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• The distal relationship between Taipei's resource inflows and nonrenewable resource production in Taiwan was investigated. • Cross-scale emergy synthesis revealed the reliance of Taipei's resource inflows on Taiwan. • The demand of construction materials in Taipei's peri-urbanization is the underlying driving force of the development in Taipei's remote areas. Urbanization not only causes environmental changes in metropolitan regions but also influences the ecological and socioeconomic changes of distant land areas due to increasing demands on resource use and waste emissions. Previous studies on the assessment of urban systems have focused on the city or metropolitan areas under study. There is a need to incorporate urban land teleconnections to investigate the relationship between a city and distant land areas during the process of urbanization. This paper analyzes the teleconnection of the energy and material flows associated with Taipei's peri-urbanization and remote areas in Taiwan. The cross-scale emergy synthesis of Taipei and Taiwan was examined first to investigate the relationships of the material and energy flows between Taipei and Taiwan. The exploitation of non-renewable resources in Taiwan during the 1990s was driven mainly by the construction and development taking place in Taipei. Furthermore, compared with Taiwan, the Taipei area relies heavily on external resources. The results of the emergy evaluation of materials flows in Taipei indicated that 85% of the construction materials used were imported from other remote areas during the past 30 years. The use of construction materials in Taipei had a higher intensity in the city center during 1982–1992 and in the peri-urban area during 2002−2014. The results of the emergy synthesis indicated that urban land teleconnections exist between peri-urban areas of Taipei and other distant areas in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents an approach which combines the orthogonal array experiment technique and an ant direction hybrid differential evolution algorithm (ADHDEOA) in determining the tilt angle for photovoltaic (PV) modules. In this study, an orthogonal array (OA) is first conducted to obtain the initial solution. Next, an ant direction hybrid differential evolution (ADHDE) is applied to search for a near optimum solution. The purpose of this research is to maximize the output power of the module. The sun’s position at any time and location was predicted by the mathematical procedure of Julian dating; then, the solar irradiation was obtained at each site under a clear sky. The searching for global optimal solution is applied to a practical experimental system. The results show that the annual optimal angle for the Taipei area is 23.18°; for Taichung, 22.32°; for Tainan, 21.62°; for Kaosiung, 20.83°; for Hengchung, 20.27°; for Hualian, 22.18°; and for Taitung, 20.89° in seven Taiwanese areas, and the actual best annual tilt angles are close to the computer simulation results. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Pavement performance is a critical factor toward riding comfort experience and drastically affect traffic management and the safety of road users. Since road quality declines over time and current periodic inspection on a vast road network is laborious and costly to the authority. This paper proposes a participatory system to conduct pavement performance monitoring of a country-wide road network based on crowdsourcing spatiotemporal data. By conducting cloud computing of a statistical grading mechanism with respect to the vertical and lateral acceleration behavior, the perception of riding comfort, which has a high correlation with pavement quality, can be reflected faithfully based on the spatiotemporal data acquired from a smartphone-driven progressive web application. Moreover, a deep learning technique is leveraged to identify road anomalies from the on-site images for a cross-check mechanism, which ensures the reliability of the monitoring pavement conditions and facilitates the automation level of road anomaly labeling and documenting. The proposed pavement performance monitoring was validated by the road network of Taipei city, Taiwan, which rendered promising results with an accuracy up to 98% and a false positive rate smaller than 1.3% showing the practicality and adaptability in a complex road network. • Cost-efficient participatory system for pavement performance monitoring of a country-wide road network. • Uncertainties of vehicle types and driving speeds are considered in crowdsourcing spatiotemporal data processing. • A statistical grading mechanism with a self-contained knowledge to faithfully reflect the perception of riding comfort. • A cross-check mechanism between pavement monitoring and anomaly recognition to promote reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]