Infrastructure

A Network-Centric UAV Organization for Search and Pursuit Operations

Ko, J.
Mahajan, A.
Sengupta, R.
2002

Techniques for pursuit-evasion games and search missions have been studied widely in the research community in the past few years but most of the emphasis has been laid on the control strategies for these missions. These have been shown to work for small scale missions, but attempts at their application to large scale missions have suffered from the lack of scalability and robustness of these systems. Hence we believe that for large systems implementing these missions, there is a need to lay emphasis on proper network architecture for these systems to make them scalable and robust to...

A Service Network Architecture for a Multi-Vehicle Search Mission

Zennaro, M.
Ko, J.
Sengupta, R.
Tripakis, S.
2001

Multi-vehicle applications rely on the dynamic allocation of resources, and must exhibit robustness to failures or to service degradation in general. We present a model for such applications, called the service network model. The entities of this model are services and service providers. Services are defined by standard names and interfaces, and are described by attributes. Service providers export services with certain quality of service guarantees. They may also need to import services from other providers. An application is modeled as a directed graph, where nodes represent service...

Algorithm for Finding Optimal Paths in a Public Transit Network with Real-Time Data

Jariyasunant, Jerald
Mai, Eric
Sengupta, Raja
2011

Recently, transit agencies have begun opening their route configuration and schedule data to the public, as well as providing online application programming interfaces to real-time bus positions and arrival estimates. On the basis of this infrastructure for providing transit data over the Internet, the authors developed an algorithm to calculate the travel times of K shortest paths in a public transportation network where all wait and travel times were known only in real time. Although there was a large body of work on routing algorithms in transit networks, the authors took cues from an...

An autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Exploration Platform with a Hierarchical Control Method for Post-Disaster Infrastructures

Peng, Xin
Su, Gaofeng
Sengupta, Raja
2024

Catastrophic natural disasters like earthquakes can cause infrastructure damage. Emergency response agencies need to assess damage precisely while repeating this process for infrastructures with different shapes and types. The authors aim for an autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform equipped with a 3D LiDAR sensor to comprehensively and accurately scan the infrastructure and map it with a predefined resolution r. During the inspection, the UAV needs to decide on the Next Best View (NBV) position to maximize the gathered information while avoiding collision at high speed. The...

An Analysis of the Agglomeration Benefits of Transit Investment: A Case Study of Portland and Dallas

Noland, Robert B.
Chatman, Daniel G.
Klein, Nicholas J.
2013

The objective of this paper is to examine whether new firms are more likely to form near rail transit stations. Two relatively new light-rail systems, one in Portland, Oregon and the other in Dallas, Texas form the basis of the analysis. A geo-coded time-series database of firm births from 1991 through 2008 is analyzed using all firm births, firm births of various sizes, and firm births of specific industry sectors. A random effects negative-binomial model is used to examine associations between proximity to rail stations and other spatially defined variables. Results show that newly...

A Mode Choice Analysis of School Trips in New Jersey

Noland, Robert B.
Park, Hyunsoo
Von Hagen, Leigh Ann
Chatman, Daniel G.
2014

This paper examines the mode choice behavior of children's travel to school based on surveys conducted at a sample of schools in New Jersey. The main focus is on a variety of network design, land use, and infrastructure variables that have typically been associated with walking activity. Using a mixed logit model, it is found that good connectivity, more intense residential land use, and better sidewalk infrastructure are associated with increased walking to school. The use of a mixed logit model allows the examination of individual heterogeneity. Results indicate substantial heterogeneity...

Assessing the Value of Urban Air Mobility through Metropolitan-Scale Microsimulation: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area

Yedavalli, Pavan S.
Onat, Emin
Peng, Xin
Sengupta, Raja
Waddell, Paul
Bulusu, Vishwanath
Xue, Min
2021

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) has garnered billions of dollars in investment with early proofs-of-concept and deployments across the world. However, its viability as a transport mode will be strongly determined by benefits in travel time. Hence, before optimizing the planning and infrastructure provision for UAM’s deployment, the dynamics of UAM trips must first be simulated and understood in order to determine the total addressable market. This work contributes to the existing scholarship in several ways. First, we use an ultra-fast parallelized, GPU-based microsimulator, MANTA, to study the...

Autonomous UAV-Based Structural Damage Exploration Platform for Post-Disaster Reconnaissance

Peng, Xin
Su, Gaofeng
Folk, Benjamin
Chen, ZhiQiang
Sengupta, Raja
2024

Rapid structural health inspection process is essential for post-disaster reconnaissance.
Nowadays, visual inspection still dominates the practice, which is time-consuming, expensive,
and unsafe. To reduce labor costs and guarantee personnel safety, we develop a fully
autonomous UAV-based structural damage exploration platform that explores and rebuilds post disaster environment maps with limited prior information. As a result, environment maps can be
used for further damage detection and risk evaluation. The proposed platform implements a
closed-loop control strategy...

BigActors: a Model for Structure-Aware Computation

Pereira, Eloi
Kirsch, Christoph M.
De Sousa, João Borges
Sengupta, Raja
2013

This paper describes a model of computation for structure-aware computing called the BigActor model. The model is a hybrid. It combines the Actor model [1] and the Bigraph model [10]. The contributions of this paper are an operational semantics, an example illustrating how the model supports the concise programming of a mobile agent working in a ubiquitous computing world, a query language enabling a bigActor to observe the world around it, and a definition giving semantics to the feedback loop in control theory in the context of this model. This is followed by three theorems showing how...

Department of Computer Sciences University of Salzburg, Austria

Sengupta, Joshua Love Raja
2025

Data center cloud computing distinguishes computational services such as database transactions and data storage from computational resources such as server farms and disk arrays. Cloud computing enables a software-as-a-service business model where clients may only pay for the service they really need and providers may fully utilize the resources they actually have. The key enabling technology for cloud computing is virtualization. Recent developments, including our own work on virtualization technology for embedded systems, show that service-oriented computing through virtualization may...