Search

Traffic models are of foremost importance in the planning of any transportation infrastructure. This importance lies on the ability to predict future behaviour of users and, therefore, the demand on each link of the network. In order to properly study the demand patterns and characteristics of the city of Kuwait, a detailed modelling of these phenomena is required. The purpose of this modelling is to create a useful tool with which to objectively evaluate the alternatives proposed in this paper research. Future demand on the proposed public transport network had been forecasted based on the transportation model developed by Atkins for Colin Buchanan & Partners in the framework of the 3rd Kuwait Masterplan Review. This model, built on a SATURN platform, was translated to a CUBE environment. This step involved reproducing both the data (networks and demand) then also the model algorithms, and checking the output results after running the model on this new platform matched those obtained by Buchanan. That initial model, built for a 2003 base year, was then updated to the current situation, where both road and public transport networks were concerned. The current road network was checked, and amended or completed when necessary, as well as the public transport services.

Pavements are an important of highway transportation infrastructure that constitutes an enormous investment of public fund. A tremendous of time and money is spent now and then each year on construction of both new and existing asphalt pavement. The objective of this study is to evaluate the permanent deformation characteristics of buton rock asphalt (BRA) modified asphalt paving mixtures using dynamic creep test analysis. Dynamic creep test was conducted on unmodified and BRA modified asphalt mixture using UTM25 machine. Asphalt cement of C170 was used as the base asphalt binder for unmodified asphalt mixture and BRA modified asphalt mixtures were made by substituting the base asphalt with 10, 20, and 30% (by weight of total asphalt binder) natural binder continuing granular BRA modified binder. The granular (pellets) BRA modified binder with a diameter of 7-10 mm was produced and extracted according the Australia Standard. Results of this analysis are then compared to simplify the results of unmodified and BRA modified asphalt mixtures and the conclusions are drawn.

Airports, and in particular terminal buildings, present a real challenge for security and protective design engineers. The requirements for excellent accessibility, via road and rail connections, results in significant explosive threat vectors with few opportunities to provide adequate stand-off distances. Indeed, in terms of transportation infrastructure, airports present some of the most complex threat environments and present a real and credible target for malevolent attack, as has been proved by numerous case studies over the last few decades. When this complex threat environment is combined with architectural drivers to maintain accessible and open spaces to ease passenger flow and provide interesting and iconic structures, the headache for protective design engineers becomes more acute. This paper will present the state-of-the-art analysis methodologies and tools to design blast resistant airport structures and describe how their application can reduce human vulnerability, structural damage, and operational disruption. These tools include the employment of engineering-scale computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes for the calculation of airblast loads, with the ability to model propagation through failing surfaces and complex external and internal geometries, including the potential effects of channeling. The paper will discuss the development of effective analysis tools to characterize contact and near-contact detonations against critical structural elements, as well as fast running models (FRMs) to facilitate analysis and protective design for these extremely challenging scenarios. Finally, a discussion of innovative design and retrofit options to increase the blast resistance of airport structures will be detailed, with a description of the testing programs used to validate these technologies.

Advances in measuring the intangible costs and benefits of transportation are being made but economic cost-benefit models used to analyze transportation infrastructure projects have not kept up. There are new benefit categories that existing transportation cost-benefit models do not include. One example is the benefit of travel time reliability. This paper summarizes the results of 30 studies of reliability and synthesizes them into a reliability ratio that can be used in transit cost-benefit analysis. By interpreting and standardizing reliability research the paper shows how cutting edge transportation research can be made available to engineering and planning professionals in their planning and design decisions. The value of reliability is implemented in a cost-benefit and risk analysis model and is freely available as a spreadsheet from the authors.

The State of Oklahoma, long considered geologically stable with little to no detected seismicity, has become seismically active in recent years. In 2014 the rate of occurrence of earthquakes with magnitudes Mw 3 and greater in Oklahoma exceeded that in California. The damaging Mw 5.7 record earthquake occurred near Prague Oklahoma in November 2011 with swarms of aftershocks including two Mw 5.0 earthquakes. The unexpected sharp increase in seismicity over a broad region of central Oklahoma has raised concerns regarding its potential hazard to local communities and civil infrastructure systems. This paper uses the HAZUS-MH earthquake module developed by Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to generate three scenario earthquakes at Mw 5.0, Mw6.0, and Mw7.0 and investigate the impacts of the seismic activities on transportation infrastructure systems in Oklahoma City area. The seismic hazard and the likelihood of various states of damage to the transportation infrastructure are assessed and evaluated, and direct and indirect losses resulting from this damage estimated. The simulation results could aid decision makers in identifying the most critical and vulnerable transportation assets so that mitigation strategies can be developed to minimize the negative impacts of seismic activities on public safety, property loss, and state economic development.

Bridges are a key component of transportation infrastructure. Currently, decisions on what material should be used to build a bridge superstructure are primarily driven by the initial costs in design/construction, but subsequent repair and maintenance costs are less emphasized. Moreover, limited budgets for bridge construction and maintenance require new processes to optimize decision making in choosing appropriate materials for bridges. This study aims to characterize the performance of steel bridge superstructures considering factors such as age, average daily traffic (ADT), design load, and structure length. This paper applies data mining techniques to the 2013 national bridge inventory (NBI) database for bridges whose superstructure material is steel or steel continuous and whose deck type is concrete cast-in-place. This study develops a model to predict the probability of a steel bridge superstructure being deficient given the characteristics of the bridge. The contribution of the paper is that the analyses will help stakeholders better understand what parameters are significant to the superstructure deterioration, and what type of steel bridges are more likely to have deficient superstructures.

Pipeline system is very important to transportation infrastructure. It is vulnerable to earthquake and man-made disasters in Taiwan. Because there is no strictly regulation to the petrochemical pipeline safety outside the industrial area, therefore a part of hazardous material transportation has to pass through some populous areas, such as Kaohsiung City. The consequences of pipeline accident is widely, such as fire, explosion, road and lifelines system destruction, tension in petrochemical industry supply etc. A petrochemical pipeline explosion occurred on July 31, 2014 in Kaohsiung City. Thirty-two people, include 7 policeman and fireman, were killed and 321 people were injured in this accident. It is the most severe public safety pipeline accident in recent years. This paper briefly describes this incident and its causes, lessons learnt from this accident and proposes some improvement issues, which includes pipeline safety regulations, inspection and maintenance of pipeline facility integrity, and enhance pipeline disaster management.

Observed records provide clear evidence of global climate change, especially for severe weather events. The study presented addressed strategies for safety management of road infrastructure under Severe Weather Conditions (SWC), aims to consolidate transportation infrastructures' adaptation to severe weather change. On the basis of reviewing security and management strategy, the authors analyze the impact of Road Transportation Infrastructure (RTI) in severe weathers. Moreover, strategy development for managing highway safety under SWC is discussed based on the risk assessment, the precaution mechanisms, the emergency rescue and the traffic organization. Lastly, the authors briefly discuss guarantee measures for implementation. The study demonstrated that the reasonable adaptation strategy for safety management of RTI under SWC can effectively enhance the responsiveness of the traffic administrative department, in addition, which is of great social significance to reduce the loss of accidents to SWC, to maintain social stability and the protection of people's life and property safety.

With the speeding up of urbanization, traffic flow between urban and rural area is gradually increasing, and traffic accidents happen more frequently. This article chose Huanghe north region in Jinan as the research object. Through field investigation and literature review, the authors obtained data of transportation infrastructure and traffic accidents from 2011 to 2013. After establishing the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model of road transport infrastructure the authors reached the conclusion that there is a higher correlation between infrastructure and traffic accidents.

Transportation infrastructure construction supports the transportation system. In order to make the right investment strategy, one must focus on the relationship between transportation infrastructure construction and growth of the economy. On the basis of statistics, the paper applies the Granger causality test to investigate the relationship between the five modes of transportation infrastructure construction and economic growth in China. The results indicate the affect degree between them.

This study uses the method of system dynamics to analyze the effects of logistics transportation infrastructure investment on Chongqing's economic growth. According to a comparison of the simulation results, the authors found that the logistics transportation infrastructure investment has significant impact on the economic growth of Chongqing. It influenced the primary and the tertiary industries' output value the most, followed by the secondary industry's output value, which indicates that an increase of logistics transportation infrastructure investment could push the output value of three industries to a higher level, making a contribution to Chongqing's economic growth.

In most transportation infrastructure projects, earthworks are generally associated with the highest percentage costs and durations. Because these tasks are reliant on heavy machinery and repetitive tasks, they are strongly susceptible to optimization. This paper presents a study based on the application of artificial neural networks (ANN) on data originated from an actual earthwork construction project. Results show a good adjustment to the data while emphasizing the importance of optimal equipment allocation throughout the construction site. Finally, the architecture of an intelligent earthwork optimization system is presented, combining both data mining (DM) and modern optimization technologies, among others, to support equipment distribution optimization in earthwork projects., Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

The effectiveness of emergency medical services (EMS) depends on the existing infrastructure and allocation of medical resources. It is, in general, considered that the response time for ambulances is a critical factor to the survival of major trauma patients. EMS is a challenging task due to the spatial distribution of the population and geographical layout in urban areas. The configuration of EMS units and hospitals should be assessed to provide an efficient service. In this research, the effect of disasters is considered as the disturbance of the EMS system. The objective of this research is to assess the service area of EMS after a disaster. In this study, the deviation of service area is observed before and after the disturbance on the transportation infrastructure disaster.

The Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet) was established to develop collaborative networks and platforms needed to integrate the multidisciplinary areas of climate change, pavement design and performance, and economics. Preliminary network activities, described in this paper, have rapidly expanded knowledge of pavement performance under future climates and provide insights for future research. Specifically, increases in the frequency and/or severity of many types of extreme weather events have already been observed; projected future changes in air temperature, rainfall, sea level rise and hurricanes on pavement performance are significant; and future costs are expected to increase very significantly and non-linearly. Combining these findings, the authors offer a set of recommendations for future research to address their key research question: How does climate non-stationarity differentially impact transportation infrastructure design, performance and life span?

Three well-known examples -- I-35W bridge failure, London Hammersmith Flyover closure, and the UK M1 motorway under-bridge fire -- highlight the need for a reliable decision support methodology to enable better informed decisions on timely intervention and/or resilient recovery from a damaging event. It seems that, quite apart from extreme man-made or natural hazards, our transportation infrastructure is not resilient under man-made or natural loads, and we need to leverage technology to better understand and respond to societal risks due to a lack of resiliency. The challenge to improve infrastructure resilience has led to major infrastructure research initiatives that are relevant to the case of bridges. FHWA created the Long Term Bridge Performance Program, while in the UK, EPSRC recently promoted the two themes of resilient infrastructure and monitoring and field investigation of existing infrastructure. The paper will describe these initiatives and how they aim to improve the resilience of bridges, which are key components in our transport infrastructure. It will also suggest some specific activities for developing closer interactions between a wide range of academic and industry stakeholders leading to development effective decision support methodologies.

As the transportation infrastructure in the United States is aging and expanding rapidly, demolition and replacement of the existing systems has increasing importance. Highway bridge demolition has become increasingly significant as the bridges reaching their service design life require rehabilitation or replacement. Highway widening to meet capacity increase also involves partial or total removal of highway bridges. This paper presents the fundamentals of highway bridge demolition by explaining the systematic deconstruction, crane usage, and the engineering involved with this process. Systematic deconstruction is the art and science of preventing unplanned potential energy release during a demolition process. Engineering is needed for the deconstruction process in order to protect the lives of the workers and in order not to damage any other structure in the close proximity of the structure to be demolished. In addition, the expensive machinery used for the deconstruction process needs to be protected. As a result, nearly as much engineering analysis is needed to demolish a structure than to initially build it. While the stereotypical image of demolition is a wrecking ball or an explosive event, these are not typically used in highway bridge demolition. Explosive demolition is rare, and is used occasionally for very large bridges (as well as other large structures outside of this scope). For a typical highway overpass bridge hydraulic excavators sit on the deck removing concrete with a hydraulic hammer or shear, and then excavators or cranes placed on grade remove the girders. The bridge structure is analyzed for different excavator positions and different stages of the demolition. The excavator body weight and the hammer tip weights are considered separately for different cases of demolition sequence. The engineering work required for cranes involves support design for crane bases (tracks or outriggers), pick plan and pick weights (pick sequence, radii, clearances, 680 Structures Congress 2013 © ASCE 2013

The purpose of transportation asset management is to meet life-cycle performance goals through the management of physical assets in the most costeffective manner. The performance goals can include safety, mobility, preservation, economics, and environmental aspects. Example geotechnical features that can be incorporated into the broader practice of transportation asset management include engineered and native slopes, embankments, tunnels, and earth retaining structures. Currently, many agencies address geotechnical features on the basis of worst-first conditions, reacting to failures and often incurring significant safety, mobility, environmental, and intangible costs. The goal of risk based methods for management of geotechnical features is to implement project planning, selection, and maintenance on the basis of most-at-risk, by identifying and managing the features with the greatest probability of failure and consequence. When analyzing risk, it is important to recognize the process will only be successful when all features that create risk are included. Further, the use of multi-tier risk based assessment approaches can identify geotechnical features with the greatest risk to transportation performance goals. The concepts presented in this paper can be used to implement risk based management of geotechnical features.

Through an analytic framework of spatial economics, this paper reveals the influential mechanism of transportation cost on agglomeration and spread of China's industrial economy. On the basis of this analysis, a panel date model is established to explore the causes of industry agglomeration in China using the dates of 31 provinces, and it is proved that transportation cost has an important influence on the agglomeration of industry economy. Furthermore, it puts forward the policy to perfect transportation infrastructure. Within the logistics network system, economic development can be expanded from center area to peripheral area gradually, and regional disparity can be narrowed progressively, thus realizing a coordinated developing regional economy.

The prediction of multi-commodity freight which flows over a multimodal network has attracted increased interest in recent years. Methods used to model freight transportation demand can be categorized into two general types: spatial price equilibrium and network equilibrium. With a simplistic representation of the transportation network, spatial price equilibrium methods were used to model interregional freight flows. These models determine the flow between production and consumption regions by using demand and supply functions. The most efficient use of the transportation infrastructure is to transport the freight at least total cost. This paper regards the spatial price equilibrium and network equilibrium as a model based on super network and gives the solution algorithm. The objective is to offer a method to forecast the transportation demand and the freight flows on the transportation network at most profit. As an application, the model is used to analyze freight flow on Wenzhou transportation network with STAN.

Application of microscopic traffic simulation beyond the corridor level analysis is not widely seen in literature. This is partly because of the fact that a simulation model cannot capture behavior responses such as peak spreading. This study develops a framework that integrates agent-based travel behavior models with large-scale traffic simulation to capture the regional impacts of new development. The proposed model is then applied to the I-270/I-495/I-95 corridor in the north Washington, DC metropolitan area in a case study. Findings from this study reveal the potential of the proposed model to capture network dynamics and behavioral reactions. This framework also provides a valuable tool for the evaluation of new transportation infrastructure, such as the intercounty connector (ICC) corridor currently under con- struction, and its operation strategies. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000139. © 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers. CE Database subject headings: Traffic management; Simulation; Traffic models; Travel patterns. Author keywords: Traffic simulation; Agent-based model; Departure time choice; Intercounty connector.

The extreme event of a natural disaster has had a serious significant impact on the transportation infrastructure in recent years. The management of financial resources need to have some criteria to show the current condition of infrastructure based on the results from inspection databases. Highway systems are very important to the transportation infrastructure, and the highway system in Taiwan is vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons. Vulnerability of a transportation infrastructure system is the susceptibility to incidents that can result in a considerable reduction in the transportation network serviceability. Because the major rainfall of Typhoon MORAKOT was focused in a mountainous area, most of the highway system destroyed was in this mountainous area as well. For example, more than 600 kilometers of highway length and 196 bridges failed or were closed as a result of Typhoon MORAKOT. In addition, the main causes of infrastructure damage were due to heavy and long periods of precipitation, floods, and upstream watershed debris-flow. In this paper, learning from the Typhoon MORAKOT experience, the authors describe the impact and assessment of its region of influence in terms of the susceptibility to and the consequences of typhoon occurrences. In addition, a lesson is learned from this study regarding the key issues arising after Typhoon MORAKOT.

Over the past 20 years, China's transportation infrastructure has developed rapidly. To date, more than 40,000 kilometers expressway have been built and opened to traffic, ranking second in the world. In the meantime, short service life and early failure of the highway pavement have become one of major concerns. This may be contributed by the poorly designed semi-rigid pavement structure and heavily overloaded vehicles. In more recent years, some long-life pavement structures have been designed and constructed. This paper discusses the design and construction of an expressway long-life flexible pavement structure in China. The project involved is a new 26.78 kilometer, Da'an to Jiliao Section in Henan Province, of the Erlianhaote to Guangzhou Expressway. The pavement had been designed as a semi-rigid structure which was later replaced by the new long-life flexible pavement structure in order to introduce this pavement technology as a cost-effective alternative to current semi-rigid or rigid pavement technology in China. Technical services provided through integrated technology transfer activities have presented a model for future expressway projects an option, and made the long-life flexible pavement structure the leading edge of national practice.

Not only does freight transportation use a large percentage of America's resources but it also contributes significantly to its share of carbon emissions and affects the safety of the transportation system and all its users. These problems are expected to increase as the volume of freight transportation is already reaching the limits of the transportation infrastructure's capacity while demand continues to increase. The primary objective of this research was to compile a list of technologies and practices that should be included in the sustainable freight transportation frameworks of government agencies and commercial fleets to reduce their carbon footprint and increase their safety by providing recommendations on promising legislation, research, technology, and practices. Data were gathered through a literature review of available materials and a survey of the state Departments of Transportation. The success of this research project provides the needed knowledge for the development of a sustainable freight transportation framework.