Infrastructure, Planning and Environment

There is a consensus that integrated cyber-physical systems (CPSs), such as the smart-grid, will emerge as the underpinning technology for major industries. A major concern regarding such systems is the seemingly unexpected large-scale failures. Such events are often attributed to a small initial shock getting escalated due to intricate dependencies within and across the individual (e.g., cyber and physical) counterparts of the system. This phenomenon, also known as cascade of failures, has the potential of collapsing an entire infrastructure.

We empirically study the number of facilities at municipality level in Japan observed in telephone directory data from 2011 to 2017. This data is renewed every one year and contains comprehensive individual listings of about 7 million facilities. The distribution of the number of facilities is approximated by an exponential distribution. The annual growth rates follows a Laplace distribution.

The current availability of real-time datasets from electronic devices in cities has offered an unprecedented opportunity to develop methods for controlling of traffic flow and implementation of intelligent transportation systems. Moreover, the mapping of city structure as networks has enabled to understand how the organization of streets influences the transport of people and goodies. In this work, we consider data from electronic radars in the Sorocaba city (Brazil) and constructed a graph, whose nodes are radars and two radars are connected according to geographical distances.

In 2012 a cascading failure caused a loss of power to 600 million people throughout India, while the 2003 Northeastern US blackout is estimated to have cost around USD 6 billion. Using complex network analysis has become a useful tool in understanding how cascading failures propagate through the power-grid. However, obtaining detailed network data is difficult especially regarding line-limits. A popular approach to side-step this problem is to use proportional loading instead of real line-limits.

Typical challenges in the design of modern integrated systems involve selecting a good layout for heterogeneous components, while trying to fulfill several different design objectives at the same time. Historically, such challenges have been cast into different mathematical forms, most commonly optimization problems. The last 20 years have seen a gradual shift to view large design problems instead as constraint-satisfaction problems and to look for sets of feasible solutions. In this work we cast design problems in terms of maximal-entropy statistical physics problems.

The analysis and characterization of human mobility using population-level mobility models is important for numerous applications, ranging from commuting flows to modeling trade flows. However, almost all of these applications have focused on large spatial scales, varying from intra-city level to country level. In this work, we study population-level mobility models in supermarkets, and we thereby examine these models on a much smaller spatial scale.

Worldwide, flood and drought events cause severe disruption to essential services. Climate change, population growth and urbanisation are due to cause further infrastructure pressures. Traditionally, hydro-hazard risk is addressed with technical interventions which loosely couple social impacts and focus on either end of the hydrological cycle but not both concurrently. Such methods are now reaching the boundaries of their performance envelope – necessitating novel planning approaches that acknowledge complexity science.

The transformation of traditional vehicles in ports to autonomous ones is one of the trends that is observed to handle the increasing volumes of containers at terminals, which in some case are reaching their operational capacity. The LOGIMATIC project aims to fully automate port operations with the use of autonomous straddle carriers and to apply this approach to the 6th pier of the Port of Thessaloniki.

In order to answer the question as to whether road networks follow a self-organisation process, we need to be able to understand what principles of economy would this mechanism entail. It is therefore of interest to be able to explore the possible shape that a performance function would have for transportation systems. In this work, we tackle this issue by proposing a network generation model based on a single parameter alpha which is capable of creating any type of network from trees to quasi-surfaces and is shown to generate networks close to the real road networks under study.

The existence of slums or informal settlements is common to most cities of developing countries. In India, slums contain a wealth of diversity that is masked by a high level of poverty and rather insufficient access to resources. Recent studies have identified that it is important to study and assess the stability of slums as they exhibit vastly different levels of resilience. While many slums are vulnerable to forced evictions, temporary jobs, and constant migration; few slums can respond and recover from external shocks and stress.