementation of modular construction due to the significant productivity and project cost-reducing benefits it provides. However, there exist challenges with the modular method, and many of them are well covered by previous studies, except for the effects of transportation-induced impact/vibration on volumetric modules. A previous study examined the effects of transportation-induced impact/vibration on a timber-framed module and identified some valuable findings. But, it did not explore other types of modules, height considerations, and the differences in the magnitude of impact/vibration due to different module maneuvers on the road. …

Numerical Simulation Of Hydrodynamic Forces On Riverine And Coastal Bridges Subjected To Extreme Weather Events, Fahad Pervaiz

Civil Engineering Dissertations - Archive

ABSTRACT: Recent bridge failures due to hurricane-generated storm surges and riverine flood events have highlighted the vulnerability of bridge infrastructure to extreme hydrodynamic loading. In addition to posing an immediate risk to human life, bridge failures can hinder evacuation planning and emergency response efforts. Changes in flood frequency and intensity due to climate change and urbanization may alter the hydrodynamic conditions along urban streams, further stressing bridge infrastructure designed based on historical flow conditions. As a result, quantifying the structural response and stability of bridges under current and future hydrodynamic conditions is crucial to improving transportation safety and efficiency. This …

Development Of An Excel Model To Evaluate The Stability Of Slopes, Bradley Davis

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This objective of this study is to determine a method or tool for taking given slope stability parameters and quickly and effectively determining the factor of safety against sliding of fully softened slopes. This study evaluates the effects of soil and geometric parameters of common slopes, and models these properties in a hypothetical model. The methodology is based on a parametric analysis using the Spencer’s Method of Slices limit equilibrium analysis used in the computer program Slide2. A parametric analysis is performed to determine which soil and/or geometric properties have a high influence on slope stability. The parametric analysis is …

Security Analysis And Implementation Of Dnp3 Multilayer Protocol For Secure And Safe Communication In Scada Systems, Isaac Monroy

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

When SCADA systems were first introduced into society, a lot of manpower was required for monitoring and controlling devices within critical infrastructures. With the increasing demand for services and growing systems, a need arose to automate the monitoring and controlling tasks. This led to introduction of networks into SCADA systems to enhance monitoring and control capabilities, that can scale with system size and requirements. But this introduction of network layer along with its advantages, also introduced a new threat surface which exposed multiple vulnerabilities within the system that can exploited to launch attacks, that led to the integration of security …

Simulating Emergency Evacuation Response In An Auditorium Space, Anna Lee

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The successful execution of emergency evacuations is very important for the protection of the public. Some emergency events, such as fires, can occur with very little warning and turn into a dangerous situation in less than a minute. With high population densities, universities have increased risk involved with evacuations. One specific area that presents high risk is auditorium spaces such as lecture halls with high densities combined with added barriers such as tables and chairs. The ability to assess a building’s emergency preparedness is necessary for keeping the public safe. Simulation is a way to conduct a theoretical event and …

The Impact Of Murals On Traffic Safety: A Behavior And Crash Analysis, Maria Cecelia Cruz

Civil Engineering ETDs

ABSTRACT

This research analyzed changes in motor vehicle volumes and motor vehicle speeds after the installation of an intersection mural in Albuquerque, NM and changes in crash frequency after mural installations in Philadelphia, PA. Data was collected manually on site for the Albuquerque study and secondary data – including installation dates and physical characteristics – were used for the Philadelphia crash analyses. Statistics were computed to determine trends in motor vehicle speeds and volumes relative to the Albuquerque mural installation. A geographic information system (GIS) spatial analysis and t-test statistical analyses were used to determine which Philadelphia murals saw significant …

Rapid Pothole Repair In Concrete Bridge Decks, Abheetha Peiris, Issam Harik

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Using traditional methods to repair potholes in reinforced concrete (RC) bridge decks is time-consuming and requires significant manpower and equipment. However, commercially available epoxies and similar materials provide a repair option that does not require saw cutting the deck around the pothole, concrete removal, and replacement. Researchers laboratory tested three epoxies to identify which is best for pothole repairs. Based on assessments of substrate penetration times and set times for epoxy and epoxy mortar, as well as compressive strength gain over time for epoxy mortar, researchers selected Sikadur 52 for static and dynamic bending tests using small-scale beams with simulated …

Exploring And Validating Risks Related To Containerization : Lessons For Vietnam, Minh Nhat Pham

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Final Report - Simulation Training To Work With Bridge Inspection Robots, Sushil J. Louis

Project WD-3

This project aims to investigate and develop a software system that helps bridge inspectors work together with semiautonomous and autonomous robots that efficiently and effectively inspect truss bridges more thoroughly in less time. Our first project WD-2 effort developed a simulation training system for bridge inspection, enabling a heterogeneous group of simulated robots to accelerate comprehensive bridge inspections. This new project WD-3 will investigate and develop techniques to 1) map the simulated world to the real world, 2) connect simulated robots with real robots being developed in other INSPIRE projects, and 3) investigate and develop algorithms, protocols, and autonomy for …

Transient Nonlinear Vibration Characterization Of Building Materials In Sequential Impact Scale Experiments, James Bittner, John S. Popovics

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Characterizing standard building materials such as concrete is challenging primarily because of the broad range of constituent component sizes within the material itself. Concrete, the most ubiquitous building material, contains critical components that span at least three orders of magnitude of physical size. This work introduces a nondestructive sequential impact test to extract transient nonlinear vibration behaviors that provide statistically significant holistic characterization of a heterogeneous building material, neat cement paste, on a centimeter scale sample. The sensitivity of the single impact vibration combined with the repeatability of the new sequential apparatus enables the extraction of statistically distinct transient nonlinear …

Software Protection And Secure Authentication For Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing, Muhammad Hataba

Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC.

In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our …

Kentucky Traffic Collision Facts 2021 Report, Paul Ross, Eric Green, Christopher Blackden, Michael Fields, Kenneth Agent, Christopher Van Dyke, Ed Harding

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Each year the Kentucky Transportation Center publishes the Traffic Collision Facts report in collaboration with the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Kentucky State Police, and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. This is the fiscal year 2022 report, which covers collisions reported during calendar year 2021. For the year, 734 fatal crashes, 20,117 nonfatal crashes, and 88,440 property damage only crashes occurred on the state’s roadways. Overall, 109,291 crashes were reported in calendar year 2021, a 8.4 percent increase over calendar year 2020.

Coupled Situational Awareness System To Improve Transportation Infrastructure Performance During Extreme Events, Hatim Sharif, Samer Dessouky, Md Jobair Bin Alam, Raghava Kommalapati, Hongbo Du Ph.D

Publications

The dense road networks and numerous low water crossings throughout Texas may be contributing to the higher recurrence rates of floods that pose a danger to vehicles. A timely issue that should be addressed by researchers is the compounding of disaster. Flooding can be combined with other life-threatening occurrences such as power loss and interruptions of health and emergency services. During these events, rescue requests from the stranded communities overwhelm the emergency response facilities; impassable roadways and the paucity of reliable information on the affected areas and their accessibility hamper emergency response operations, causing several detours and delays that put …

Big Lagoon Sea Level Rise, Kyra Cohen, Malia Seeley, Dustin Helliwell, Albert Wolff

Student Projects

Cal Poly Humboldt Environmental Resources Engineering Senior Capstone.

The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is highly concerned sea level rise (SLR), due to climate change and the potential negative impacts on the California transportation system. SLR is especially important for routes constructed at low elevations and those immediately adjacent to the coast where SLR is one of the largest threats to the transportation system along the coast. Rising sea levels are expected to disrupt the daily lives of Californians, specifically the coastal economies, which increases the risk to public safety and contributes to the decline of ecosystems that are vital …

Quality-Of-Service Provisioning For Smart City Applications Using Software-Defined Networking, Basima Kurungadan

Theses

In the current world, most cities have WiFi Access Points (AP) in every nook and corner. Hence upraising these cities to the status of a smart city is a more easily achievable task than before. Internet-of-Things (IoT) connections primarily use WiFi standards to form the veins of a smart city. Unfortunately, this vast potential of WiFi technology in the genesis of smart cities is somehow compromised due to its failure in meeting unique Quality-of-Service (QoS) demands of smart city applications. Out of the following QoS factors; transmission link bandwidth, packet transmission delay, jitter, and packet loss rate, not all applications …

Poster Session, Kentucky Water Research Institute

Kentucky Water Resources Annual Symposium

• Evaluating the Effects of Beaver Dam Removal on the Hydrology, Water Quality, and Bioindicators of a Restored Wetland
• Predictive Sediment Flux Modeling of a Karst Spring Using High Resolution Sensors and Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotopes
• Development and Validation of qPCR Assays for Use in eDNA Detection of Four Species of Semiaquatic Salamanders .
• Analyzing Recent Spatio-Temporal Rainfall Erosivity Patterns and Trends Across Kentucky
• Development of eDNA Protocols for Detection of Four Darter (Percidae: Etheostomatinae) Species in Central Kentucky Streams
• Assessing Change in the Seasonality of Stable Isotopes δ18O and δ2H for Meteoric and Terrestrial Waters of Central Kentucky
• Coupling …

Science And Food Fictions: Agricultural Technologies, The Evolution Of The Modern Industrial Diet, And Calls For A Food Revolution, Tracey Daniels-Lerberg

Green Humanities: A Journal of Ecological Thought in Literature, Philosophy & the Arts

[First paragraph] Individual food choices are culturally and historically contingent practices that arise through an amalgamation of often hidden political, scientific, and economic policies that shape desire and influence access. Food, like all other man-made mechanisms of control and authority, has been used “as a political tool for […] subjugating (either economically or politically) other nations” according to William A. Dando, a professor at the University of North Dakota, who in 1975 urged American agricultural officials not to use food as “a weapon” against starving nations, something he feared was eminently possible given the economic and political climate of agricultural …

Noncontact Machinery Operation Status Monitoring System With Gated Recurrent Unit Model, Jason Jing Wei Lim, Boon Yaik Ooi, Wai Kong Lee, Teik Boon Tan, Soung Yue Liew

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In manufacturing industry, assembly line monitoring provides statistical information about overall performance and reliability of the legacy machines, ensuring that the machines give maximum yield output. However, most legacy machines lack internet connectivity and advanced functionality, increasing the difficulty for tracking task. Therefore, this work seeks to introduce a noncontact acoustic method to track machines rather than the mainstream vibrational approach. In order to provide accurate tracking of the daily machine operation for our machine tracking system, we consider scenario of background noises such as environmental sounds from multiple sources as well as neighbouring machine?s sound. Thus, several neural networks …

Value Focused Thinking Analysis Of C-Band Australia Radar Operations, Samuel Ray Grothman

Theses and Dissertations

The radars used for Space Domain Awareness (SDA) are inherently all-weather, day/night sensors capable of around the clock operations. Despite this fact, some radars are operated for fewer than their maximum operating capabilities. The decision-making process for selecting the operating hours of a sensor has historically been based on only a few factors or just one. This research uses the techniques in Value Focused Thinking to develop an evaluation process to score possible alternatives and find the alternative with the most value for the decision maker. By investigating the value that is added by operating an SDA radar, it is …

Supplementary Information For "Understanding Mid-To Large Underground Leaks From Buried Pipelines As Affected By Soil And Atmospheric Conditions – Field Scale Experimental Study", Navodi J.R.R. Jayarathne, Kathleen M. Smits, Stuart N. Riddick, Daniel J. Zimmerle, Younki Cho, Michelle Schwartz, Fancy Cheptonui, Kevan Cameron, Peter Ronney

Earth & Environmental Sciences Datasets - Archive

Reducing the amount of leaked natural gas (NG) from pipelines from production to use has become a high priority in efforts to cut anthropogenic emissions of methane and ensure public safety. However, tracking and evaluating NG pipeline leaks, especially at moderate to high flow rates, requires a better understanding of the leak from the source to the detector as well as more robust quantification methods. To better understand fugitive emissions from NG pipelines, we developed a field scale testbed that simulates mid and high-pressure gas leaks from belowground natural gas infrastructure. The system is equipped with subsurface, surface and atmospheric …

Developing Novel Optimization And Machine Learning Frameworks To Improve And Assess The Safety Of Workplaces, Amin Aghalari

Theses and Dissertations

This study proposes several decision-making tools utilizing optimization and machine learning frameworks to assess and improve the safety of the workplaces. The first chapter of this study presents a novel mathematical model to optimally locate a set of detectors to minimize the expected number of casualties in a given threat area. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear binary integer programming model and then solved as a linearized branch-and-bound algorithm. Several sensitivity analyses illustrate the model's robustness and draw key managerial insights. One of the prevailing threats in the last decades, Active Shooting (AS) violence, poses a serious threat to …

Reduced Fuel Emissions Through Connected Vehicles And Truck Platooning, Paul D. Brummitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication enable the sharing, in real time, of vehicular locations and speeds with other vehicles, traffic signals, and traffic control centers. This shared information can help traffic to better traverse intersections, road segments, and congested neighborhoods, thereby reducing travel times, increasing driver safety, generating data for traffic planning, and reducing vehicular pollution. This study, which focuses on vehicular pollution, used an analysis of data from NREL, BTS, and the EPA to determine that the widespread use of V2V-based truck platooning—the convoying of trucks in close proximity to one another so as to reduce air drag …

Development Of Flood Prediction Models Using Machine Learning Techniques, Bhanu Kanwar

Doctoral Dissertations

"Flooding and flash flooding events damage infrastructure elements and pose a significant threat to the safety of the people residing in susceptible regions. There are some methods that government authorities rely on to assist in predicting these events in advance to provide warning, but such methodologies have not kept pace with modern machine learning. To leverage these algorithms, new models must be developed to efficiently capture the relationships among the variables that influence these events in a given region. These models can be used by emergency management personnel to develop more robust flood management plans for susceptible areas. The research …

A Patient Risk Minimization Model For Post-Disaster Medical Delivery Using Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Mark J. Simpson

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The purpose of this research was to develop a novel routing model for delivery of medical supplies using unmanned aircraft systems, improving existing vehicle routing models by using patient risk as the primary minimization variable.

The vehicle routing problem is a subset of operational research that utilizes mathematical models to identify the most efficient route between sets of points. Routing studies using unmanned aircraft systems frequently minimize time, distance, or cost as the primary objective and are powerful decision-making tools for routine delivery operations. However, the fields of emergency triage and disaster response are focused on identifying patient injury severity …

Improving The Hardware Security Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Against Side Channel Analysis Using Motor Noise, Timothy Radtke

Master's Theses (2009 -)

This thesis investigates the efficacy of side channel analysis based attacks to recover the encryption key of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) which have become increasingly important internet of things devices in both the public and military sectors. Additionally, this thesis proposes a method based on noise injection to safeguard against side channel analysis based attacks. The proposed method is unique because it is ultra-low power and uses as a noise source the brushless motors of the unmanned aerial vehicle. Verification through experimentation on an in-house build UAV system is presented. Firstly, side channel analysis techniques are overviewed and the correlation …

Jme 4110: Yogurt Lid Remover Device, Odette Beagrie, Seela Wang, Moises Martinez Camarena, Keaton Christensen

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

There are not many, if any, products that tackle an issue every demographic, generation, and person faces, removing a yogurt lid completely and without a mess. For the elder generation, this proves more difficult as the lid is not easy to peel off for a variety of yogurts. Lucky enough, there is now a portable, easy to use product that will solve this everyday obstacle; the Yogurt Lid Remover (YLR).

Behavioral Intention Factors For Prescription Deliveries By Small Unmanned Aircraft In Rural Communities, Sarah M. Talley

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Nearly half of the U.S. population regularly use and depend on prescription medications; however, pharmacy availability and access to pharmacy services are often lacking, particularly in rural communities. In an effort to meet local healthcare needs, delivery by sUAS is proposed to ensure the nearly 60 million rural residents have access to their prescription medications.

As an emerging technology with little research into home delivery applications, the successful implementation of sUAS for prescription medication delivery requires public acceptance and positive behavioral intention toward its use. At the time of the current research, no prior studies have specifically focused on the …