for their enthusiasm, support and advice during the realization of this thesis. Furthermore I would like to thank the staff members of the Fluid Mechanics Laboratory of Delft University of Technology for their assistance while building the experimental setup and their support during the data processing. I would also like to thank Martijn Henriquez for his overall advice. Abstract Artificial sur...

A high-throughput bioassay system to evaluate the efficacy of residual pesticides against mosquitoes and muscid flies with minimal insect handling was developed. The system consisted of 4 components made of readily available materials: 1) a CO2 anaesthetizing chamber, 2) a specialized aspirator, 3) a cylindrical flat-bottomed glass bioassay chamber assembly, and 4) a customized rack.

Time geography had led geographers to analyse and model activity-travel patterns since the 1970s. The notion that activity-travel patterns are highly constrained has been frequently used in analytical studies and models of space-time behaviour. The popularity of this field of research lost most of its momentum in geography in the 1990s, but is now the dominant approach among civil engineers in ...

In recent decades, in silico absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion (ADME), and toxicity (T) modelling as a tool for rational drug design has received considerable attention from pharmaceutical scientists, and various ADME/T-related prediction models have been reported. The high-throughput and low-cost nature of these models permits a more streamlined drug development process in which ...

Travel time is very critical for emergency response and emergency vehicle (EV) operations. Compared to ordinary vehicles (OVs), EVs are permitted to break conventional road rules to reach the destination within shorter time. However, very few previous studies address the travel time performance of EVs. This study obtained nearly 4-year EV travel time data in Northern Virginia (NOVA) region usin...

This paper deals with bi-level control policy and queuing analysis of a machine repair problem. The model is developed by incorporating mixed standbys (cold and warm), reneging, set up and vacation time. The repair facility consists of two heterogeneous repairmen in the system. The life and repair time of the failed units and also their set up times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. ...

The Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) is used to collect voluntarily submitted aviation safety reports from pilots, controllers and others. As such it is particularly useful in researching aviation safety deficiencies. In this paper we address two challenges related to the analysis of ASRS data: (1) the unsupervised extraction of meaningful and interpretable topics from ASRS reports and (...