The Science of Bike-sharing
TAU develops a high-tech tool to improve two-wheeled public transportation
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The new environmentally-friendly concept of municipal “bike-sharing is taking over European cities like Paris, and American cities like New York are also looking into the idea. It allows a subscriber to “borrow” a bike from one of hundreds of locations in the city, use it, and return it to another location at the end of the journey. It’s good for commuters and for running short errands.
While the idea is gaining speed and subscribers at the 400 locations around the world where it has been implemented, there have been growing pains — partly because the projects have been so successful. About seven percent of the time, users aren’t able to return a bike because the station at their journey’s destination is full. And sometimes stations experience bike shortages, causing frustration with the system.
To solve the problem, Dr. Tal Raviv and Prof. Michal Tzur of Tel Aviv University‘s Department of Industrial Engineering are developing a mathematical model to lead to a software solution. “These stations are managed imperfectly, based on what the station managers see. They use their best guesses to move bikes to different locations around the city using trucks,” explains Dr. Raviv. “There is no system for more scientifically managing the availability of bikes, creating dissatisfaction among users in popular parts of the city.”
Their research was presented in November 2010 at the INFORMS 2010 annual meeting in Austin, Texas.
Biking with computers
An environmentalist, Dr. Raviv wants to see more cities in America adopt the bike-sharing system. In Paris alone, there are 1,700 pick-up and drop-off stations. In New York, there soon might be double or triple that amount, making the management of bike availability an extremely daunting task.
Dr. Raviv, Prof. Tzur and their students have created a mathematical model to predict which bike stations should be refilled or emptied — and when that needs to happen. In small towns with 100 stations, mere manpower can suffice, they say. But anything more and it’s really just a guessing game. A computer program will be more effective.
The researchers are the first to tackle bike-sharing system management using mathematical models and are currently developing a practical algorithmic solution. “Our research involves devising methods and algorithms to solve the routing and scheduling problems of the trucks that move fleets, as well as other operational and design challenges within this system,” says Dr. Raviv.
For the built environment
The benefits of bike-sharing programs in any city are plentiful. They cut down traffic congestion and alleviate parking shortages; reduce air pollution and health effects such as asthma and bronchitis; promote fitness; and enable good complementary public transportation by allowing commuters to ride from and to train or bus stations.
Because of the low cost of implementing bike-sharing programs, cities can benefit without significant financial outlay. And in some cities today, bicycles are also the fastest form of transport during rush hour.
The city of Tel Aviv is now in the process of deploying a bike sharing system to ease transport around the city, and improve the quality of life for its residents. Tel Aviv University research is contributing to this plan, and the results will be used in a pilot site in Israel
For more transportation news from Tel Aviv University, click here.
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Reference Link
http://www.aftau.org/site/News2/1039511600?page=NewsArticle&id=13823&news_iv_ctrl=-1
Courtesy
American Friends of Tel Aviv University
Software could help prevent disaster in sinking cities
A Nottingham University researcher has been awarded funding to help China prevent human disaster as some of its fastest-growing cities sink under the weight of towering skyscrapers.
Dr Andrew Sowter, a mathematician and scientist at the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China (UNNC), is developing a computer program that will help Chinese authorities identify with greater accuracy exactly where, and by how much, structures are moving.
The UNNC scientist’s software will analyse satellite images gathered over several years to reveal how much land has moved, in millimetres, across the entire city.
Shanghai, like several other coastal cities in China, is built on marshy soil, making it vulnerable to sinking. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, it is believed to be sinking at an average rate of 2-4cm a year, putting pressure on underground pedestrian and railway tunnels, and building foundations.
In 2003, subsidence was blamed for the collapse of an eight-storey building in Shanghai’s inner-city Bund region, which is known for its iconic commercial real estate.
The pumping of groundwater to cater for a massive, growing population has been a significant contributor to subsidence. The problem has been exacerbated by the country’s decades-long building boom amid rapid urbanisation, said Sowter.
Sowter is working in collaboration with Shanghai’s Tongji University, which is gathering ground information to confirm the results of data gathered from space.
’We are advancing and refining existing computer programs so that we can identify risks with greater confidence of the accuracy of the results. Rather than just measuring the problem, we are also improving the models to map and identify priority areas,’ he said.
The Nottingham Ningbo scientist has also commenced research on the coastal city of Ningbo to assess the extent to which it might be sinking. An underground rail system is being constructed to accommodate the estimated eight-million-plus population of greater Ningbo, which, like Shanghai, has developed rapidly and is on water-logged land.
Sowter said that the technology he is developing can be applied to other risks associated with land, such as earthquake zones, high-risk flood areas, land deformation from mining, and glacier movements. It can, for example, help authorities prevent landslides by detecting where land is starting to move at the stage when changes are slight.
Reference Link
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/software-could-help-prevent-disaster-in-sinking-cities/1007102.article
Courtesy
The Engineer
University of Warwick engineering students use Xbox to aid award winning rescue robot
Engineering students at the University of Warwick are building an innovative rescue robot which uses the Xbox Kinect to help navigate the machine – in a bid to retain the European RoboCup Rescue Championship title which was won by a team of Warwick students last year.
They are currently trialling the XBox Kinect to see if they can use it to provide a method of real time visual communication and 3D mapping, which will ultimately aid in the navigation of the autonomous robot to give the team an edge over the competition.
If this is successful the team could save thousands of pounds but using the technology instead of buying existing sensors.
Last year’s team developed a robot to crawl over difficult terrain such as destroyed buildings in search of trapped survivors. This robot won first place overall and best in class for mobility at the European championship in Germany.
This year the cu
rrent Warwick Mobile Robotics team of seven students want to go one better by using the popular games console and win at the Robocup Rescue World Championships, which is being held in Istanbul, Turkey.
The first challenge the team face is to raise enough sponsorship money to enable them to compete in both competitions in Germany and Turkey. They need about £20,000 to pay for new robot components plus travel costs for both Championships.
Plans are already afoot to enhance last year’s impressive robot by improving the human-machine interface, increase manoeuvrability and design an arm with added manipulator to carry supplies to trapped survivors.
The team is being backed by WMG academic, Dr Emma Rushforth, who believes the project will give the students an excellent opportunity showcase their skills.
She said: “As well as giving each team member experience in solving real engineering problems, the project offers them the chance to acquire unparalleled expertise in mobile robot design which, in future, companies will need to have.”
Anyone interested in sponsoring the team should email mobilerobotics@warwick.ac.uk.
Notes to Editors
Warwick Mobile Robotics can be followed on twitter – @wmrobotics
More photography is available on request.
For interviews or filming opportunities with the Warwick Mobile Robotics team or for more information contact Luke Hamer, Assistant Press Officer, University of Warwick, on 02476 575601, or on 07824 541142. Alternatively email l.hamer@warwick.ac.uk
Reference Link
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/university_of_warwick_engineering_students_use_xbox_to_aid_award_winning_rescue_robot1/
Courtesy
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/
Berkeley Lab To Help China Improve Energy Efficiency of Data Centers
The amount of energy consumed by data centers is increasing rapidly around the world, and China is no exception. With its growing information technology and telecom industries and its emerging status as a supercomputer power, China continues to expand its data center capacity. In an effort to help reduce carbon emissions, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a world leader in high-performance buildings, has started working with China to improve the energy performance of its data centers.
The project is jointly run by Dale Sartor, leader of the Building Technology’s Applications Team (A-Team), which specializes in the energy efficiency of high-tech facilities, and Bo Shen of the China Energy Group. The Berkeley Lab scientists will work with the China Institute of Electronics and the China Electronics Standardization Institute to share best practices, case studies and other material to help China develop standards and training programs for its industry. “As in other countries, there’s huge variation in the data centers in China, but there is a lot of room for improvement,” Sartor said, after two visits to China in four months.
Berkeley Lab scientists Dale Sartor (second from left) and Bo Shen (far right) visit Huawei’s data center in China.
China is eager to participate in initiatives to boost its energy efficiency, partly because of a central government mandate to reduce the economy’s energy intensity. And for its data centers, there are cost incentives that are often even stronger than those for data centers in other countries. “The overall cost of both utility-supplied and onsite-generated power is expensive, so therefore, it can be even more cost-effective for China than here to take energy efficiency actions,” Sartor said.
Moreover, it is an opportune time to implement standards, given that China is still relatively early in the development curve and may be on the brink of explosive growth. “It’s important because one of our interests is targeting an industry that’s in its youth so it can leapfrog, and we can make sure they do it right the first time,” Sartor said. “China is looking at India and saying, ‘we want to be knowledge workers as well.’ It’s eying the IT [information technology] industry as a growth area, not just to support their manufacturing, but they see the kinds of services India is providing as something their population can profit from. So the IT industry growth is potentially huge.”
In the United States and other countries, data centers have proliferated due largely to skyrocketing demands for communications, data storage, data processing and the digitization of vast sectors of the economy. A 2007 report by the Environmental Protection Agency found that the energy used by data centers—including the servers as well as the infrastructure to power and cool them—had doubled in the previous five years. Data centers accounted for 1.5 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2006 and were on track to double by 2011.
In China, it appears the telecommunications rather than the IT industry dominates the data center market. China is also moving aggressively into the supercomputer market—it now has two of the top 10 fastest supercomputers in the world and 42 of the top 500, ranking second behind the United States (with 275).
Another difference is that most data centers in China tend to be government owned or controlled. “It’s a little harder to use the entrepreneurial approach, but once you convince the government to make the changes, since it’s centrally controlled, they can make the changes quicker,” Sartor said. “If you get them to change, big changes can occur rapidly.”
A common measure of data center efficiency is the power utilization effectiveness (PUE), which is the ratio of the entire data center’s energy usage to the energy going just to the servers and other IT equipment. A typical U.S. data center has a PUE of 2, meaning that for every kilowatt of power going to the computers, another kilowatt goes to the cooling, electrical system losses, lighting and other building functions. But the performance varies widely in the U.S., with the very best ones having PUEs as low as 1.1 and some inefficient ones as high as 4 or more.
Sartor says it is not difficult to make data centers more efficient and attain a PUE of 2 or lower. Sometimes it’s simply a matter of turning computers around, or plugging an empty slot in a rack with a blanking plate so that hot air doesn’t recirculate. “The level of engineering that goes into the infrastructure around a data center is so far behind what’s in the rack it’s not even funny,” he said. “Throughout the world, lack of knowledge of how to implement energy-efficiency measures is what’s holding industry back, not economics.”
Turning computers around so that they all face the same direction and the hot exhaust goes out the back creates hot and cold aisles; this is a basic element of energy efficient data centers that can be achieved with little additional cost. Furthermore, the “cold aisles” do not need to be cold. Computers can be cooled at 80 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. “Our goal is to reduce or eliminate the need for mechanical (compressor) cooling,” Sartor says.
Berkeley Lab also hopes to work with China to implement more advanced concepts, such as warm-water liquid cooling and DC power, through its partner agency.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory managed by the University of California for the DOE Office of Science. Berkeley Lab provides solutions to the world’s most urgent scientific challenges including sustainable energy, climate change, human health, and a better understanding of matter and force in the universe. It is a world leader in improving our lives through team science, advanced computing, and innovative technology.
Reference Link
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/12/21/china-energy-efficiency-of-data-centers/
Courtesy
University of California
Smarter Systems Help Busy Doctors Remember
CHICAGO — Busy doctors can miss important details about a patient’s care during an office examination. To prevent that, Northwestern Medicine researchers have created a whip-smart assistant for physicians – a new system using electronic health records that alerts doctors during an exam when a patient’s care is amiss.
After one year, the software program significantly improved primary care physicians’ performance and the health care of patients with such chronic conditions as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The program, a new comprehensive approach tied to a doctor’s performance review, also boosted preventive care in vaccinations and cancer and osteoporosis screenings.
The study, done with 40 Northwestern Medicine primary care physicians, will be published Dec. 21 online in the journal Medical Care and in the February print issue.
“It helps us find needles in the haystack and focus on patients who really have outstanding needs that may have slipped between the cracks,” said lead author Stephen Persell, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
“Quality health care is not just about having good doctors and nurses taking care of you,” said Persell, a researcher in the division of general internal medicine. “It’s having systems in place that make it easier for them to do their jobs and insure that patients get what they need.”
In the new system, an unobtrusive yellow light on the side of a doctor’s computer alerts him or her to a message that something is awry with Mr. Jones’ care. When the doctor clicks on the light, she may learn Mr. Jones, who has congestive heart failure, hasn’t gotten his recommended pneumonia vaccine. Or, perhaps he was taken off his beta-blockers during a recent hospitalization and needs to start them again.
“The pieces of this system aren’t new, but putting them together in a comprehensive way is new,” Persell noted. “If you put these things together in a smart way, then electronic health records are powerful tools for quality of care.”
Electronic health records alone have not been shown to improve quality of care.
“What matters is how you use the electronic health records, so they make your job easier rather than act as a source of constant annoyance and false alarms,” Persell said. “By showing only things that appear to be out of order, we are trying not to overwhelm the physician. If doctors get inaccurate alerts saying do this, do that, then they will ignore them.”
Essential to the success of the program: it doesn’t waste the doctor’s time, is tied to performance reviews and isn’t annoying.
“You can’t shove it in doctors’ faces, or they walk away from it,” Persell noted. “We used reminders that were not intrusive, but were still effective because doctors had faith that the data was accurate and they could enter data to make it more accurate.”
David Baker, M.D., senior author and chief of Northwestern Medicine’s general internal medicine divison, added, “We wanted physicians to feel ownership of this. For this to work well, they have to view the alerts and reporting system as their personal quality improvement tools.”
Doctors’ interactions with the reminders were tied to quarterly performance reports based on their treatment of chronic disease and preventive care quality measures. They were willing to use the electronic tools, Persell believes, because they were regularly being reminded of their performance, and the tools were helping them improve it.
To create the program, researchers used existing tools already available in a commercial electronic health records system. They integrated the health records with performance reports and paid close attention to the quality of information fed to physicians.
When a recommended treatment is not the medically right choice for a patient, the doctor is able to enter that information. Thus, he is not needlessly reminded that the patient isn’t getting a certain drug and won’t be penalized in performance reports for not prescribing it.
Among the improvements: heart disease patients getting cholesterol lowering medication rose from 87 to 93 percent, pneumonia vaccinations from 80 to 90 percent and colon cancer screenings from 57 to 62 percent.
“The gains are modest,” Persell said, “but if you are already at 90 percent and go to 94 percent, that’s important.”
The research was supported by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Reference Link
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/12/smarter-systems-help-doctors-remember.html
Courtesy
Northwestern University
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