Search results for "Infrastructure"
showing 10 items of 326 documents
Evaluating the thermal-radiative performance of ENVI-met model for green infrastructure typologies: Experience from a subtropical climate
2022
Abstract Microclimate knowledge has been intensively integrated into urban planning and design to improve the buildings’ energy performance and outdoor thermal comfort. To assess the climatic mitigation strategies, numerical modeling is gaining higher relevance. ENVI-met, a microclimate model to simulate the complex surface-vegetation-atmosphere interactions in the built environment, is receiving increasing popularity. This study aims to systematically evaluate the thermal-radiative performance of the ENVI-met model based on its recent updates. First, a field measurement was conducted in a subtropical city. Thermal-radiative parameters were collected besides three green infrastructure (GI) …
Evaluating the citywide Edinburgh 20mph speed limit intervention effects on traffic speed and volume: A pre-post observational evaluation.
2021
Objectives Traffic speed is important to public health as it is a major contributory factor to collision risk and casualty severity. 20mph (32km/h) speed limit interventions are an increasingly common approach to address this transport and health challenge, but a more developed evidence base is needed to understand their effects. This study describes the changes in traffic speed and traffic volume in the City of Edinburgh, pre- and 12 months post-implementation of phased city-wide 20mph speed limits from 2016–2018. Methods The City of Edinburgh Council collected speed and volume data across one full week (24 hours a day) pre- and post-20mph speed limits for 66 streets. The pre- and post-sp…
Evaluating Socio-economic Impact of Age-Friendly Environments
2018
According to the World Health Organization (WHO) (2007), physical and social environments are key determinants of whether people can remain healthy, independent and autonomous. Health and well-being are not only determined by our personal characteristics but also by the envi-ronment where we were born and where we live throughout our life (WHO 2015). In fact, promoting age-friendly environments (AFE) is the most effective approach for responding to demographic change because they empower elderly people to age in better health, they pro-mote their social inclusion and active participation, and they help them to live autonomously into old age (Parent 2012). AFE foster health, well-being and t…
Road scenes analysis in adverse weather conditions by polarization-encoded images and adapted deep learning
2019
International audience; Object detection in road scenes is necessary to develop both autonomous vehicles and driving assistance systems. Even if deep neural networks for recognition task have shown great performances using conventional images, they fail to detect objects in road scenes in complex acquisition situations. In contrast, polarization images, characterizing the light wave, can robustly describe important physical properties of the object even under poor illumination or strong reflections. This paper shows how non-conventional polarimetric imaging modality overcomes the classical methods for object detection especially in adverse weather conditions. The efficiency of the proposed …
MAC Design for WiFi Infrastructure Networks: A Game-Theoretic Approach
2011
In WiFi networks, mobile nodes compete for accessing a shared channel by means of a random access protocol called Distributed Coordination Function (DCF). Although this protocol is in principle fair, since all the stations have the same probability to transmit on the channel, it has been shown that unfair behaviors may emerge in actual networking scenarios because of non-standard configurations of the nodes. Due to the proliferation of open source drivers and programmable cards, enabling an easy customization of the channel access policies, we propose a game-theoretic analysis of random access schemes. Assuming that each node is rational and implements a best response strategy, we show that…
The overstated generational gap in online news use? A consolidated infrastructural perspective
2021
Recent research by Taneja et al. suggested that digital infrastructures diminish the generational gap in news use by counteracting preference structures. We expand on this seminal work by arguing that an infrastructural perspective requires overcoming limitations of highly aggregated web tracking data used in prior research. We analyze the individual browsing histories of two representative samples of German Internet users collected in 2012 ( N = 2970) and 2018 ( N = 2045) and find robust evidence for a smaller generational gap in online news use than commonly assumed. While short news website visits mostly demonstrated infrastructural factors, longer news use episodes were shaped more by …
Principles of Calculation of Track Access Charges in Rail Freight Transport in Poland
2019
Non-discriminatory rules for access to the railway infrastructure as well as transparent pricing system are the essential factors of ensuring that the freight transport in Poland is competitive enough. Infrastructure managers pass some categories of their costs (e.g. for maintaining of railway infrastructure) on railway undertakings in the form of access charges verified andaccepted by the Polish regulatory body. In general, approximately one – third of their costs shall be paid by railway undertakings. Given that access charges are treated as one of the most important factors for both railway undertakings and railway infrastructure man-agers. The aim of this article is to review the main p…
Fair Planning and Affordability Housing in Urban Policy. The Case of Syracuse (Italy)
2016
Equalization can be implemented in the planning process by means of several tools. The Syracuse’s Master Plan has used “urban negotiation” to obtain land for facilities and public infrastructure in different urban areas basing on the rule of the transfer of a portion of land in return for the building permission for the remaining part of each property to be developed. The Master Plan also aimed at providing social housing because the economic crisis has amplified the gap between housing market prices and household income. This study proposes an equalization and compensation model to support the urban negotiation for providing the indexes of a fair and convenient development of several inter…
Project finance in the energy industry: new debt-based financing models
2012
The paper aims to examine the development of new financing models for project finance to attract private investors to finance large European energy infrastructure projects. In particular, the paper investigates the uniqueness of the project finance as a rapidly growing field in finance, the financial characteristics of the project bond market as one of the vehicles for funding energy projects, and the role of the credit support provided by the European Investment Bank and the European Union to promote the bond-based financing schemes. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1 provides a general description of project finance. Section 2 identifies the economic reasons for using project fi…
Public-Private Partnerships: Agency Costs in the Privatization of Social Infrastructure Financing
2019
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been subjected to considerable public debate. In particular, this debate has concerned PPP financing and its implications. Using insights from agency theory, this study aims to develop a theoretical understanding of PPP financing. The following research question is investigated: How does the privatization of financing decrease or increase agency costs in social infrastructure PPPs? A comparative case study consisting of four Norwegian PPP projects with different financial configurations is undertaken. The findings suggest that the private sector is risk averse, increasing the cost of capital. In addition, private financing does not seem to have the i…