This paper presents and discusses an approach to modelling the situation at the Abermule Train Station immediately leading up to the train disaster of 1921. The incident itself is summarised and a modelling approach introduced and presented that is based on the principles behind Empirical Modelling (EM) and yet also around the notion of tasks. A corresponding model, built with EM software tools...

Actual working hours of employees vary widely, especially in the transportation industry. We developed a tool, the RAS (Representation and Analysis Software), to ease the assessment of such irregular hours and the transfer of existing knowledge of proper schedule design to the problem of irregular hours. This article discusses several critical design questions that were addressed during softwar...

Paris, Gare de Lyon, 27 June, 1988, 18:47. A crowded suburban train is ready for departure when, suddenly, another train arrives in front of it. There is a crash with 56 dead and hundreds injured. Obviously the killer train had no brakes. Why? The French government immediately set up a commission to analyse the disaster. This commission published its analysis in a report in September 1988 [1]. ...

Aerial imagery captured via unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is playing an increasingly important role in disaster response. Unlike satellite imagery, aerial imagery can be captured and processed within hours rather than days. In addition, the spatial resolution of aerial imagery is an order of magnitude higher than the imagery produced by the most sophisticated commercial satellites today. Both...

This paper presents an approach on high-level feature detection using a region thesaurus. MPEG-7 features are locally extracted from segmented regions and for a large set of images. A hierarchical clustering approach is applied and a relatively small number of region types is selected. This set of region types defines the region thesaurus. Using this thesaurus, low-level features are mapped to ...

The first objective towards the effective use of microblogging services such as Twitter for situational awareness during the emerging disasters is discovery of the disaster-related postings. Given the wide range of possible disasters, using a pre-selected set of disaster-related keywords for the discovery is suboptimal. An alternative that we focus on in this work is to train a classifier using...

abstract desertification could cause reduction of the ecological and biological potential of land which may occur both naturally and artificially. identifying and evaluating the effective factors in development of desertification is very important for better management of land. the aim of this research is to evaluate the sensitive input parameters in the desertification condition by using of ar...