This thesis considers prescriptive evacuation planning for a region threatened by a natural disaster such as a flood, hurricane, or bushfire. The evacuation planning problem is modeled as a dynamic network flow problem on an evacuation graph, where the objective is to maximize the number of people evacuated within a given time horizon. In particular, this work considers convergent evacuation planning, which means that the chosen evacuation routes must be free of forks.
This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the 23nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming, CP 2017, held in Melbourne, Australia from August 28, 2017 until September 1, 2017. The conference is colocated with the 20th International Conference on Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing (SAT 2017) and the 33rd International Conference on Logic Programming. The 46 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 115 submissions. The scope of the contributions includes all aspects of computing with constraints, including theory, algorithms, environments, languages, models, systems, and applications such as decision making, resource al location, scheduling, configuration, and planning. The papers are grouped into the following tracks: technical track; application track; machine learning & CP track; operations research & CP track; satisfiability & CP track, test and verification & CP track; journal & sister conference track.
An aging population, increasing obesity and more people with mobility impairments are bringing new challenges to the management of routine and emergency people movement in many countries. These population challenges, coupled with the innovative designs being suggested for both the built environment and other commonly used structures (e.g., transportation systems) and the increasingly complex incident scenarios of fire, terrorism, and large-scale community disasters, provide even greater challenges to population management and safety. Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics, an edited volume, is based on the Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED) 5th International 2010 conference, March 8th-10th 2010, located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA. This volume addresses both pedestrian and evacuation dynamics and associated human behavior to provide answers for policy makers, designers, and emergency management to help solve real world problems in this rapidly developing field. Data collection, analysis, and model development of people movement and behavior during nonemergency and emergency situations will be covered as well.
This SpringerBrief focuses on the use of egress models to assess the optimal strategy for total evacuation in high-rise buildings. It investigates occupant relocation and evacuation strategies involving the exit stairs, elevators, sky bridges and combinations thereof. Chapters review existing information on this topic and describe case study simulations of a multi-component exit strategy. This review provides the architectural design, regulatory and research communities with a thorough understanding of the current and emerging evacuation procedures and possible future options. A model case study simulates seven possible strategies for the total evacuation of two identical twin towers linked with two sky-bridges at different heights. The authors present the layout of the building and the available egress components including both vertical and horizontal egress components, namely stairs, occupant evacuation elevators (OEEs), service elevators, transfer floors and sky-bridges. The evacuation strategies employ a continuous spatial representation evacuation model (Pathfinder) and are cross-validated by a fine network model (STEPS). Assessment of Total Evacuation Systems for Tall Buildings is intended for practitioners as a tool for analyzing evacuation methods and efficient exit strategies. Researchers working in architecture and fire safety will also find the book valuable.
Meta-Learning, or learning to learn, has become increasingly popular in recent years. Instead of building AI systems from scratch for each machine learning task, Meta-Learning constructs computational mechanisms to systematically and efficiently adapt to new tasks. The meta-learning paradigm has great potential to address deep neural networks’ fundamental challenges such as intensive data requirement, computationally expensive training, and limited capacity for transfer among tasks. This book provides a concise summary of Meta-Learning theories and their diverse applications in medical imaging and health informatics. It covers the unifying theory of meta-learning and its popular variants such as model-agnostic learning, memory augmentation, prototypical networks, and learning to optimize. The book brings together thought leaders from both machine learning and health informatics fields to discuss the current state of Meta-Learning, its relevance to medical imaging and health informatics, and future directions. First book on applying Meta Learning to medical imaging Pioneers in the field as contributing authors to explain the theory and its development Has GitHub repository consisting of various code examples and documentation to help the audience to set up Meta-Learning algorithms for their applications quickly
The growing mobility needs of travellers have led to the development of increasingly complex and integrated multi-modal transit networks. Hence, transport agencies and transit operators are now more urgently required to assist in the challenging task of effectively and efficiently planning, managing, and governing transit networks. A pre-condition for the development of an effective intelligent multi-modal transit system is the integration of information and communication technology (ICT) tools that will support the needs of transit operators and travellers. To achieve this, reliable real-time simulation and short-term forecasting of passenger demand and service network conditions are required to provide both real-time traveller information and successfully synchronise transit service planning and operations control. Modelling Intelligent Multi-Modal Transit Systems introduces the current trends in this newly emerging area. Recent developments in information technology and telematics have enabled a large amount of data to become available, thus further attracting transport researchers to set up new models outside the context of the traditional data-driven approach. The alternative demand-supply interaction or network assignment modelling approach has improved greatly in recent years and has a crucial role to play in this new context.
"Spufford cunningly maps out a literary genre of his own . . . Freewheeling and fabulous." —The Times (London) Strange as it may seem, the gray, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairy tale. It was built on the twentieth-century magic called "the planned economy," which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working. Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. Red Plenty is history, it's fiction, it's as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant, and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
