Lifelines and infrastructure systems are among the most critical operational components of an urban environment to ensure a minimum level post-earthquake economic societal functionality following major seismic events. The overall performance lifeline after September 19, 2017 Mw 7.1 Central Mexico earthquake was generally positive. extensive impact observed on fresh water supply network within C...

This paper examines the historical impact of railroads on the American economy. Expansion of the railroad network and decreased trade costs may affect all counties directly or indirectly, an econometric challenge in many empirical settings. However, the total impact on each county can be summarized by changes in that county’s “market access,” a reduced-form expression derived from general equil...

We consider a variant of the freight railcar flow problem. In this problem, we need 1) to choose a set of transportation demands between stations in a railroad network, and 2) to fulfill these demands by appropriately routing the set of available railcars, while maximizing the total profit. We formulate this problem as a multi-commodity flow problem in a large space-time graph. Three approaches...

We developed a new semi-analytical source zone depletion model (SZDM) for multicomponent light nonaqueous phase liquids (LNAPLs) and incorporated this into an existing screening model for estimating cleanup times for chemical spills from railroad tank cars that previously considered only single-component LNAPLs. Results from the SZDM compare favorably to those from a three-dimensional numerical...

Semantic query optimization can dramatically speed up database query answering by knowledge intensive reformulation. But the problem of how to learn the required semantic rules has not been previously solved. This chapter presents a learning approach to solving this problem. In our approach, the learning is triggered by user queries. Then the system uses an inductive learning algorithm to gener...

As World population is exponentially increasing big cities face traffic and safety challenges related to railroad and rapid ground transportation projects. For this reason, to avoid collisions and allow a better communication between train, central control headquarters, and passengers new technologies are being developed by means of very sophisticated technologies. This project, being focused i...

The broadband wireless access is emerging as a promising technology to meet the ever-increasing demand of M-commerce on the train. The traditional railroad communication system (RCS) is not only in charge of the traditional train scheduling, but also offers broadband WLAN services to passengers and provides the network platform to the intelligent railroad information system. This imposes a majo...

The current guidance provided for alignment studies stems largely from Wellington’s “Economic Theory of The Location of Railways” which discusses the problem of minimizing grades and curves on a transcontinental scale. However, modern engineers often find themselves working on a less grand scale with shorter projects such as industrial spur build-ins and urban by-passes, and needing to consider...