Engineering Commons^™

Tra-938: A Parkway In A Prairie: The Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway, Joel Foster

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Can a new international trade corridor successfully co-exist with one of the world’s most threatened ecosystems? Through careful design and innovative mitigation, the Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway (the Parkway) was built with sensitivity to the adjacent tallgrass prairie. The Parkway was approved under the Ontario Environmental Assessment Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act as the new freeway connection between Highway 401 and a new crossing of the Detroit River between Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan.

Tallgrass prairie ecosystems are one of the most endangered vegetation communities on Earth and home to many rare species. The Parkway's ecological approach …

Tra-936: Modifying Signal Control At Intersections Under Adverse Weather Conditons, Zhengyang Lu, Liping Fu, Tae J. Kwon

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Adverse winter weather has always been a cause of traffic congestion and road collisions. To mitigate the negative impacts of winter weather, transportation agencies are under increasing pressure to introduce weather responsive traffic management strategies such as adaptive control of signalized intersections and variable speed limits. Currently, most traffic signal control systems are designed for normal weather conditions and are therefore suboptimal in terms of efficiency and safety for controlling traffic during winter snow events due to the changing traffic patterns and driver behavior. The main objective of this research is to explore how to modify traffic signal control under …

Tra-939: Re-Establishing Community Connections: The Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway, Joel Foster

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The Rt. Hon. Herb Gray Parkway (the Parkway) is the Canadian access road portion of a new end-to-end transportation system for the Windsor-Detroit corridor. The Parkway was identified through the Detroit River International Crossing (DRIC) study, one of the most extensive environmental assessments ever undertaken by Ontario. The Parkway was approved under the Ontario Environmental Assessment Act and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act in 2009 and construction began in 2011.

Windsor-Detroit is the busiest land border crossing in Canada. More than 9,000 transport trucks per day travel the corridor from Highway 401 to border crossings in Windsor. Prior to construction, …

Tra-940: Assessing Current And Future Mackenzie River Freight Volumes In The Context Of Climate Change Impacts, Yunzhuang Zheng, Amy Kim, Qianqian Du

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The Mackenzie River is a major freight transportation route that connects many remote communities in the Northwest Territories and parts of Nunavut to southern Canada’s transportation network. The river is only navigable during the summer months, from mid-June until sometime in late-September to mid-October, when it is clear of ice. However, the water conditions of the river have changed significantly in recent years. Although water levels always decrease as the delivery season moves into fall, these reductions have been occurring much faster, in turn reducing barge loading capacities as well as operational speeds. In addition, based on simulations of ice …

Tra-941: Effectiveness Of Variable Message Signs In Improving The Road Network Through Route Guidance, Ahmed Kamal Mostafa, Dalia G. Said, Omar Osman Omar, Ahmed Atef Gadallah

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Variable Message Signs (VMS) are a means of providing valuable information to roadway users and enhancing the performance of the road network. The main objective of this research was to analyze the effectiveness of the use of VMS in improving the efficiency of the road network. This was implemented through a number of case studies under different conditions and different designs of the VMS. As this is a unique traffic guidance method to Egypt, the different factors that may affect the effectiveness of the sign to divert drivers was studied to fully understand the benefits of implementing VMS in Egypt. …

Tra-942: Imputation Of Missing Classified Traffic Data During Winter Season, Hyuk-Jae Roh, Satish Sharma, Prasanta K. Sahu

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Highway agencies collect traffic data to calculate traffic parameters such as Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT), Design Hourly Volume (DHV) and then to use as input in the planning, operation and management of their highway systems. The traffic data are usually collected through traffic monitoring programs. In particular, the Weigh-in-Motion (WIM) system is one of data collection systems to capture configuration patterns of vehicle travelling on the detection area. It is learned from literatures that traffic monitoring devices are prone to be in malfunctioning and, consequently, providing erroneous or missing traffic data due to the adverse weather conditions in which …

Tra-946: Comparing Crash Estimation Techniques For Ranking Of Sites In A Network Screening Process, Lalita Thakali, Liping Fu, Tao Chen

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Network screening, a process for an effective and efficient management of road safety programs, relies on crash prediction techniques to quantify the relative risks of given sites. The two most commonly used statistical approaches are- cross-sectional model-based approach and Empirical Bayesian (EB) approach as they are known for reducing regression-to-mean bias problem of a simple crash history-based method. Meanwhile, relatively the EB approach is known to be a robust technique as it accounts for a site-specific risk level while still incorporating the risk estimates obtained from a cross-sectional model. Common to both the approaches is they are relatively convenient to …

Tra-944: Union Pearson Express Spur And T1 Station, Srdjan Brasic, Andrew Barr

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The Union Pearson Express Spur and station in Terminal 1 is a Design-Build-Finance pursuit by Infrastructure Ontario on behalf of the client/owner, Metrolinx. The rail passenger service line branches off the existing GO Georgetown Rail corridor and connects to Toronto Pearson International Airport with a new passenger station at Terminal 1. The Spur alignment is elevated over its entire length and crosses above major existing airport access roads and existing bridges, and connects to a new UP Express Terminal 1 Station in-line with the existing Automated People Mover Station.

The Spur Elevated Guideway is a 3 km long, multi span …

Tra-950: A Dynamic Programming Approach For Arterial Signal Optimization In A Connected Vehicle Environment, Gang Liu, Tony Z. Qiu

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Within the Connected Vehicle (CV) environment, vehicles are able to communicate with each other and with infrastructure via wireless communication technology. The collected data from CVs provide a much more complete picture of the arterial traffic states and can be utilized for signal control. Based on the real-time traffic information from CVs, this paper enhances an arterial traffic flow model for arterial signal optimization. Then a dynamic programming optimization model is created to solve the signal optimization application. A real-world arterial corridor is modeled in VISSIM to validate the algorithms. This approach is shown to generate good results and may …

Tra-951: The Importance Of Integrated Corridor Management At Borders And Their Surrounding Communities, Ben Plested

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The Transportation field is moving forward with an Integrated Corridor Management (ICM) approach whose aim is to manage the highway corridors as a multimodal system, and allows professionals to introduce operational decisions for the benefit of the corridor as a whole. Through this approach, travelers will be able to make educated decisions in choosing their method and route of travel, allowing highway corridors to realize significant improvements in the efficient movement of people and goods.

Border crossing locations are receiving attention from various stakeholders and partnerships, and substantial funding is being provided with the aim of implementing an Integrated Corridor …

Tra-952: Enhancing Resilience Of Traffic Networks With Connected Vehicles, Ata M. Khan, Matthew Whelen, Naser Snobar, Omar Elsafdi, Brooke Jones, Patricia Arnold

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Improving resilience of transportation infrastructure is a multifaceted subject. One of these addresses the traffic serving capability of the transportation system. As the profession progresses in finding ways to improve infrastructure resilience in physical terms, an associated thought process is underway to enhance the adaptive capacity in traffic networks with intelligent systems and advanced related methods in order to cope with shocks in the traffic environment caused by nature-induced or other events. This paper reports research in-progress on measures for enhancing the resilience of road traffic networks with applications of connected vehicles. The need for resilient road traffic networks is …

Tra-953: Automation In Driving For Enhancing Resiliency In Transportation System, Ata M. Khan, Matthew Whelen, Omar Elsafdi, Naser Snobar, Brooke Jones, Patricia Arnold

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The ability of the transportation system to continue to serve traffic under disruptive conditions is a resilience characteristic of infrastructure and traffic management. In the context of this research, resilience is defined as the ability to resist the loss of traffic-serving capability by using traffic (including geometric) and control system design advances (i.e. the inherent resilience) and by activating capacity-enhancing measures (i.e. the dynamic resilience). Vulnerabilities in road traffic networks cause the loss of capability to serve demand overloads. On the other hand, intelligent technology and associated methodology can potentially prevent or reduce this loss of capability. An outstanding research …

Tra-954: Solution Model For Urban Traffic Congestion: Egyptian Case Study, Mary E. Soliman, Romany E. Bassily, Safwan A. Khedr, Maram M. Saudy, Ezzat H. Fahmy, Omar I. Khalil

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Traffic congestion is a major problem in many cities around the world resulting in massive delays, increased fuel wastage, environmental impact and other negative consequences affecting the daily life of each individual. From a transportation engineering point of view, making the correct decision to eliminate such congestion problems can be very difficult for decision-makers who carry the burden of analyzing large quantities of data which could be vague and conflicting in nature. Therefore, an effective and consistent system is required to simplify the decision-making process of the traffic congestion control. Traffic simulation could be that tool.

The seriousness of traffic …

Tra-956: Improving Intersection Throughput Using Connected Vehicles, Jiangchen Li, Jie Gao, Tony Z. Qiu

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

This paper proposes a connected vehicle based approach to improve the throughput at signalized intersections and ultimately increase the mobility of a transportation system. Connected vehicle technology demonstrates tremendous potential for improving safety and mobility, as it enables the real-time sharing of vehicle data, including position, speed, acceleration, etc., not only among vehicles but also between vehicles and infrastructure. The proposed approach takes advantage of such real-time data to develop a strategy that maximizes throughput of an isolated intersection locally. Accordingly, the problem is formulated as a two-step centralized optimization. There are two main processes in this method: optimization for …

Tra-957: London On Bikes – London’S Cycling Master Plan Strategic Changes To Improve London’S Cycling Culture & Infrastructure, Douglas W. Macrae, Claire A. S. Basinski

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The City of London, Canada has been implementing cycling infrastructure since the 1980s. The City’s formal cycling master planning efforts to improve the cycling culture within the City were successfully “launched” in 2005 with the development and adoption of the City’s first Cycling Master Plan. The first master plan was followed by a strategic implementation plan which was completed in 2007 and used to guide planning, design and engineering efforts by City staff. The completion and adoption of both of these plans has led to the development of comprehensive off-road network of cycling facilities along the City’s premier Thames River …

Tra-958: A Methodology For Integrating Asset Valuation In Transportation Asset Management, Zaid Alyami, Susan L. Tighe

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Asset valuation is an essential component of effective asset management. It is an important method to demonstrate proper management of public assets and effective utilization of government’s budgets. In addition, it allows agencies to demonstrate justifications of funds needed to preserve its assets. Asset valuation is used in standard reporting, depreciation schedules, auditor requirements and condition assessments. Several government regulatory bodies mandate agencies to report their Capital Tangible Assets’ (CTA) values within their annual statement. For example, the Canadian Public Sector Accounting Board (PSAB), the Governmental Accounting Standard Board (GASB) and the New Zealand International Financial Reporting Standards (NZ IFRS) …

Tra-960: Field Evaluation Of Passing Sight Distance Parameters, Udai Hassein, Said Easa

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Drivers require a sufficient distance on a two-lane highway to ensure that they can safely maneuver past an impeding vehicle. The passing behaviour of drivers is an important element of safe passing maneuvers. In this paper, field studies were conducted in different countries to determine the passing behaviour of drivers. The study involved participants of both genders in different age groups. A passing profile was established using experimental data collected by Dual Camera Car DVRs and a GPS data logger device that records the instantaneous speeds and positions of different passing vehicles. Using the collected data, linear regression models were …

Tra-961: Foam Glass Lightweight Aggregate: The New Approach, Yassaman Yousefi, Adam C. Schneider, Hassan Baaj, Susan L. Tighe, Abbas Youssefi

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Foam glass lightweight aggregate (LWA) derived from mixed waste and recycled glass has great potential for use as an alternative material for several applications in building and other industrial applications. Despite the significant superior features of the current product, there is still room for further research to improve the structural performance of newly developed foam glass and foam glass-ceramics produced from waste and recycled materials. Improvements may be achieved through controlling microstructures and the distributions of pore sizes and shapes, altering chemical and phase compositions, creating reinforced structures by the inclusion of other fibrous materials as well as adding colour …

Tra-962: Coloured Asphalt Bus Rapid Transit Lanes In The Regional Municipality Of York: Integrating Laboratory Performance Testing Into Sustainable Pavement Asset Management, Sina Varamini, Mehran Kafi Farashah, Susan L. Tighe

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Located north of Toronto, Ontario, The Regional Municipality of York, the sixth largest municipality in Canada, is a thriving community and home to a well-established service sector. York Region’s population is expected to grow from 1.1 million in 2013 to 1.8 million in 2041. With more people coming to the Region every year, Rapid Transit projects provide significant benefits. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lanes are built or being built along the three most heavily travelled roads in York Region: Yonge Street, Highway 7 and Davis Drive. To improve the level of safety through enhanced visibility and help residents and motorists …

Tra-963: Evaluation Of Using Wifi Signals To Estimate Intersection Travel Time, Sajad Shiravi, Kamal Hossain, Liping Fu, Amir Ghods

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Travel time is an important measure in traffic engineering and planning with many applications including identification of network bottlenecks, plan to improve traffic mobility, providing commuters with travel time information, and traffic signal control evaluation and control. Currently a number of technologies can provide travel time information such as GPS enabled probes and identifying vehicles with Bluetooth or Wi-Fi devices. The later method detects and matches unique Media Access Control (MAC) address of the Bluetooth or Wi-Fi activated devices to calculate travel time information. This method is a non-intrusive and cost effective and has gained a lot of attention in …

Tra-967: Time Expenditure Differences Among Weekdays, Weekends, And Fridays For Residents Of Makkah, Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Alaa A. S. Sindi, Said Easa, A. O. Abd El Halim

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

Many researchers have studied the differences in travel behaviours during the weekdays and the weekends for building travel demand in Makkah, Saudi Arabia, any travel demand framework should recognize the differences in residents’ travel behaviour not only between the weekdays and the weekends, but also on Fridays. During the weekends (i.e., Thursday and Friday), most residents spend time with their families and friends on Thursdays, whereas some go to work. On Fridays, there is the Friday prayer, which takes place around noon, and most of the stores are closed until late afternoon. This paper presents modelling of the activity duration …

Tra-968: Waterloo Region Light Rail Transit – Overview And Design Challenge, Scott Davis

Canadian Society for Civil Engineering

The Region of Waterloo rapid transit system (“ION”) will connect the Region’s three major urban centres - the cities of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo. This presentation will focus on the Stage I Light Rail Transit (LRT) project between north Waterloo and south Kitchener. It is being implemented as a DBFOM project by GrandLinq Consortium, and AECOM is the lead designer for this project. The capital cost to construct is $818M and the cost is split approximately equally between the Government of Canada, the Government of Ontario, and the Region of Waterloo.

Energy, Economy, And Environment Analysis And Optimization On Manufacturing Plant Energy Supply System, Lujia Feng, Laine Mears, Cleveland Beaufort, Joerg Schulte

Publications

Increasing attention has recently been drawn to energy consumption in manufacturing plants. Facing the challenges from reducing emissions coupled with rising raw material prices and energy costs, manufacturers are trying to balance the energy usage strategy among the total energy consumption, economy, and environment, which can be self-conflicting at times. In this paper, energy systems in manufacturing environments are reviewed, and the current status of onsite energy system and renewable energy usage are discussed. Single objective and multicriteria optimization approaches are effectively formulated for making the best use of energy delivered to the production processes. Energy supply operation suggestions based …

Enrichment Of Diluted Cell Populations From Large Sample Volumes Using 3d Carbon-Electrode Dielectrophoresis, Monsur Islam, Rucha Natu, Maria Fernanda Larraga-Martinez, Rodrigo Martinez-Duarte

Publications

Here, we report on an enrichment protocol using carbon electrodedielectrophoresis to isolate and purify a targeted cell population from sample volumes up to 4 ml. We aim at trapping, washing, and recovering an enriched cell fraction that will facilitate downstream analysis. We used an increasingly diluted sample of yeast, 106–102 cells/ml, to demonstrate the isolation and enrichment of few cells at increasing flow rates. A maximum average enrichment of 154.2 ± 23.7 times was achieved when the sample flow rate was 10 μl/min and yeast cells were suspended in low electrically conductive media that maximizes dielectrophoresis trapping. A COMSOL …

Cost Estimation Model For Pan Based Carbon Fiber Manufacturing Process, Amaninder Singh Gill, Darian Visotsky, Laine Mears, Joshua D. Summers

Publications

A polyacrilonitrile (PAN) based carbon fiber manufacturing cost estimation model driven by weight is presented in this study. One of the biggest limiting factors in the large scale use of carbon fiber (CF) in manufacturing is its high cost. The costs involved in manufacturing the carbon fiber have been formalized into a cost model in order to facilitate the understanding of these factors. This can play a key role in manufacturing CF in a cost effective method. This cost model accounts for the fixed and variable costs involved in all stages of manufacturing, in addition to accounting for price elasticity.

Design Of Magnesium Phosphate Cement Based Composite For High Performance Bipolar Plate Of Fuel Cells, Wenbin Hao, Hongyan Ma, Zeyu Lu, Guoxing Sun, Zongjin Li

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this work, we report a comprehensive study on a magnesium phosphate cement (MPC) based composite as the construction material for high performance bipolar plates of fuel cells. MPC with partial replacement of fly ash was employed as the binding matrix. Some carbon-based materials, such as graphite, carbon black, carbon fiber, and multi-walled carbon nanotubes were used to construct the conductive phase. A simple hot-press process was applied to produce the composite. The formula and the structure of the composite was modified and adjusted to optimize the properties of the composite to meet the US DOE 2015 technical targets, including …

Modification Of Upper-Ocean Temperature Structure By Subsurface Mixing In The Presence Of Strong Salinity Stratification, Emily L. Shroyer, Daniel L. Rudnick, J. Thomas Farrar, Byungho Lim, S. Karan Venayagamoorthy, Louis C.St Laurent, Amrapalli Garanaik, James N. Moum

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The Bay of Bengal has a complex upper-ocean temperature and salinity structure that is, in places, characterized by strong salinity stratification and multiple inversions in temperature. Here, two short time series from continuously profiling floats, equipped with microstructure sensors to measure subsurface mixing, are used to highlight implications of complex hydrography on upper-ocean heat content and the evolution of sea surface temperature. Weak mixing coupled with the existence of subsurface warm layers suggest the potential for storage of heat below the surface mixed layer over relatively long-time scales. On the diurnal time scale, these data demonstrate the competing effects of …

Remind, Keith Abdulla

Computer Science and Software Engineering

No abstract provided.

Automatic Generation And Grading Of Programming Exercises, Andrew Dufrene

Computer Science and Software Engineering

In our current age of technological advances, and rising education costs, it is becoming increasingly beneficial to use technology to aid in education, usually through automated lectures or grading. One missing feature from this automated education is complex grading and problem generation. The main objective of this project is to create a program that can automatically generate and grade problems of varying difficulties based on the topic of programming for loops. The project solution was created as a program designed for use in Dr. Clinton Staley’s Intelligent Homework System, which is used precisely for automated exercise grading and generation. Ultimately, …

High-Rate And Low-Complexity Space-Time Block Codes For 2x2 Mimo Systems, Vida Vakilian, Hani Mehrpouyan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The main design criteria for space-time block codes (STBCs) are the code rate, diversity order, coding gain, and low decoder complexity. In this letter, we propose a full-rate full-diversity STBC for 2 × 2 multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with a substantially lower maximum likelihood (ML) detection complexity than that of existing schemes. This makes the implementation of high-performance full-rate codes feasible for practical systems. Our numerical evaluation shows that the proposed code achieves significantly lower decoding complexity while maintaining a similar performance compared to that of existing rate-2 STBCs.