My thesis project is attempting to investigate the notion of estrangement as a qualitative effect and discover various strategies and technics of estrangement in the field of architecture.These investigations will aim to design a cultural center as an institute for discovering more about the displaced situation of mankind in the twenty-first century, producing a defamiliarized aesthetic that is both alien and strangely contextual to our new cultural identity which embraces the concepts of disorientation and otherness. This center will be designed as a public exhibition and community building, integrating a high variety of programs and functions for attracting people of all ages and backgrounds, addressing the instability and fragility of our environment.Architecture is always incomplete and reliant on multiple layers of interaction and engagement, I aim to produce spaces that are challenging, lacking clear boundaries or hierarchies which demand new forms of interaction between architecture and subject, and offer a new understanding of space and material.

No description available.

In this dissertation we prove a version of the tropical Bezout's theorem which is applicable to all tropical projective plane curves. There is a version of tropical Bezout's theorem presented in other works which applies in special cases, but we provide a proof of the theorem for all tropical projective plane curves. We provide several different definitions of intersection multiplicity and show that they all agree. Finally, we will use a tropical resultant to determine the intersection multiplicity of points of intersection at infinite distance. Using these new definitions of intersection multiplicity we prove the complete tropical Bezout's theorem.

No description available.

No description available.

Preferential treatments are employed to provide preemption for emergency vehicles (EV) and conditional priority for transit vehicles at signalized intersections. EV preemption employs technologies and signal control strategies seeking to reduce emergency vehicle crash potential and response times. Transit priority employs the same technologies with signal control strategies seeking to reduce travel time and travel time variability. Where both preemption and transit technologies are deployed, operational strategies deconflict simultaneous requests. Thus far, researchers have developed separate evaluation frameworks for preemption and priority. This research addresses the issue of preemption and priority signal control strategies in breadth and depth. In breadth, this research introduces a framework that reveals planning interdependence and operational interaction between preemption and priority from the controlling strategy down to roadway hardware operation under the inclusive title: preferential treatment. This fulfills a current gap in evaluation. In depth, this research focuses on evaluation of EV preemption. There are two major analytical contributions resulting from this research. The first is a method to evaluate the safety benefits of preemption based on conflict analysis. The second is an algorithm, suitable for use in future traffic simulation models, that incorporates the impact of auto driver behavior into the determination of travel time savings for emergency vehicles operating on signalized arterial roadways. These two analytical methods are a foundation for future research that seeks to overcome the principal weakness of current EV preemption evaluation. Current methods, which rely on modeling and simulation tools, do not consider the unique auto driver behaviors observed when emergency vehicles are present. This research capitalizes on data collected during a field operational test in Northern Virginia, which included field observations of emergency vehicles traversing signalized intersections under a wide variety of geometric, traffic flow, and signal operating conditions. The methods provide a means to quantify the role of EV preemption in reducing the number and severity of conflict points and the delay experienced at signalized intersections. This forms a critical basis for developing deployment and operational guidelines, and eventually, warrants. / Ph. D.

Safe and efficient traffic control remains a challenging task with the continued increase in the number of vehicles, especially in urban areas. This manuscript focuses on traffic control at intersections, since urban roads with closely spaced intersections are often prone to queue spillbacks, which disrupt traffic flows across the entire network and increase congestion. While various intelligent traffic control solutions exist for autonomous systems, they are not applicable to or ineffective against human-operated vehicles or mixed traffic. On the other hand, existing approaches to manage intersections with human-operated vehicles, cannot adequately adjust to dynamic traffic conditions. This manuscript presents a technology-agnostic adaptive real-time server based approach to dynamically determine signal timings at an intersection based on changing traffic conditions and queue lengths (i.e., wait times) to minimize, if not eliminate, spillbacks without unnecessarily increasing delays associated with intersection crossings. We also provide timeliness guarantee bounds by analyzing the travel time delays, hence making our approach more dependable and predictable. The proposed approach was validated in simulations and on a realistic hardware testbed with robots mimicking human driving behaviors. Compared to the pre-timed traffic control and an adaptive scheduling based traffic control, our algorithm is able to avoid spillbacks under highly dynamic traffic conditions and improve the average crossing delay in most cases by 10--50 %. / Master of Science / Safe and efficient traffic control remains a challenging task with the continued increase in the number of vehicles, especially in urban areas. This manuscript focuses on traffic control at intersections, since urban roads with closely spaced intersections are often prone to congestion that blocks other intersection upstream, which disrupt traffic flows across the entire network. While various intelligent traffic control solutions exist for autonomous systems, they are not applicable to or ineffective against human-operated vehicles or mixed traffic. On the other hand, existing approaches to manage intersections with human-operated vehicles, cannot adequately adjust to dynamic traffic conditions. This work presents a technologyagnostic adaptive approach to dynamically determine signal timings at an intersection based on changing traffic conditions and queue lengths (i.e., wait times) to minimize, if not eliminate, spillbacks without unnecessarily increasing delays associated with intersection crossings. We also provide theoretical bounds to guarantee the performance of our approach in terms of the travel delays that may incur on the vehicles in the system, hence making our approach more dependable and predictable. The proposed approach was validated in simulations and on a realistic hardware testbed which uses robots to mimic human driving behaviour in an urban environment. Comparisons with widely deployed and state-of-the-art traffic control techniques show that our approach is able to minimize spillbacks as well as improve on the average crossing delay in most cases.

This thesis is devoted to the outer and grounded string representations of graphs and their subclasses. A string representation of a graph is a set of strings (bounded continuous curves in a plane), where each string corresponds to one vertex of the graph. Two strings intersect each other if and only if the two corresponding vertices are adjacent in the original graph. An outer string graph is a graph with a string representation where strings are realized inside a disk and one endpoint of each string lies on the boundary of the disk. Similarly, in case of grounded string graphs the strings lie in a common half- plane with one endpoint of each string on the boundary of the half-plane. We give a summary of subclasses of grounded string graphs and proves several results about their mutual inclusions and separations. To prove those, we use an order-forcing lemma which can be used to force a particular order of the endpoints of the string on the boundary circle or boundary line. The second part of the thesis contains proof that recognition of outer string graphs is NP-hard. 1

The subject of master´s thesis is a variant solution VMO processing segment in Brno - the south, in the area approximately bounded by streets Heršpická - Marian Square - Faměr Square and the south of the motorway D1. The solution was based on the fact that it will be implemented reconstruction of the railway junction in Brno (ŽUB) and thus is released today Přerovka corridor route. Route VMO will be conducted on the embankment of Přerovka and will be processed two variants. As an alternative A - VMO connection with D1 and the route Bratislava radial (see Urban Plan MB). As an alternative B - route run as the Bratislava tangent and Brno from MUK - south along the street Ráječek to Hájecká. Technical level of processing route VMO and routes radial and the tangent is considered as the search study with solutionof fundamental trace elements.

This thesis introduces new algorithms for solving curve/curve and ray/surface intersections. These algorithms introduce the concept of a geometric interval to extend the technique of Bézier clipping. A geometric interval is used to tightly bound a curve or surface or to contain a point on a curve or surface. Our algorithms retain the desirable characteristics of the Bézier clipping technique such as ease of implementation and the guarantee that all intersections over a given interval will be found. However, these new algorithms generally exhibit cubic convergence, improving on the observed quadratic convergence rate of Bézier clipping. This is achieved without significantly increasing computational complexity at each iteration. Timing tests show that the geometric interval algorithm is generally about 40-60% faster than Bézier clipping for curve/curve intersections. Ray tracing tests suggest that the geometric interval method is faster than the Bézier clipping technique by at least 25% when finding ray/surface intersections.