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In this paper, we propose an efficient target detection algorithm, ASF-Sim-YOLO, to address issues encountered in escalator step defect detection, such as an excessive number of parameters in the detection network model, poor adaptability, and difficulties in real-time processing of video streams. Firstly, to address the characteristics of escalator step defects, we designed the ASF-Sim-P2 structure to improve the detection accuracy of small targets, such as step defects. Additionally, we incorporated the SimAM (Similarity-based Attention Mechanism) by combining SimAM with SPPF (Spatial Pyramid Pooling-Fast) to enhance the model's ability to capture key information by assigning importance weights to each pixel. Furthermore, to address the challenge posed by the small size of step defects, we replaced the traditional CIoU (Complete-Intersection-over-Union) loss function with NWD (Normalized Wasserstein Distance), which alleviated the problem of defect missing. Finally, to meet the deployment requirements of mobile devices, we performed channel pruning on the model. The experimental results showed that the improved ASF-Sim-YOLO model achieved an average accuracy (mAP50) of 96.8% on the test data set, which was a 22.1% improvement in accuracy compared to the baseline model. Meanwhile, the computational complexity (in GFLOPS) of the model was reduced to a quarter of that of the baseline model, while the frame rate (FPS) was improved to 575.1. Compared with YOLOv3-tiny, YOLOv5s, YOLOv8s, Faster-RCNN, TOOD, RTMDET and other deep learning-based target recognition algorithms, ASF-Sim-YOLO has better detection accuracy and real-time processing capability. These results demonstrate that ASF-Sim-YOLO effectively balances lightweight design and performance improvement, making it highly suitable for real-time detection of step defects, which can meet the demands of escalator inspection operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of large passenger flow during peak hours causes serious congestion in subway stations, and passenger flow bottlenecks appear in many places, which affects travel efficiency and safety. How to eliminate the bottlenecks is an urgent problem to be solved. In this paper, we first analyze the causes and regions of bottlenecks, and we propose three decongestion solutions: (a) moving the security check machines from the station hall to the entrance channel; (b) adding isolation belts in front of the area of escalators; and (c) separating opposite passengers flow by using isolation belts. We conduct a case study on Guomao Station, Beijing, China to verify the effectiveness of the solutions. Specifically, we establish a microscopic model to simulate the passenger flow in a subway station, and the simulation results show that decongestion solutions can reduce the queueing length of security bottleneck by more than 30%, while decreasing the passenger density in non-paying areas of the station hall by more than 50%. The decongestion solutions proposed in this paper can eliminate the bottlenecks in subway stations effectively and practicably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shopping malls have become vibrant public spaces, serving as commercial centers and sociocultural hubs. However, the arrangement of stationary elements such as elevators and escalators significantly impacts the visual quality of the atrium and the overall navigation experience within the complex. This research focuses on analyzing the configuration of elevators and escalators in shopping mall atriums and their influence on visual richness and accessibility. Descriptive-analytical and survey methods are employed, utilizing data from 10 successful malls worldwide. The UCL-Depth map software and space syntax variables are used for analysis. Connectivity, clustering-coefficient, and controllability analyses assess visual richness, while integration, mean-depth, entropy, depth, step-depth, and gate-count analyses evaluate accessibility. The research includes a questionnaire to obtain optimal indices for each space syntax variable, enhancing the accuracy of the findings. The results highlight the significant impact of the positioning of vertical access elements within the atrium on its visual richness and the accessibility of shops. The research identifies an optimal configuration: placing the escalator in the middle of the atrium, deviating 30° from the entrance axis, and separately locating the elevators. This configuration provides the highest level of access to shops and the central atrium from any point, minimizing the number of turns required to reach different locations within the mall. Furthermore, the separate placement of elevators improves the flow of individuals between shops and the atrium, resulting in increased integration. In conclusion, selecting an appropriate configuration of elevators and escalators in shopping mall atriums can greatly enhance wayfinding and improve the visual richness and accessibility of the complex. Architects and designers can utilize these findings to optimize the design of public spaces within shopping centers, promoting social interactions and enhancing the overall visitor experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of literature on the effects of escalator regions on intergenerational social mobility (ISM) of migrants. Nevertheless, the role of migrant origins in migration outcomes remain neglected. To address this gap, this study attempts to investigate whether migrants' birthplaces continue to have an impact after they move to escalator regions and the mechanism of this impact. Using data from the 2010, 2013, and 2015 Chinese General Social Survey, our findings suggest that the effect of escalator regions on migrants' ISM varies according to the size of their birthplace. Furthermore, the birthplace effect on migrants' ISM when relocating to escalator regions is partially mediated by the birthplace effect on education. Finally, it was found that this birthplace effect varies according to dynamic human capital; migrants with high levels of dynamic human capital can overcome the birthplace effect after relocating to escalator regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The residential landscape of western societies in the 20th century was based on a nuclear and monogamous normative representation of the family. This representation contrasts with the representation of the family that some consensually non-monogamous (CNM) parents carry. How did CNM informants combine residence, parenting and multiple relationships within the hetero-mono-normative organizational legacy of society? An extensive set of exploratory and ethnographic data was gathered in francophone countries in Western Europe during 2013–2018. Informants' dwelling configurations were interpreted as the result of their personal life paths interwoven with a web of macrostructural tensions. A comparative approach on residences, combined with life stories gathered within a strategic group of informants, contributed to understanding the various processes leading to specific forms of CNM dwellings with children. The comparison highlights five categories of CNM residential patterns, all resulting from attempts to compromise with the hetero-mono-normative dwelling tradition. The developments of transportation and communication technologies appeared as an important factor in the spatial and temporal organizations of family functions within the CNM configurations observed. These CNM family arrangements also appeared as ephemeral and versatile. These conclusions lead to new avenues of research regarding the social forces contributing to their fragility despite the intent of the actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Users of escalators and moving walkways with sufficient space to accommodate two lanes of users often follow an implied etiquette for the two lanes: one for walking and one for standing (in the US, China, and many countries, the convention is "walk left, stand right"). When there is high volume, e.g., when exiting a subway or train station or at the conclusion of an athletic event, the escalators often experience bottleneck congestion that constitutes the primary source of delay. It has been suggested that during such high-congestion periods, it would be more efficient if everyone just stood in both lanes, with empirical evidence used to support this counterintuitive finding. Simple deterministic queueing models are used to show under what conditions such results hold and also to provide further insights regarding tradeoffs between performance metrics as a function of the distribution of walkers and standers, which could inform practical implementation policies to increase efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The performance of the heavy-duty escalator truss greatly affects the stability and service life of the whole escalator system, and the manufacturing cost of truss structure accounts for more than 1/5. Thus, how to design the truss structure reasonably is a pivotal issue drawing the attention of numerous engineers and researchers. In this work, the experimental research of heavy-duty escalators under full load conditions were performed in terms of the end restraints, the docking port clearances, and the deflection. Based on the experimental results, the three-dimensional simulation model of truss structure was created, and the influences of various factors such as the internal chamfer of truss member, the lower deviation of truss member, the dead weight of escalator, and the pretension force of each bolt at the docking port were analyzed and quantified. Finally, the finite element model which can almost completely characterize the actual structure was obtained with slight difference. The conclusions drawn in this work provide the basis for the efficient design, correct simulation, low cost production and rapid installation of the heavy-duty escalator truss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of platform escalators in the Copenhagen Metro and their impact on passenger movements and capacity issues. It emphasizes the concept of "friction" and how it affects the metro's vision as a seamless travel experience. The study finds that congestion and capacity problems are not solely caused by escalators, but are also influenced by passengers' behaviors, knowledge of the metro system, and how they interact with others. The article suggests a two-pronged approach to addressing capacity issues, which involves improving the functionality of the physical infrastructure while maintaining the inclusive and accessible nature of the metro as a public space. Additionally, the article discusses the use of tracking technologies to supplement traditional research methods in studying mobile situations at Nørreport station in Denmark. The findings reveal that the front part of the platform is particularly susceptible to congestion, and escalators can act as gateways or obstacles for passengers. Unintended stops occur due to crowded situations, uncertainty, and disruptions, but passengers find ways to manage these challenges. The article underscores the significance of metro literacy and managing interactions with other passengers in navigating crowded situations. Overall, the design of the metro, including the escalators, significantly shapes the movement and experiences of passengers, and a balance must be struck between a seamless travel experience and the realities of passenger interactions. [Extracted from the article]

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The behavior of passengers in urban railway stations (i.e., metro stations) is dependent on environmental, cultural, and temporal factors. This affects how escalator infrastructures are used, with some passengers standing on one side of the steps to allow others to walk and, in other cases, others standing or walking on both sides of the steps. In this research, escalator infrastructures were studied to better understand the relationship between different conditions and passenger behaviors through a method based on video cameras, passenger detection techniques, and a simulation framework. The results indicate that passenger behavior could affect escalator infrastructure as it varies significantly depending on the time of day, type of station, local culture, and other environmental factors. The implications of these findings for the planning and design of the infrastructure of railway stations are discussed, and practical recommendations are proposed to improve the efficiency of escalator usage in urban railway stations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shopping malls are crowded areas which makes the evacuation routes unable to meet personnel evacuation needs. Therefore, this paper proposes the idea of using escalators evacuation to increasing evacuation routes. In addition, the effects of escalator fire shutters on the use of escalator evacuation paths, and the efficiency of mall personnel evacuation under different conditions were simulated. The results show that the different states of fire shutters have different effects on the emergency evacuation. When the fire shutter is not lowered, it will result in 1 person not being evacuated to complete. However, when the fire shutter is lowered to 1.8 m from the ground or sprinklers are set, escalators can be used for evacuation routes are verified. And compared to the normal descent of the fire shutter (only the staircase evacuation, 2 people not evacuate completed), the evacuation of people is completed and the efficiency of evacuation is improved. This result can improve the new evacuation model for emergency evacuation plans of shopping malls with escalators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent assistants often struggle with the complexity of spatiotemporal models used for understanding objects and environments. The construction and usage of such models demand significant computational resources. This article introduces a novel multilevel spatiotemporal model and a computationally efficient construction method. To facilitate model construction on different levels, we employ a meta-mining technique. Furthermore, the proposed model is specifically designed to excel in foggy environments. As a practical application, we develop an intelligent assistant focused on enhancing subway passenger safety. We present case examples involving jammed objects, such as shoes, in escalator combs. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and method. Specifically, the accuracy of breakdown detection has improved by 10% compared to existing information systems used in subways. Moreover, the time required to build a spatiotemporal model is reduced by 2.3 times, further highlighting the efficiency of our approach. Our research offers a promising solution for intelligent assistants dealing with complex spatiotemporal modeling, with practical applications in ensuring subway passenger safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An escalator is an essential large-scale public transport equipment; once it fails, this inevitably affects the operation of the escalator and even leads to safety concerns, or perhaps accidents. As an important structural part of the escalator, the foundation of the main engine can cause the operation of the escalator to become abnormal when its fixing bolts become loose. Aiming to reduce the difficulty of extracting the fault features of the footing bolt when it loosens, a fault feature extraction method is proposed in this paper based on empirical wavelet transform (EWT) and the gray-gradient co-occurrence matrix (GGCM). Firstly, the Teager energy operator and multi-scale peak determination are used to improve the spectral partitioning ability of EWT, and the improved EWT is used to decompose the original foundation vibration signal into a series of empirical mode functions (EMFs). Then, the gray-gradient co-occurrence matrix of each EMF is constructed, and six texture features of the gray-gradient co-occurrence matrix are calculated as the fault feature vectors of this EMF. Finally, the fault features of all EMFs are fused, and the degree of the loosening of the escalator foundation bolt is identified using the fused multi-scale feature vector and BiLSTM. The experimental results show that the proposed method based on EWT and GGCM feature extraction can diagnose the loosening degree of foundation bolts more effectively and has a certain engineering application value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The behavior of stair/escalator/elevator selection of passengers at the subway platform could directly affect the travel efficiency and even the service level of the station. This paper proposes a stair/escalator/elevator selection model of passengers at the subway platform, where the cellular automata model is used to simulate passenger movement, and the fuzzy logic theory is used to describe selection behavior. The distance to the stair/escalator/elevator and the density of passengers in front of the facility are selected as the main influence factors. The rationality and effectiveness of the selection model are verified by comparing the field data with simulation results of passengers choosing different stairs/escalators/elevators. The relationship between passenger quantity, passenger speed, escalator quantity, escalator location, and the traffic rate is analyzed based on simulation results, which can provide a theoretical reference for the facility layout optimization at the platform floor of the subway station. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the use of the AHP-Gaussian method to support the selection of a smart sensor installation for an electric motor used in an escalator in a subway station. The AHP-Gaussian methodology utilizes the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) framework and is highlighted for its ability to save the decision maker's cognitive effort in assigning weights to criteria. Seven criteria were defined for the sensor selection: temperature range, vibration range, weight, communication distance, maximum electric power, data traffic speed, and acquisition cost. Four smart sensors were considered as alternatives. The results of the analysis showed that the most appropriate sensor was the ABB Ability smart sensor, which scored the highest in the AHP-Gaussian analysis. In addition, this sensor could detect any abnormalities in the equipment's operation, enabling timely maintenance and preventing potential failures. The proposed AHP-Gaussian method proved to be an effective approach for selecting a smart sensor for an electric motor used in an escalator in a subway station. The selected sensor was reliable, accurate, and cost-effective, contributing to the safe and efficient operation of the equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Bartin University Journal of Faculty of Education is the property of Bartin University Journal of Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Tunel is the property of Ceska Tunelarska Asociace ITA-AITES, z.s and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Regional disparities in social mobility have long been apparent in Britain. Recent decades have seen a growing level of spatial inequalities in terms of social, economic and employment opportunities. Empirical studies suggest not only what do your parents do, but also where do you come from, profoundly influences one's life opportunities, London and the Southeast are consistently shown to be areas with more social mobility than the rest of country. This study presents an updated estimate of the extent of social mobility across regions in England, and more importantly, how this has been conditional on cross‐region migration. By using national representative survey data covering a decade (2005–2015), the results show considerable variations in the regional estimates of both absolute and relative mobility. In particular, London was found to be leading on social mobility measures in nationwide comparisons, supporting previous findings that London plays an important national role in Britain's social mobility. In addition, separate analysis for samples of cross‐region 'movers' and 'stayers' suggests that migration is associated with social upward mobility, with London still functioning as an 'escalator' region providing better opportunities for those who move there from elsewhere the country. This persistence of the 'escalator region' effect for the millennial generation in England underlines how unequal economic geography continues to shape opportunity and trajectories of mobility for individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is a common awareness of wartime media censorship in both Ukraine and Russia, there has been less research on Western media coverage and expert analysis of the war in Ukraine. This essay considers the extent to which a skewed and partisan version of the war's evolution has been presented in UK media. Five stages are identified in the emergence and evolution of a British meta-narrative on the war in Ukraine, replete with 'cheering' and 'jeering', that works against a realistic understanding of the war's nature and reasonable consideration of possible future scenarios. It is argued this coverage has sidestepped critical questions of the war's stage-by-stage escalation and has essentially avoided serious debate of the risks, costs and benefits of such a course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate a variety of aspects related to the simulation of passenger dynamics on escalators, mainly focusing on the discrepancy between the 'theoretical' and the 'practical' capacity that is observed for these facilities. The structure of the paper is twofold. In the first part, we introduce a space-continuous model to describe the transition of agents from walking on the plain to standing on the escalator. In the second part, we use numerical findings from simulations to study important measures like minimum distances between the standing agents and average occupancies of the escalator steps. One of the most important results obtained in this paper is a generalized analytical formula that describes the escalator capacity. We show that, apart from the conveyor speed, the capacity essentially depends on the time gap between entering passengers which we interpret as human reaction time. Comparing simulation results with corresponding empirical data from field studies and experiments, we deduce a minimum human reaction time in the range of 0.15s–0.30s which is in perfect agreement with results from social psychology. With these findings, it is now possible to determine accurately the relationship between the capacity and the speed of an escalator, allowing a science-based performance evaluation of buildings with escalators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the process of the continuous development of subway construction, the safe evacuation of subway passengers has been paid much attention to. As the subway itself has the characteristics of limited space and high passenger density, once a fire emergency occurs, it can cause huge losses only by passive rescue. Therefore, it is important to actively plan for evacuation to reduce life and property losses due to fires in subways. This study aims to develop a fault tree analysis method for identifying scenarios that lead to evacuation failure in subways due to impassability incurred by fires. First, a virtual evacuation model is established using an agent modeling technique, with collected passenger characteristics to calibrate local evacuation behaviors. Then, fire impassability scenarios (e.g. fire(s) in the escalator(s), in emergency stairs, or the combination) are evaluated using the established agent model. Eventually, a fault tree analysis is constructed to identify scenarios that lead to evacuation failures. The research results show that the passability of escalator(s) is critical for subway fire resilience. It is important to use stationary escalator(s) as evacuation pathways for more evacuation capacity. Fire risk management around escalator(s) should be stricter. Passengers and staff are advised to learn how to stop a running escalator to avoid evacuation failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hazardous object detection (escalators, stairs, glass doors, etc.) and avoidance are critical functional safety modules for autonomous mobile cleaning robots. Conventional object detectors have less accuracy for detecting low-feature hazardous objects and have miss detection, and the false classification ratio is high when the object is under occlusion. Miss detection or false classification of hazardous objects poses an operational safety issue for mobile robots. This work presents a deep-learning-based context-aware multi-level information fusion framework for autonomous mobile cleaning robots to detect and avoid hazardous objects with a higher confidence level, even if the object is under occlusion. First, the image-level-contextual-encoding module was proposed and incorporated with the Faster RCNN ResNet 50 object detector model to improve the low-featured and occluded hazardous object detection in an indoor environment. Further, a safe-distance-estimation function was proposed to avoid hazardous objects. It computes the distance of the hazardous object from the robot's position and steers the robot into a safer zone using detection results and object depth data. The proposed framework was trained with a custom image dataset using fine-tuning techniques and tested in real-time with an in-house-developed mobile cleaning robot, BELUGA. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm detected the low-featured and occluded hazardous object with a higher confidence level than the conventional object detector and scored an average detection accuracy of 88.71%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early 1990s, Anthony Fielding coined the term 'escalator region' to describe how London and the South East attracted those with greater human capital by offering them superior career prospects and enhanced returns in the housing markets. When delineating a housing or labour market area, it is not uncommon to require high levels of migration and commuting within the market area relative to those that cross the area's boundaries. Net migration flows to and from this escalator region change depending on the age range one examines, making migration across boundaries relatively high. It is proposed that focusing on age ranges that reflect younger adults would capture the extent of the market. In particular, the birth of a first child is likely to trigger migration, but that movement is constrained to be within the boundary of the market area. The decision to buy a dwelling would be made around the time of this event. This paper delineates market areas using spatial autocorrelation. This has the advantage of using a statistical criterion rather than a containment value. Broadly similar areas in the Greater South East are revealed using relative housing affordability measures, the movement of infants and the migration of 20- to 24-year-olds. It is argued that the time-varying patterns of migration of 30- to 39-year-olds is reflective of a change in housing affordability, forcing more households to migrate with children whilst renting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) has recently been active everywhere for dimension reduction in image processing, display and pattern recognition. Methods based on low-rank sparse representations, which make some specific significant assumptions, have recently received a lot of attention in background modelling. Meanwhile, a powerful analysis framework is needed to handle background areas or foreground motion at various scales. this paper presents a hybrid approach along with total variation L1 (TV-L1) features and reproductive RPCA model in low rank background subtraction modelling and sparse matrix with mixture of Gaussians (MoG) as foreground modelling. The hybrid structure with TV-L1 features imposes a hierarchical RPCA on the singular values of the low-rank component and MOG sparsity indicators. The proposed work was evaluated on the CDnet2014 (ChangeDetection.net) dataset, obtained result as accuracy was 92.9%, 86.7% 95.7% for Highway, Escalator, and Indoor respectively. The proposed method is compared with traditional methods and obtained relative reconstruction error is 0.01529 as a lower side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the motion of virus‐laden droplets between moving passengers in line, we performed numerical simulations of the distribution of airborne droplets within a geometrically detailed model similar to an actual escalator. The left and right sides and the ceiling of the escalator model were surrounded by walls, assuming a subway used by many people every day with concern to virus‐laden droplets. Steps and handrails were incorporated in the model to faithfully compute the escalator‐specific flow field. The ascending and descending movements of the escalator were performed with 10 or 5 passengers standing at different boarding intervals. To resolve the unsteady airflow that is excited by a moving boundary consisting of passengers, steps, and handrails, the moving computational domain method based on the moving‐grid finite‐volume method was applied. On the basis of the consideration that the droplets were small enough, droplet dispersion was computed by solving the equation of virus‐laden droplet motion using a pre‐computed velocity field, in which the flow rate of a cough, diameter distribution, and evaporation of droplets are incorporated. The simulation resolved the detailed motion of droplets in flow, and therefore, we were able to evaluate the risk of viral adhesion to following passengers. As a result, we found that the ascending escalator had a higher risk of being exposed to virus‐laden droplets than the descending escalator. We also reported that the chance of viral droplet adhesion decreases as the distance from the infected person increases, emphasizing the importance of social distancing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Railway Standard Design is the property of Railway Standard Design Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

So‐called "left behind" regions have gained infamy for working‐class discontent. Yet a concurrent phenomenon has gone unremarked: middle‐class lifestyles in peripheral places. This article examines how middle‐class migrants (defined by economic, social, and cultural capital) to peripheral regions envisage and enact their aspirations. Against presumed migration trajectories to growing urban centres or for better‐paid employment, we argue that seeming moves down the "escalator" reveal how inequalities between regions offer some migrants opportunities to enact middle‐class lifestyles affordably. We present a qualitative case study of West Wales and the Valleys, predominantly rural and post‐industrial and statistically among Europe's most deprived regions. Drawing from interviews with EU and UK in‐migrants alongside long‐term residents, we illustrate how three dimensions of quality of life—material, relational, subjective—are mobilised in middle‐class placemaking amidst peripherality. We demonstrate how spatial inequalities and career trade‐offs offer affordable material access to lifestyle and how middle‐class aspirations enable migrants to subjectively transform peripherality into enchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As subway systems play a central role in connecting various modes of transport, such as trains and airplanes, passengers with luggage cases have become common sight in subway stations. During emergency situations such as fires or earthquakes, passengers carrying luggage are likely to abandon their luggage to escape. However, the impact of abandoned luggage on evacuation remains unclear. Current research does not analyze the forces on pedestrians carrying luggage on a physical level and lacks knowledge of the interaction mechanism between luggage and pedestrians. Therefore, this paper constructs a comprehensive model based on an improved social force model that considers pedestrians carrying luggage cases, ordinary pedestrians, and abandoned luggage cases. It simulates a complete situation where pedestrians carry to discard luggage during an emergency. Through the simulation of Qingdao Station, we explore the impact of discarded luggage cases on pedestrian evacuation in subway bottlenecks and the interaction mechanism between luggage cases and pedestrians. The results show that strategies that involve the removal of luggage in areas of bottlenecks such as stairs, escalator entrances, and gateways have a significantly negative impact on the efficiency of evacuation. The key factors affecting evacuation efficiency are the appearance and dissipation of blockages due to accumulated luggage. The luggage carrying rate and abandonment rate are primary determinants for the occurrence of blockages. When blockages cannot be resolved, discarding luggage cases helps in evacuation. The removal of luggage cases increases the individual speed but decreases the overall evacuation speed. Compared to scenarios without luggage abandonment, the arching effect formed in those with discarded luggage cases is more complex and unstable. • Built a comprehensive force model considering luggage carrying/discarding impact on pedestrian movement. • Simulated the impact of discarded luggage on subway bottleneck evacuations. • Explored the interaction mechanism between luggage cases and pedestrians. • Conducted a field test to obtain an accurate emergency passage time for pedestrians with luggage at open subway gates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One significant fact familiar to the signal processing-based diagnostic community but generally ignored by the transfer learning-based diagnostic community is that the cyclostationarity of the monitored signal conveys the actual diagnostic information. Popular network architectures, e.g. , ResNet, and domain discrepancy metrics, e.g. , maximum mean discrepancy, in current transfer diagnostic research are generally borrowed from the transfer learning community yet do not explicitly consider machine fault physics. As Jérôme Antoni points out, signal processing and machine learning methods are not mutually exclusive but should complement each other. The current article aims to develop an interpretable domain adaptation method for transfer diagnostic tasks by simultaneously exploiting the ideas of cyclostationary signal processing and domain adaptation techniques. By taking NTScatNet as the network backbone and scattering moment distance as the domain discrepancy metric, the proposed scattering moment matching-based domain adaptation method is more interpretable and matches fault physics better than conventional deep transfer learning methods. Besides, the proposed method does not require target domain data during the training phase, thus relaxing the assumption of standard domain adaptation. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed domain adaptation method were verified on four transfer diagnostic case studies, i.e. , transfer diagnostic across bearing specifications, transfer diagnostic across escalator roller specifications, transfer diagnostic across transducers on bearing datasets, and transfer diagnostic across transducers on the gearbox datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides the first critical history of escalators on the London Underground railway and the ways their introduction reconfigured passengers' bodies. As the Underground became a coordinated and unitary technological system, its central Tube stations—particularly their elevators—created friction and exerted systemic drag. The Underground's executives initiated a major modernization program, replacing elevators with automatic escalators. Yet for the new technology to succeed, passengers had to learn certain actions, develop competencies, and acquire new corporeal habits. This article examines the dynamic regimes of instruction and surveillance that the Underground deployed to achieve these aims and assesses the outcome. Despite the assurance that the escalator would mechanize movement and overcome physiological variation, certain users found it discriminatory. While contemporary critics depicted the machine as an agent of dehumanization, beyond rush hour and at less busy stations, "escalator-legged" Londoners found more expressive and autonomous ways of moving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Escalators are a widely used means of transportation. The escalator truss structure is subjected to random loads during working operation, and fatigue failure of escalator truss structure occurs from time to time. In this study, the pedestrian load time history of escalator in a subway station was counted by means of real measurements. The stability of the collected data was verified by the round-trip test method. By using rain-flow counting method to process the load time history, the random load spectrum of escalator structure was obtained. And the eight-level fatigue load spectrum of escalator truss was simplified. To study the probabilistic characteristics of the truss material, the P-S-N curve of the truss material was obtained based on the subsample method and modified to obtain the P-S-N curve of the truss structure. Finally, the fatigue life of the dangerous part of the escalator truss structure was predicted by using Miner liner fatigue accumulation damage theory. The probabilistic life of the truss structure was obtained. Based on the finite element simulation analysis, the fatigue life of the truss structure is verified, and the results show that the simulation results are basically consistent with the calculation results, which proves the effectiveness of the method of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergency response process will not start immediately in the initial stage of a subway accident, and information will not fully spread temporarily. Crowds in different regions receive different comprehensiveness of accident information. They will start evacuating at different times and at different desired speed states. Depending on this phenomenon, pedestrians were classified in simulation modeling. In addition, the different states of emergency gates, escalators, and automatic gate machines before and after the emergency response instruction were set up in the simulation. The impact of different emergency response times on evacuations was studied. The emergency response in advance did not make a significant promotion to evacuation efficiency, but delayed emergency response reduced it greatly. This work proposed an evacuation risk index (ERI) and maximum safe evacuation capacity in metro stations. The worst accident evacuation scenario can be obtained by calculating the ERI, and a metro station was evaluated as a case study. The comparison of the evaluation results of ERI and other methods shows that the conclusion is consistent, but ERI considers the accident location factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main challenge of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is that there is great uncertainty in data association when using the tracked predicted values and tracked trajectories. Meanwhile, the MOT is complex and time‐consuming. When equipment resources are limited or real‐time requirement is high, its application is very limited. Therefore, we propose a Lightweight Deep Appearance Embedding (LDAE) to assist the association of trajectories. Firstly, in addition to motion information in data association, we also introduce more discriminative appearance features to participate in the affinity measure to effectively distinguish similar targets. Secondly, according to the idea of feature mapping, we design a lightweight deep appearance embedding module. It can help extract appearance features with less computation. Finally, we propose a simulated occlusion strategy for the training of the LDAE, which helps improve the ability to recognise different targets in dense scenes. The LDAE dramatically reduces the computational cost and improves the accuracy of data association. Extensive experiments are conducted on the MOT datasets (MOT16, MOT17 and MOT20), which prove that the LDAE outperforms several state‐of‐the‐art trackers in the tracking accuracy and anti‐occlusion performance. Furthermore, we apply the LDAE to escalators, which can achieve fast and stable tracking effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: Rapid global warming is threatening global biodiversity, and it will likely lead to varying degrees of local adaptation, particularly amongst plant species. Besides, rising temperatures frequently result in upslope distribution shifts towards climatic optima (i.e. the escalator effect) within a limited dispersal space, such as in insular environments. Here, we integrated ecological and genetic approaches to investigate how climate change will impact the genetic compositions and spatial distributions of Taiwan's endemic maple Acer caudatifolium. Location: Taiwan. Methods: We estimate the distribution range shifts of A. caudatifolium under climate change through species distribution modelling (SDM). We also use 368 genotyped samples to infer dispersal and genetic hotspots and quantify the contributions of geography/environments to genetic variations. We further assess the potential risk to A. caudatifolium under different climate warming scenarios. Results: We detected three genetic diversity hotspots near mountainous glacial refugia and two dispersal hotspots in northern Taiwan and the central‐to‐southern Central Mountain Range. Overall range reductions and an altitudinal upslope shift were observed in SDM. Using both linear and nonlinear regression approaches, we found that genetic variation was significantly associated with geographic distance and elevation‐related climatic variables. The potential risk analysis revealed that the northernmost summit‐dwelling populations were the most vulnerable. Furthermore, the major risk factor differed amongst populations: for central populations, temperature and precipitation jointly determined the potential risk, whereas precipitation was the only risk factor for northern and southern populations. Main conclusions: This case study demonstrates how various climate factors, mountain height and the availability of corridors jointly determine the demographic fates and sustainability of island maples in the face of climate change. This study also provided estimates of the implications of global warming, which can be conducive to developing appropriate conservation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to collect the operation data of escalator for fault diagnosis, the fault tree analysis method is firstly applied to obtain the occurrence probability of the intermediate event and the bottom events of escalator fault. Then the importance degree of each event is calculated and the four most important components are selected based on the importance degree. For collecting the operation data of these important components, vibration sensor is selected to obtain their acceleration data and store the data locally through Ethernet. In order to meet the characteristics of large data volume and fast data growth and make the transmission platform have the characteristics of large throughput and distributed expansion, Flume, Kafka and Flink components are used to build the big data processing platform for the operation data transmission and pre-processing. The result shows that the platform can complete the data acquisition of the main components of the escalator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The statistical nature of failures in repairable systems does not have a behaviour similar to non-repairable systems. The statistical models developed for the study of the reliability of repairable systems mostly based on the application of stochastic processes. However, there is a group of prediction models for reliability based on time series analysis. Below are the results and conclusions of the application of simple regression models in the escalators Avante model (TNE), in order to assess their potential use by maintenance organizations.

Fixed loss energy of escalators denotes the energy consumption of an unloaded escalator. Fixed loss energy fluctuates over time indicating varying operation conditions. We propose an algorithm (named the Optimization approach) to compute daily fixed loss energy based on energy consumption sensor data and validate our algorithm by comparing it to two benchmark methods (named the Classical and Engineering approaches) using a set of experimental data. Our evaluation includes a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, ultimately recommending our method due to its nearly 20 times smaller bias. Our optimization approach shows significant improvement (p -value=0.022): error declines from 2.87 for the classical approach to -0.11 for our approach. To further highlight the practical application within Prognostic Health Management (PHM), we design an Exponential Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) chart for monitoring the fixed loss over time and illustrate the potential of this approach in reducing energy usage and costs associated with escalator operation. We estimate that 5 Wh of energy every minute can be saved, which roughly equals 10% of the fixed loss energy of the escalator in our example. This study enables us to support health status assessment of escalators, and provides valuable insights into maintenance effectiveness, as well as identifying excessive energy consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]