Engineering Commons^™

Adaptive Water Infrastructure Planning For A Changing World, Sarah Fletcher

All ECSTATIC Materials

Water planners face the challenge of ensuring reliable water supply for people and the environment. Long-term changes and short-term variability in both the natural and social environments create large uncertainty in future water supply and demand. This makes it difficult to know when and how to adapt water systems through operational changes, policy, and infrastructure development. Adaptive planning approaches, in which planners defer action and respond as the system changes over time, have the potential to enable robustness to an uncertain future without unnecessary infrastructure development or policy changes. However, adaptive approaches may prevent planners from leveraging economies of scale, …

Adaptive Policy Design In Water Resources Systems Under Uncertain Climate And Human Stressors, Jon Herman

All ECSTATIC Materials

Long-term planning of water resources systems must contend with severe uncertainty in future projections of hydroclimatic variability across multiple scales, as well as uncertainty in human behavior, such as land use and reservoir operation. This talk will review recent developments in adaptive policy design to meet this challenge, centered around the key question: how should we learn from, and react to, dynamic observations of hydroclimatic, human, and ecological variables to ensure long-term sustainability? Specific contributions will cover three areas: (1) adaptation of short-term control rules, enabling existing infrastructure to manage multiple objectives across a range of possible futures; (2) exploration …

Flow-Based Adaptive Split Signal Control, Airton G. Kohls

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the last 35 years many adaptive traffic signal control systems have been developed presenting alternative strategies to improve traffic signal operations. However, less than 1% of all traffic signals in the United States are controlled by adaptive systems today. The extensive infrastructure necessary including reliable communication and complex calibration leads to a time consuming and costly process. In addition, the most recent National Traffic Signal Report Card indicated an overall grade of D for the nation’s traffic signal control and operations. Recent economic adversity adds to the already difficult task of proactively managing aged signal timing plans.

Therefore, in …