Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): J.D. Fulp, Dan C. Boger. Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-160). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of West Florida, 2009. / Submitted to the Dept. of Computer Science. Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 45 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.U.D.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves iv-iv).

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

China’s mega-regions, in addition to cities and metropolitan areas, have become the engines for economic development, and the target areas for regional and national policies. Reflecting upon China’s current path of regional urbanization, the proposed research examines a fundamental issue for China’s megaregional development: the impact of transport network development on the spatial pattern of China’s megaregions. Using the multiple national Censuses (1982, 1990, 2000, 2010) and the transport network GIS data in the corresponding years, this research 1) constructs measures of megaregional spatial patterns, 2) assesses the spatial trajectory of megaregional growth based on the differentiated growth rates of metropolitan cities, 3) computes indicators of megaregional transport network connectivity and accessibility, 4) examines the impacts of transportation infrastructure on megaregional growth trajectory. This research helps understand the spatial structure of China’s megaregions with newly constructed quantitative measures of polycentric spatial development, as well as the intra-megaregion and inter-megaregion variation of transport network in China. It also clarifies the link between transport infrastructure and megaregional spatial structure in China’s unique context by providing quantitative evaluation of the implications of transport investment for the spatial pattern in Chinese megaregions. Finally it enriches the megaregional solutions to China’s vision of economic, social and environmental sustainability.

Increasing urbanization is a dominant global trend of the past few decades. For cities to become more sustainable, however, the infrastructure on which they rely must also become more efficient and resilient. Urban infrastructure systems are analogous to ecological systems because they are interconnected, complex and adaptive, are comprised of interconnected components, and exhibit characteristic scaling properties. Analyzing them together as a whole, as one would do for an ecological system, provides a better understanding about their dynamics and interactions, and enables system-level optimization. The adoption of this “infrastructure ecology” approach will result in urban development that costs less to build and maintain, is more sustainable (e.g. uses less materials and energy) and resilient, and enables a greater and more equitable creation of wealth and comfort. Resilience, or the capacity of a system to absorb shocks and perform under perturbations, can serve as an appropriate indicator of functional sustainability for dynamic adaptive systems like Urban Water Systems. This research developed an index of resilience (R-Index) to quantify the “full-spectrum” resilience of urban water systems. It developed five separate indices, namely (i) Index of Water Scarcity (IWS), (ii) Relative Dependency Index (RDI), (iii) Water Quality Index (WQI), (iv) Index of Network Resilience (INR), and (v) Relative Criticality Index (RCI), to address the criticalities inherent to urban water systems and then combines them to develop the R-Index through a multi-criteria decision analysis method. The research further developed a theoretical construct to quantify the temporal aspect of resilience, i.e. how quickly the system can return back to its original performance level. While there is a growing impetus of incorporating sustainability in decision making, frequently it comes at the cost of resilience. This is attributable to the fact that the decision-makers often lack a life-cycle perspective and a proven, consistent and robust approach to understand the tradeoff between increased resilience and its impact on sustainability. This research developed an approach to identify the sustainable and resilient (SuRe) zone of urban infrastructure planning and design where both sustainability and resilience can be pursued together.

China faces a very serious environmental situation as a result of severe environmental pollution in the country. Smog in eastern and northern China is a wake-up call for actions to be taken to improve the ecological environment. As a student in landscape architecture, my practicum topic focuses on a design that can reduce the problem of air pollution in China. A bicycle infrastructure design in Nanjing is proposed to encourage people to ride instead of drive. By creating a safe, functional, efficient, recreational and attractive bicycle system, more people will love cycling and realize the importance of “green travel”. At the same time, I would like to try to improve Chinese people’s awareness of environmental protection through a well-designed bicycle infrastructure. / February 2016

As-built documentation is an essential set of records, consisting of construction drawings, specifications and equipment location, which are kept for facility management purposes. These documents are constantly being created and modified throughout the life of a project. This process is usually manual and fraught with errors, which inhibits reliable decision making. Technological advancements have made it possible to generate 3D models to assess as-built conditions for construction monitoring purposes, such as verifying conformance to baseline project schedules and contract specifications. For this purpose, 3D point clouds are widely generated using laser scanners. However, this approach has limitations in the construction industry due to the expensive and fragile equipment, lack of portability and need of trained operators. This study aims at investigating an alternate technology to generate as-built 3D point clouds using photos taken using handheld digital cameras, compare them against the original as-built 3D models, and check for accuracy of the modeling process. This analysis can aid in more reliable and effective decision making due to its cost effectiveness and ease of use, particularly in heavy infrastructure projects which are continually undergoing rehabilitation work. To achieve these objectives, a set of guidelines are developed for taking photographs that enable effective generation of 3D point clouds using off-the-shelf software packages. The accuracy of the modeling process is investigated using the results of the as-built 3D point cloud modeling of a 2000 feet under construction bridge in southern United States. Finally, the range of tolerance and deviation of element dimensions is determined by comparing the photo based model to the actual as-built model (developed using 2D drawings). Furthermore, to compare point clouds of laser scanning and photogrammetry, a laser scan and an image based survey of an exterior wall of a university building was also done. Results show that this technology in its present state is not suitable for modeling infrastructure projects, however technological developments can enable this to be an efficient way to extract measurements of inaccessible objects for progress monitoring purposes and the models can also be stored for future dimension takeoffs for decision making and asset management purposes. / text

This research proposes a methodological framework for the probabilistic evaluation of the financial viability of transportation infrastructure projects procured as Public Private Partnerships (PPPs). In doing so a methodological approach is undertaken. First, this research investigates the various risks of PPP projects, in particular the investment risk in terms of both the depth and its corresponding methods of evaluation, yielding a new method for more accurate estimation. Second, it examines the multiple facets of financial viability, stemming from the different meaning that it has for the various project stakeholders, i.e., the public authority, the lenders and the equity investors. From this study a connection between the financial viability and the investment risk is established for the purpose of using the latter for the assessment of the former. Based on this established connection, this research proposes a general methodological framework that can be used for the probabilistic evaluation of the financial viability of other types of revenue-generating transportation infrastructure projects, procured as PPPs. This framework proposes the evaluation of the financial viability through the estimation of the project's investment risk, using available numerical and/or analytical approximation techniques such as the Method of Moments. The general methodological framework is then utilized for the specific case of highway toll-road concession projects, where detailed and specific quantitative models are devised for the determination of the costs and revenues of these projects. Additionally, and by capitalizing on similar models found elsewhere in the literature, this dissertation also proposes a process to increase the accuracy of the Maintenance and Rehabilitation cost estimates, borrowing concepts stemming from reliability and stochastic processes. The findings of this research are expected to help all project stakeholders with their evaluation of whether or not a project under consideration is capable of achieving their respective financial targets. The proposed methodology can be used as a quantitative tool for project evaluation and investment appraisal by all project stakeholders. However, as in any decision support methodology, the purpose of the proposed framework is not to replace decision makers but to help them make better and informed decisions. / text

Large-scale layer-2 Ethernet networks are needed for important future and current applications and services including: metro Ethernet, wide area Ethernet, data center networks, cyber-physical systems, and large data processing. However Ethernet bridging was designed for small local area networks and suffers scalability and resiliency problems for large networks. I will present the architecture and protocols of ROME, a layer-2 network designed to be backwards compatible with Ethernet and scalable to tens of thousands of switches and millions of end hosts. We first design a scalable greedy routing protocol, Multi-hop Delaunay Triangulation (MDT) routing, for delivery guarantee on any connectivity graph with arbitrary node coordinates. To achieve near-optimal routing path for greedy routing, we then present the first layer-2 virtual positioning protocol, Virtual Position on Delaunay (VPoD). We then design a stateless multicast protocol, to support group communication such as VLAN while improving switch memory scalability. To achieve efficient host discovery, we present a novel distributed hash table, Delaunay DHT (D²HT). ROME also includes routing and host discovery protocols for a hierarchical network. ROME protocols completely eliminate broadcast. Extensive experimental results show that ROME protocols are efficient and scalable to metropolitan size. Furthermore, ROME protocols are highly resilient to network dynamics. The routing latency of ROME is only slightly higher than shortest-path latency. / text