The RoboCup Rescue Simulation system provides a rich environment for developing novel techniques for multi-agent systems. The simulation provides a city map modeled as buildings and roads with civilians amongst them. A disaster scenario is simulated causing buildings to catch fire, roads to get blocked, and civilians to get injured and/or buried. The main goal is to use the available emergency ...

Habitat fragmentation is one of the main drivers of global amphibian decline. Anthropogenic landscape elements can act as barriers, hindering the dispersal that is essential for maintaining gene flow between populations. Dispersal ability can be influenced by locomotor performance, which in turn can depend on morphological traits, such as hindlimb length (HLL) in amphibians. Here, we tested rel...

Traffic–related pollutant has been recognized as an air pollution hot spot due to its large emission rate and great health impacts for the exposed population. In the present investigation, a computational fluid dynamics technique is used to evaluate the effect of traffic pollutions on indoor air quality of a naturally ventilated building. The transport of street-level nonreactive pollutants emi...

The urbanization process affects faunal distributions and movement patterns, contributing directly to biotic homogenization and representing an important threat to biodiversity. In particular, birds, which have been well studied as indicators of anthropogenic disturbance, are especially valuable in evaluating these impacts. While the negative impact of these processes and structures, most notab...

This paper develops an economic framework for developing strategies necessary to deploy networks, and applies the framework to the deployment of road pricing. The cost structure of highways are discussed. A graphical method for measuring welfare with road pricing is presented. The relationship of space and financing mechanism is reviewed. A network model of the economy is presented. This is fol...

Accurate road speed predictions can help drivers in smart route planning. Although the issue has been studied previously, most existing work focus on arterial roads only, where sensors are configured closely for collecting complete real-time data. For collector roads where sensors sparsely cover, however, speed predictions are often ignored. With GPS-equipped floating car signals being availabl...

In recent years, many approaches have been exploited for automatic road extraction. Most of these approaches are based on edge detection algorithms. In this paper, a new object-based approach for automatic extraction of main roads in large scale imagemaps is proposed. The gray-scale imagemap is converted to a simplified imagemap using Gray scale Morphological Algorithms (GMA). At this point, th...

This paper addresses the issue of extracting main and secondary road networks in dense urban areas from very high resolution (VHR, ~0.61m) satellite images. The difficulty with secondary roads lies in the low discriminative power of the grey-level distributions of road regions and the background, and the greater effect of occlusions and other noise on narrower roads. To tackle this problem, we ...

The linkage between NHL morbidity and residence near heavy roads is analyzed among the Jewish population of the Haifa Metropolis, Israel. The addresses of 1436 patients (94.5% of all cases, 1995-2004) were geocoded. The geographic distribution of NHL patients was adjusted by the overall density of population in the study area. The analysis indicates steady decline in the "density adjusted" numb...