Search results for "vehicles"
showing 10 items of 202 documents
Exploring the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) with the simplified ‘triangle’ technique for soil water content and evaporative fraction retriev…
2020
Participation of Dr. Petropoulos has been funded by the ENViSIoN-EO Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant (grant No 752094), part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. Part of the present collaborative work was also materialised in the framework of a short Term Scientific Mission (STSM) of the HARMONIOUS Cost Action which financially supported Dr Petropoulos’ visit between 4 to 15 February 2020 to the Department of Engineering of the University of Palermo, Italy. Η συμμετοχή του Δρ. Πετρόπουλου χρηματοδοτήθηκε από το πρόγραμμα της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης για Έρευνα και Καινοτομία «Oρίζοντας 2020», δράση Marie Sklodowska - Curie , έργο ENViSIoN-EO (αριθ. 752094). Επίσης μέ…
Performance and international investments in microfinance institutions
2013
Preprint of the published version of an article from Strategic Change Using data from 319 microfinance institutions (MFIs) in 68 developing countries, we study the degree to which international debt investments are related to the financial and social performances of MFIs. We find that commercial investments are mainly related to financial performance and level of professionalisation of the MFIs. The targeting of women is not a priority, even though international commercial investors target MFIs that provide small loans. Subsidised investments, however, are mainly driven by the targeting of women, while financial performance and the level of professionalisation of the MFI is not a priority.
Network Connectivity and Area Coverage for UAV Fleet Mobility Model with Energy Constraint
2016
International audience; Our main focus through the present paper is on developing an original distributed mobility model for autonomous fleet of interconnected UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) performing an area exploration mission. The UAVs, equipped with wireless ad-hoc capabilities, are required to optimally explore an area while maintaining connectivity with their neighboring UAVs and the base station. Because energy is a scarce resource, especially for UAVs, its wise management is quite beneficial for the network lifetime and mission success. Hence, the proposed mobility model, compared to other models in the literature, is the first to ever include the remaining energy level as decisio…
The role of the transportation phase for a green management of municipal solid waste
2017
Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) constitutes a high challenging issue to cope with to move towards sustainability of the urban policies. Despite new standards call for recycling and reusing materials contained in the city waste, several municipalities still use extensive landfills. Other than the environmental pressure exerted by these plants, the waste transportation from the recovery points of towns to landfills needs consideration to correctly assess the whole burden of the waste management. In this paper, the Ecological Footprint indicator is applied to the MSWM of the town of Palermo (Sicily). Results show that the effects produced by the involved transportation vehicles, both i…
Road Traffic Pollution and Childhood Leukemia: A Nationwide Case-control Study in Italy
2016
Background The association of childhood leukemia with traffic pollution was considered in a number of studies from 1989 onwards, with results not entirely consistent and little information regarding subtypes. Aim of the study We used the data of the Italian SETIL case-control on childhood leukemia to explore the risk by leukemia subtypes associated to exposure to vehicular traffic. Methods We included in the analyses 648 cases of childhood leukemia (565 Acute lymphoblastic–ALL and 80 Acute non lymphoblastic-AnLL) and 980 controls. Information on traffic exposure was collected from questionnaire interviews and from the geocoding of house addresses, for all periods of life of the children. Re…
Efficient Steering Mechanism for Mobile Network-Enabled UAVs
2022
HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) is becoming the de-facto video delivery technology over best-effort networks nowadays, thanks to the myriad advantages it brings. However, many studies have shown that HAS suffers from many Quality of Experience (QoE)-related issues in the presence of competing players. This is mainly caused by the selfishness of the players resulting from the decentralized intelligence given to the player. Another limitation is the bottleneck link that could happen at any time during the streaming session and anywhere in the network. These issues may result in wobbling bandwidth perception by the players and could lead to missing the deadline for chunk downloads, which result …
Non-cooperative game theory based stepwise power tariff model using Monte-Carle simulation for agricultural consumers
2019
Abstract In the present study the concept of non-cooperative game theory is proposed in the retail electricity market for introducing stepwise power tariff model (SPT) for agricultural consumers. The objective of the paper is to increase the energy generation through green energy generation sources (GEGS), introduction of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, education of families, standard wiring and appliance efficiency in tariffs for agricultural consumers with non-cooperative game theory. Agricultural consumers are able to generate a huge amount of electricity through GEGS and are able to control the consumption in their own way, and the non-cooperative game theory is introduced. Energy con…
Fuzzy cooperative control of automated ground passenger vehicles
2007
In this paper a fuzzy motion control for cooperative passenger automated vehicles where there are not collisions between the closest ones is proposed. Based on the position of the target and on the initial position of each cooperative vehicle, a supervisory plans nonholonomic circular trajectories which are without intersections, while a fuzzy control strategy assures the asymptotical stability of the motion errors and the reaching of the target with low acceleration values along the planned trajectories. Based on the ISO 2631-1 standard, the saturation properties of the fuzzy maps guarantees low values of the longitudinal and lateral accelerations to assure the comfort of the passengers. T…
A Planning and Control System for Self-Driving Racing Vehicles
2018
Autonomous robots will soon enter our everyday life as self-driving cars. These vehicles are designed to behave according to certain sets of cooperative rules, such as traffic ones, and to respond to events that might be unpredictable in their occurrence but predictable in their nature, such as a pedestrian suddenly crossing a street, or another car losing control. As civilian autonomous cars will cross the road, racing autonomous cars are under development, which will require superior Artificial Intelligence Drivers to perform in structured but uncertain conditions. We describe some preliminary results obtained during the development of a planning and control system as key elements of an A…
A hybrid algorithm for planning public charging stations
2014
International audience; Green mobility solutions are receiving currently an enormous attention. Indeed, during last years, electric vehicles, being part of the field of the smart-grid, entered the automobile market of the whole world. This technology requires an effective deployment of charging stations of electric refill since the main problem in this system remains over the duration of refill of the batteries. In this work, we propose an optimized algorithm to locate electric charging stations. The main task of the algorithm is to find the best site of charging stations locations so as to minimize loss on the way to the charging station, as well as minimize investment cost, we take into a…