Improving Traffic Efficiency With Lane Guidance Based on Desired Speeds

Drivers initiate a discretionary lane change when they perceive an anticipated improvement in their own driving condition from moving to another lane. However, such a lane change can slow down other vehicles on the target lane, and even worse initiate a disturbance. In this work, we argue that the blocking effect triggered by individual lane...

Airtightness in the Retrofit of Historic Buildings: Investigation of a retrofit strategy for historic traditional buildings, optimizing their energy-efficiency, indoor environment quality, and heritage preservation

Despite being a critical aspect in improving the building stock’s environmental performance and achieving the global environmental goals, the retrofit of traditional historic buildings is hindered by a lack of comprehensive guidelines tailored to their complex building physics and heritage preservation requirements. The conventional retrofit...

Optimization of Urban Quay Wall Design: A parametric approach to improve the structural efficiency

Over the last years the critical state of existing quay wall structures have gained a lot of concern. With the focus on urban quay walls in Amsterdam, a lot of aspects could play a role which limit the possibilities for both the design and the construction. The focus in this research is placed at the structural efficiency of the design for...

EdgeBOL: A Bayesian Learning Approach for the Joint Orchestration of vRANs and Mobile Edge AI

Future mobile networks need to support intelligent services which collect and process data streams at the network edge, so as to offer real-time and accurate inferences to users. However, the widespread deployment of these services is hindered by the unprecedented energy cost they induce to the network, and by the difficulties in optimizing...

Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming for Energy-Efficient Container Handling: Formulation and Customized Genetic Algorithm

Energy consumption is expected to be reduced while maintaining high productivity for container handling. This paper investigates a new energy-efficient scheduling problem of automated container terminals, in which quay cranes (QCs) and lift automated guided vehicles (AGVs) cooperate to handle inbound and outbound containers. In our scheduling...

Methodically improving assembly lines: A bicycle assembly case study

The bicycle production company Accell-group N.V. aims to improve their bicycle assembly lines. The assembly of bicycles requires fastening a large amount of parts using a variety of fastening techniques. In the investigated situation, these assembly operations are performed on an assembly line. The goal of this thesis is to structurally improve...

Minimum net driving temperature concept for membrane distillation

In this study, we analyzed the heat requirement of membrane distillation (MD) to investigate the trade-off between the evaporation efficiency and driving force efficiency in a single effect MD system. We found that there exists a non-zero net driving temperature difference that maximizes efficiency. This is the minimum net driving temperature...

Rail and road freight transport network efficiency of Canada, member states of the EU, and the USA

The main research problem has been analyzing and comparing the efficiencies of road and rail freight transport networks in different geographical contexts and derive policy suggestions from the results based on a dataset that spans multiple continents, covers multiple countries and covers a longer time period. For Europe, the benchmarking...

Computational Design Method Based on Multidisciplinary Design Optimization and Optioneering Techniques for Energy Efficiency and Cost Effectiveness

One of the cutting-edge interests gaining relevance among design offices, notably in the sphere of architecture firms, is computational design. With its inception embedded in the 60s and later reformed through the CAD revolution that boomed in the 80s, the use of the computer as a design tool has evolved to such lengths that it became...

Thermal Morphology: A Geometrically Optimized Trombe Wall

Recently, there has been a growing interest in passive climate design aimed at reducing the large energy demand arising from existing buildings. Sustainable consumption of quantities of energy by buildings has necessitated research into innovative designs for comfortable and energy-efficient buildings. This graduation project branches out from...

An efficient fluid–structure interaction model for optimizing twistable flapping wings

Spanwise twist can dominate the deformation of flapping wings and alters the aerodynamic performance and power efficiency of flapping wings by changing the local angle of attack. Traditional Fluid–Structure Interaction (FSI) models, based on Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), have been used to...

Study on route division for ship energy efficiency optimization based on big environment data

In the case of the global energy crisis and the higher sound of energy saving and emission reduction, how to take effective management measures of ship energy efficiency to achieve the goal of energy saving and emission reduction, put forward a new challenge for the development of shipping technology. The application of big data technology...