Public transportation policy plays a significant role in facilitating ridership as well as travel modes, economic activities, and environmental aspects. Seoul has experienced rapid urbanization. Also, high density developments and uncontrolled land use gave rise to extensive urban sprawl in the Seoul Metropolitan Areas (SMA). Due to increased use of private vehicles, which created serious traffic congestion, the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) has reformed public transportation policies-introduced bus transportation reform (BTR) in 2004 and reformed fare and ticketing structures in 2009. This research focuses on the relationships between socioeconomic characteristics and commuting patterns by applying smart card data that includes individual travel behaviors during commuting periods. Among regression results, average commuting times are significantly associated with the proportion of population with lower levels of education and the number of public transit stations. These results appear to support the idea that the lower educated people in each district tend to have longer commuting times. Also, the greater availability of public transit stations contributes to shorter commuting times. Finally, analyzing commuting times seems to be important for determining demographic movement as well as locational advantages in certain regions of Seoul based on public transportation policies.

With the great potential smart distribution systems have to cause a paradigm shift in conventional distribution systems, many areas need investigation. Throughout the past few decades, many distribution systems reliability indices have been developed. Varying in their calculation techniques, burden, and purpose of calculation, these indices covered wide range of reliability issues that face both utilities and regulators. The major purpose of the continuous development of reliability indices is to capture a comprehensive idea of systems performance. While systems are evolving to a much more smarter and robust ones, so do the assessment tools need to be improved. The lack of consensus among utilities and regulators on which indices should be used complicate the problem more. Furthermore, regulators still come short when it comes to standard implementation because no final standard have been developed. However, regulators tend to advice or impose certain numbers on utilities based on historic performances. Because of the inevitable comparisons made by regulators on the routinely practiced process of utilities’ reporting of some of their indices, adequate and fair process needs to be implemented. The variation in utilities perspective on the advice or imposed indices cause an additional burden to achieving fair and adequate designs, upgrade requirements, and public goodwill. Some utilities consider these regulators recommendations guidelines; others treat them as strict standards, and yet others consider them goals. In this work, a development of a unified reliability index, which can yield proper performance assessment, fair comparisons, and reflection of all the knowledge imbedded within all current indices, will be developed. The developed unified index provides several benefits, among which is adequate standards design, improved tools for planning and design optimization, and less technical burden on operators. In addition, the development of a unified reliability index required the development of a standard normalization methodology.

The few past years have witnessed a huge leap in the field of the smart grid communication networks in which many theories are being developed, and many applications are being evolved to accommodate the implementation of the smart grid concepts. Distribution power systems are considered to be one of the first leading fields having the strong desire of applying the smart grid concepts; resulting in the emersion of the smart distribution power systems, which are the future visualization of the distribution systems having both the ability of smart acting, and the capabilities of automation, self-healing, and decentralized control. For the sake of the real implementation of the smart distribution power systems, the main functions performed by the traditional systems have to be performed by the new smart systems as well, taking into account the new features and properties of those smart systems. One of those main functions is the ability of power networks optimal reconfiguration to minimize the system’s power loss while preserving the system radial topology. The proposed reconfiguration methodology targets the utilization of a hybrid genetic algorithm with two fuzzy controllers that could converge to the global optimal network configuration with the fastest convergence rate consuming the least computational time. The first fuzzy controller is designed to reject any infeasible system configurations that might show up in the population of the genetic algorithm and violate the system radial topology, while the second fuzzy controller is designed to adapt the mutation rate of the genetic algorithm. Consequently, a novel multi-agent system is proposed and designed to perform the reconfiguration application in smart distribution power systems employing the concepts of distributed processing and decentralized control demanded by those systems. A multi-agent system employs a group of intelligent agents that have the capabilities of autonomy, reactivity, pro-activity, and sociality. Those agents cooperate with each other in order to perform a certain function through their powerful abilities to communicate, socialize, and make a common decision in a decentralized fashion based on the information retrieved from the surrounding environment and compiles with their ultimate objective.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2007. / "Graduate Program in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering." Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-206).

Thesis (M.A. Sc.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-06, page: 2869. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MS )--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2008. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Douglas S. Cairns. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-147).

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1991. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-127). Also available via the Internet.

Zugl.: Münster (Westfalen), Univ., Diss., 2008

Zugl.: Darmstadt, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2007 u.d.T.: Hellenschmidt, Michael: Software-Infrastruktur und Entwicklungsumgebung für selbstorganisierende multimediale Ensembles in Ambient-Intelligence-Umgebungen / Hergestellt on demand

Thesis (M.S.)--Missouri University of Science and Technology, 2009. / Vita. The entire thesis text is included in file. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed May 27, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-74).