One of the most important factors that affects construction costs of highways is the earthwork cost. On the other hand, the earthwork cost strongly depends on the design of vertical alignment or project line. In this study, at first, the problem of vertical alignment optimization was formulated. To this end, station, elevation and vertical curve length in case of each point of vertical intersec...

[1] We performed analyses of topographic variation (surface roughness) using a new 2-D mapping method which shows that understanding the relationship between data resolution, Hurst exponent, y intercept, RMS deviation, and cell size is important for assessing surface processes. We use this new method to assess flows at six field sites in Kilauea caldera, Hawaii, using three data sets at differe...

We present a technique to perform occlusion culling for hierarchical terrains at run-time. The algorithm is simple to implement and requires minimal pre-processing and additional storage, yet leads to 4-6 times improvement in framerate for views with high degrees of occlusion. Our method is based on the well-known occlusion horizon algorithm. We show how to adapt the algorithm for use with hier...

An experimental study was conducted to investigate the interferences of wind turbines sited over hilly terrains in order to elucidate the underlying physics to explore/optimize design of wind turbines sitting over complex terrains for higher power yield and better durability. The experiments were conducted in an atmospheric boundary layer wind tunnel with wind turbines sited over two-dimensiona...