This paper describes the RAMPE system for the mobility and autonomy of blind people in public transports. It is intended to equip bus or tramway stops or to be installed in poles of transport interactions. In the system, the user carries a smart handheld device (PDA) that communicates by a wireless WiFi connection with fixed equipment in the bus or tram stations. A special care has been given t...

The distributed queue dual bus (DQDB) protocol, the media access protocol of the IEEE 802.6 standard for metropolitan area networks, does not fully take advantage of the capabilities of a dual bus architecture. Although a fair bandwidth distribution among the stations is guaranteed when using the socalled bandwidth balancing mechanism, the protocol requires a considerable amount of time to adju...

An integrated urban transportation system usually consists of multiple transport modes that have complementary characteristics of capacities, speeds, and costs, facilitating smooth passenger transfers according to planned schedules. However, such an integration is not designed to operate under disruptive events, e.g., a signal failure at a subway station or a breakdown of a bus, which have ripp...

A family of LAN (Local Area Network) protocols is presented. The LAN consists of a pair of unidirectional fiber optic buses to which stations are connected via passive taps. The protocols provide round-robin bounded delay access to all stations. Contrary to most roundrobin access schemes, the protocols do not require transmission of special packets (tokens); rather, they simply rely on the dete...

To fix ideas, we can think of the graph as a public transportation network, where each edge represents a bus route connecting two stations. The n players can be thought of as employees that want to commute from their home stations si to a company located at station t. Assume that the operation of each route requires a fixed amount of money, say one unit of cost, which people using that route ca...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To identify specific toxic atmospheric emissions and their industrial sources in Great Britain. To link them with each other and with the birth addresses of children dying from cancer. To identify specific causal agents and sources. DESIGN Birth and death addresses of children dying from cancer were linked to emissions hotspots for specific chemicals: and to related source in...

Studies on public transit have emphasized the role of passenger satisfaction with service quality in travel choice decisions and indicated that satisfaction depends on various service attributes. Few studies have, however, systematically examined the underlying relationships among service attributes to assess their influence on passenger overall satisfaction. Therefore, to contribute to this ra...

Transport stations such as airports, ports, and railways have adopted blocked-type pathway management to process and control travel systems in a one-directional manner. However, this excludes highway transportation where large buses have great variability and mobility; thus, an instant influx of numerous buses increases risks and complicates station management. Focusing on Taipei Bus Station, t...

A natural language interface to a computer database provides users with the capability of obtaining information stored in the database by querying the system in a natural language (NL). With natural language as a means of communication with a computer system, the users can make a question or a statement in the way they normally think about the information being discussed, freeing them from havi...

The WorldFIP protocol is based on a centralised medium access control mechanism, where a specific station, the bus arbitrator (BA), controls all data transfers between different stations. At configuration time, the BA is given a list of process variables to scan along with their corresponding periods. This piece of information is known as the bus arbitrator table. In this paper we provide a com...