Suchergebnisse

In recent years the problem of traffic congestion is spreading in many large urban areas. According to the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI, 2009), the average American driver lost 36 hours in 2007 sitting in congestion, wasting an average of 24 gallons of fuel. The average losses per driver in cities where the population exceeded one million were 25% higher. These costs were quantified into a national productivity loss of $87.2 billion, a four-fold increase (in 2007 dollars) from 1982. Although the recent economic downturn has only delayed congestion growth, once the economy recovers, congestion once again will be on the rise. Traditionally to reduce the impacts of traffic congestion over the past decades, governments are introducing policies that favour the rational use of private vehicles and prioritize public transport (push & pull). Among several attempts of mobility policies that have been implemented, park and ride has shown outstanding performance especially within European Union nations. By offering new efficient facilities and improving the level of service of public transport passengers are aiming to increase accessibility and decrease the usage of private vehicles, postulating as performances of great success, as his experience in different European cities tested. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority of Catalonia (ATM) has wagered on these systems with the objective of deterring the daily traffic congestion produced on the highways of Catalonia, especially in corridors towards Barcelona. To date, the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona numbers 14.114 parking spaces which are spread over 98 railway stations. The objective of this study is to address the potential improvements of an existing Park & Ride facility located in Mollet Sant Fost. The strategic role of this station, which is located between the highways AP-7, C-59, C-33 and C-17 with the required improvements could attract up to 55.000 new users of the rail network from neighbouring cities. To evaluate the impacts of the current study, it was build a traffic model of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona. This will help to analyse the existing users' equilibrium of their daily displacements. Based on a Multinomial Logit demand model, it will be analysed the number of rail passengers attracted by designing these facilities following the implementation of various actions that potentializing their use.

In recent years the problem of traffic congestion is spreading in many large urban areas. According to the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI, 2009), the average American driver lost 36 hours in 2007 sitting in congestion, wasting an average of 24 gallons of fuel. The average losses per driver in cities where the population exceeded one million were 25% higher. These costs were quantified into a national productivity loss of $87.2 billion, a four-fold increase (in 2007 dollars) from 1982. Although the recent economic downturn has only delayed congestion growth, once the economy recovers, congestion once again will be on the rise. Traditionally to reduce the impacts of traffic congestion over the past decades, governments are introducing policies that favour the rational use of private vehicles and prioritize public transport (push & pull). Among several attempts of mobility policies that have been implemented, park and ride has shown outstanding performance especially within European Union nations. By offering new efficient facilities and improving the level of service of public transport passengers are aiming to increase accessibility and decrease the usage of private vehicles, postulating as performances of great success, as his experience in different European cities tested. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority of Catalonia (ATM) has wagered on these systems with the objective of deterring the daily traffic congestion produced on the highways of Catalonia, especially in corridors towards Barcelona. To date, the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona numbers 14.114 parking spaces which are spread over 98 railway stations. The objective of this study is to address the potential improvements of an existing Park & Ride facility located in Mollet Sant Fost. The strategic role of this station, which is located between the highways AP-7, C-59, C-33 and C-17 with the required improvements could attract up to 55.000 new users of the rail network from neighbouring cities. To evaluate the impacts of the current study, it was build a traffic model of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona. This will help to analyse the existing users' equilibrium of their daily displacements. Based on a Multinomial Logit demand model, it will be analysed the number of rail passengers attracted by designing these facilities following the implementation of various actions that potentializing their use.

Purpose: This work intends to establish a new methodology to quantitatively measure the initial position and evolution of outsourcing in a public administration. Design/methodology: Product of the generalization of a methodological tool based on the fuzzy set theory "index of maximum and minimum level," a method is designed to evaluate the evolution of the positioning of outsourcing in a public administration. Contributions/results: The proposed model that is presented opens up the possibility to study the evolution of public administration in terms of the actions that have been taken to reach an ideal outsourcing position, which would allow managers to create points of control at various stages to ensure the success of the actions taken. Limitations: The limitations to the proposed method are directly related to the cases established in the fuzzy set theory. As an example, having to choose a specific value for the ideal values in an outsourcing strategy implies a regression to the concept of certainty. The work shows no examples of how to overcome these problems, although it does offer some ideas on how to minimize them. Practical implications: This work offers a tool to help determine the degree to which the objectives have been reached that are established within a public administration with regard to actions associated with outsourcing. Social implications: The ability to establish a distance from an ideal value means that citizens can numerically analyze whether the actions taken by the management team have improved or worsened the position of the public administration in terms of its outsourcing actions. Originality/added value: The work offers two original proposals. First, it offers an expansion of an index customarily used to calculate the distance from an ideal position. Second, it offers a context in which to demonstrate the usefulness of the index

The moisture content of live fuels is an important determinant of forest flammability. Current approaches for modelling live fuel moisture content typically focus on the use of drought indices. However, these have mixed success partly because of species-specific differences in drought responses. Here we seek to understand the physiological mechanisms driving changes in live fuel moisture content, and to investigate the potential for incorporating plant physiological traits into live fuel moisture models. We measured the dynamics of leaf moisture content, access to water resources (through stable isotope analyses) and physiological traits (including leaf water potential, stomatal conductance, and cellular osmotic and elastic adjustments) across a fire season in a Mediterranean mixed forest in Catalonia, NE Spain. We found that differences in both seasonal variation and minimum values of live fuel moisture content were a function of access to water resources and plant physiological traits. Specifically, those species with the lowest minimum moisture content and largest seasonal variation in moisture (Cistus albidus: 49–137% and Rosmarinus officinalis: 47–144%) were most reliant on shallow soil water and had the lowest values of predawn leaf water potential. Species with the smallest variation in live fuel moisture content (Pinus nigra: 96–116% and Quercus ilex: 56–91%) exhibited isohydric behaviour (little variation in midday leaf water potential, and relatively tight regulation of stomata in response to soil drying). Of the traits measured, predawn leaf water potential provided the strongest predictor of live fuel moisture content (R2 = 0.63, AIC = 249), outperforming two commonly used drought indices (both with R2 = 0.49, AIC = 258). This is the first study to explicitly link fuel moisture with plant physiology and our findings demonstrate the potential and importance of incorporating ecophysiological plant traits to investigating seasonal changes in fuel moisture and, more broadly, forest flammability. ; This study was made possible thanks to the collaboration of and the staff from the Natural Park of Poblet, P Sopeña, and the technical staff from MedForLab. This study was funded by the Spanish Government (RYC-2012-10970, AGL2015-69151-R). R. H. Nolan was supported with funding from the New South Wales Office of Environment and Heritage, via the Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub. We benefitted from critical comments from J Voltas, JM Moreno and L Serrano and instrument loans from R Savín.

© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ; Nowadays, constellations and distributed networks of satellites are emerging as clear development trends in the space system market to enable augmentation, enhancement, and possibilities of new applications for future Earth Observation (EO) missions. While the adoption of these satellite architectures is gaining momentum for the attaining of ever more stringent application requirements and stakeholder needs, the efforts to analyze their benefits and suitability, and to assess their impact for future programmes remains as an open challenge to the EO community. In this context, this paper presents the mission and system architecture conceived during the Horizon 2020 ONION project, a European Union research activity that proposes a systematic approach to the optimization of EO space infrastructures. In particular, ONION addressed the design of complementary assets that progressively supplement current programs and took part in the exploration of needs and implementation of architectures for the Copernicus Space Component for EO. Among several use cases considered, the ONION project focused on proposing system architectures to provide improved revisit time, data latency and image resolution for a demanding application scenario of interest: Marine Weather Forecast (MWF). A set of promising system architectures has been subject of a comprehensive assessment, based on mission analysis expertise and detailed simulation for evaluating several key parameters such as revisit time and data latency of each measurement of interest, on-board memory evolution and power budget of each satellite of the constellation, ground station contacts and inter-satellite links. The architectures are built with several heterogeneous satellite nodes distributed in different orbital planes. Each platform can embark different instrument sets, which provide the required measurements for each use case. A ...