Currently responsible for policing over one million citizens, the Calgary Police Service (CPS) has earned its reputation as a progressive law enforcement organization in part by focusing on the early recognition and acknowledgement of evolving crime trends. To maintain essential public trust CPS remains attuned to the constant shifting of legal and moral public accountability, an issue highlighted by judicial inquiries that have illustrated a consistent lack of police interagency cooperation. Since police are restricted by geographic jurisdictional boundaries, the answer to inter-jurisdictional challenges appears to be the timely sharing of intelligence, something the CPS has proposed through its newly developed Real Time Operations Centre (RTOC). This study investigated the question of how CPS might best develop an Alberta law-enforcement collaborative based upon the paradigm of a central real-time operations centre (RTOC), feasibility of this model, and potential challenges to its implementation. This study conducted qualitative action research with the leaders of all major law enforcement organizations in the Province of Alberta. Research data generated by one-on-one interviews with each participant was thematically analyzed to produce knowledge sufficient to plant the seeds of change for both organizational transformation and future inquiry. Study findings suggest it will be incumbent upon police leaders to create and develop the organizational social awareness necessary to enhance and leverage social capital essential to inter-agency cooperation and collaboration. Identifying positive aspects of a strong organizational culture will create a culture of well-being able to address crucial communication issues and the critical alignment of resources.

License plate recognition (LPR) technology has been widely applied in many different transportation applications such as enforcement, vehicle monitoring and access control. In most applications involving enforcement (e.g. cashless toll collection, congestion charging) and access control (e.g. car parking) a plate is recognized at one location (or checkpoint) and compared against a list of authorized vehicles. In this research I dealt with applications where a vehicle is detected at two locations and there is no list of reference for vehicle identification. There seems to be very little effort in the past to exploit all information generated by LPR systems. In nowadays, LPR machines have the ability to recognize most characters on the vehicle plates even under the harshest practical conditions. Therefore, even though the equipment are not perfect in terms of plate reading, it is still possible to judge with certain confidence if a pair of imperfect readings, in the form of sequenced characters (strings), most likely belong to the same vehicle. The challenge here is to design a matching procedure in order to decide whether or not they belong to same vehicle. In view of the aforementioned problem, this research intended to design and assess a matching procedure that takes advantage of a similarity measure called edit distance (ED) between two strings. The ED measure the minimum editing cost to convert a string to another. The study first attempted to assess a simple case of a dual LPR setup using the traditional ED formulation with 0 or 1 cost assignments (i.e. 0 if a pair-wise character is the same, and 1 otherwise). For this dual setup, this research has further proposed a symbol-based weight function using a probabilistic approach having as input parameters the conditional probability matrix of character association. As a result, this new formulation outperformed the original ED formulation. Lastly, the research sought to incorporate the passage time information into the procedure. With this, the performance of the matching procedure improved considerably resulting in a high positive matching rate and much lower (about 2%) false matching rate.

abstract: The flexibility in power system networks is not fully modeled in existing real-time contingency analysis (RTCA) and real-time security-constrained economic dispatch (RT SCED) applications. Thus, corrective transmission switching (CTS) is proposed in this dissertation to enable RTCA and RT SCED to take advantage of the flexibility in the transmission system in a practical way. RTCA is first conducted to identify critical contingencies that may cause violations. Then, for each critical contingency, CTS is performed to determine the beneficial switching actions that can reduce post-contingency violations. To reduce computational burden, fast heuristic algorithms are proposed to generate candidate switching lists. Numerical simulations performed on three large-scale realistic power systems (TVA, ERCOT, and PJM) demonstrate that CTS can significantly reduce post-contingency violations. Parallel computing can further reduce the solution time. RT SCED is to eliminate the actual overloads and potential post-contingency overloads identified by RTCA. Procedure-A, which is consistent with existing industry practices, is proposed to connect RTCA and RT SCED. As CTS can reduce post-contingency violations, higher branch limits, referred to as pseudo limits, may be available for some contingency-case network constraints. Thus, Procedure-B is proposed to take advantage of the reliability benefits provided by CTS. With the proposed Procedure-B, CTS can be modeled in RT SCED implicitly through the proposed pseudo limits for contingency-case network constraints, which requires no change to existing RT SCED tools. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed Procedure-A can effectively eliminate the flow violations reported by RTCA and that the proposed Procedure-B can reduce most of the congestion cost with consideration of CTS. The system status may be inaccurately estimated due to false data injection (FDI) cyber-attacks, which may mislead operators to adjust the system improperly and cause network violations. Thus, a two-stage FDI detection (FDID) approach, along with several metrics and an alert system, is proposed in this dissertation to detect FDI attacks. The first stage is to determine whether the system is under attack and the second stage would identify the target branch. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed two-stage FDID approach. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2017

Der Schienengüterverkehr ist eines der wesentlichen Standbeine des europäischen Binnenmarktes. Studien sagen für den Zeitraum bis 2050 ein weiteres Wachstum des Schienengüterverkehrsaufkommens voraus. Um den dadurch bestehenden Bedarf decken zu können, ist es nötig, die Kapazität des Schienennetzes zu steigern bzw. die vorhandene Kapazität besser auszunutzen. Als kostengünstige Möglichkeit bieten sich daher Echtzeitbetriebsmanagementsysteme an, zu deren Komponenten auch Konfliktlösungs- und Fahrerassistenzsysteme gehören. Die Arbeit befasst sich mit der Verknüpfung von Konfliktlösungs- und Fahrerassistenzsystemen mit dem Ziel die Nutzung der Potenziale beider Systeme zu ermöglichen. Nach einer Betrachtung des Standes der Technik auf beiden Gebieten mit Fokus auf angewandten Algorithmen sowie möglichen Datenstrukturen für Schnittstellen wird das Konzept des Zuglaufoptimierungsplans als Menge von Zugfahrtkorridoren entwickelt. Zudem wird in einer Vorbetrachtung untersucht, welche Modelle und Algorithmen sich für Fahrdynamikrechnungen beider Systeme eignen, um durch unterschiedliche Algorithmik bedingte Abweichungen zwischen den Berechnungen beider Systeme zu minimieren. Daraufhin wird eine Schnittstellenlösung entwickelt, die Eingaben von Konfliktlösungssystemen nutzt und energieoptimierte Zuglaufoptimierungspläne berechnet. Damit sollen Zugfahrtkorridore so gestaltet werden können, dass sie sich für den Versand an Fahrerassistenzsysteme eignen. Dann werden die Abläufe der Gleisbelegung und die daraus entstehenden zeitlichen und räumlichen Einschränkungen für die Zugfahrten mit einem Constraint-Programm modelliert und mit dem Matlab-nonlinear-Constraint-Löser optimiert. Das Verfahren läuft in drei Schritten ab: - Vorverarbeitung; Berechnung der Fahrzeiten nach dem zuvor beschriebenen Algorithmus sowie der Energieverbräuche; - Berechnung der optimalen Zugpfade als Durchfahrzeitpunkte und Geschwindigkeiten nach Fahrplantreue, Energieverbrauch und Mindestgeschwindigkeit: - Ermitteln der optimalen Zuglaufkorridore aus den Zugpfaden. Es werden Möglichkeiten zur Reduktion der Rechenzeit des Verfahrens diskutiert und implementiert. In einer Fallstudie werden anhand zweier Szenarien europäischer Bahnkorridore die Einflüsse der verschiedenen Modellierungsvarianten auf Lösungsgüte und Rechengeschwindigkeit untersucht. Dabei wird deutlich, dass die vorgeschlagenen Modellvereinfachungen zu besserer Lösungsgüte bei gleichzeitiger Reduktion der Rechenzeit führen. Um uneingeschränkte Echtzeitfähigkeit zu erreichen, ist jedoch eine weitere Reduktion der Rechenzeit zu empfehlen. Diese kann beispielsweise durch den Einsatz spezialisierter Lösungsverfahren oder durch das Nutzen eines (noch zu entwickelnden) analytischen Zusammenhangs zwischen Fahrzeiten und Energieverbräuchen erreicht werden.:1 Einführung 2 Nichtlineare Optimierung in Konfliktlösungssystemen und Fahrerassistenzsystemen 3 Zuglaufrechnung als Voraussetzung für Interoperabilität 4 Modellierung des Schienenverkehrs zur Berechnung von Fahrzeit-Geschwindigkeit-Korridoren 5 Dreistufiges Verfahren zur Berechnung von Fahrzeit-Geschwindigkeit-Korridoren 6 Fallstudie zur Verknüpfung von Konfliktlösungssystemen mit Fahrerassistenzsystemen 7 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick