Breakpoint Analysis for the COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Effect on the Stock Markets.

In this research, statistical models are formulated to study the effect of the health crisis arising from COVID-19 in global markets. Breakpoints in the price series of stock indexes are considered. Such indexes are used as an approximation of the stock markets in different countries, taking into account that they are indicative of these markets because of their composition. The main results obtained in this investigation highlight that countries with better institutional and economic conditions are less affected by the pandemic. In addition, the effect of the health index in the models is associated with their non-significant parameters. This is due to that the health index used in the modeling would not determine the different capacities of the countries analyzed to respond efficiently to the pandemic effect. Therefore, the contagion is the preponderant factor when analyzing the structural breakdown that occurred in the world economy.

The Feasibility of a Land Ferry System to Reduce Highway Maintenance Cost and Associated Externalities.

This study provides an economic evaluation for a Land Ferry, which is a rail system capable of carrying trucks and all other types of vehicles, passengers, and cargo. The Land Ferry system involves a sliding loading system to roll heavy loads onto a flatbed; as a result, loading and unloading of all vehicles and cargo could be accomplished simultaneously. The evaluation for this system included (1) the design of a new track alignment over which the Land Ferry system would run, (2) evaluation of various sources of power, (3) estimation of how many local jobs the Land Ferry would generate, and (4) a benefit-cost analysis. It was estimated that the Land Ferry would create over 45,788 temporary jobs in Nevada during the three-year construction period and 318 permanent jobs during operation. The majority of the benefits were attributed to savings in travel time ($356.4 M), vehicle operating costs ($1000.4 M), reduction of accidents ($544.6 M), and pavement maintenance ($503.2 M). These benefits would be a consequence of the shift of trucks from the highway, thus resulting in higher speeds, decrease fuel consumption, and decrease vehicle maintenance costs. The overall benefit-cost ratio of 1.7 implies a cost-effective project.

Traffic and Driving Simulator Based on Architecture of Interactive Motion.

This study proposes an architecture for an interactive motion-based traffic simulation environment. In order to enhance modeling realism involving actual human beings, the proposed architecture integrates multiple types of simulation, including: (i) motion-based driving simulation, (ii) pedestrian simulation, (iii) motorcycling and bicycling simulation, and (iv) traffic flow simulation. The architecture has been designed to enable the simulation of the entire network; as a result, the actual driver, pedestrian, and bike rider can navigate anywhere in the system. In addition, the background traffic interacts with the actual human beings. This is accomplished by using a hybrid mesomicroscopic traffic flow simulation modeling approach. The mesoscopic traffic flow simulation model loads the results of a user equilibrium traffic assignment solution and propagates the corresponding traffic through the entire system. The microscopic traffic flow simulation model provides background traffic around the vicinities where actual human beings are navigating the system. The two traffic flow simulation models interact continuously to update system conditions based on the interactions between actual humans and the fully simulated entities. Implementation efforts are currently in progress and some preliminary tests of individual components have been conducted. The implementation of the proposed architecture faces significant challenges ranging from multiplatform and multilanguage integration to multievent communication and coordination.

Development of a Comprehensive Database System for Safety Analyst.

This study addressed barriers associated with the use of Safety Analyst, a state-of-the-art tool that has been developed to assist during the entire Traffic Safety Management process but that is not widely used due to a number of challenges as described in this paper. As part of this study, a comprehensive database system and tools to provide data to multiple traffic safety applications, with a focus on Safety Analyst, were developed. A number of data management tools were developed to extract, collect, transform, integrate, and load the data. The system includes consistency-checking capabilities to ensure the adequate insertion and update of data into the database. This system focused on data from roadways, ramps, intersections, and traffic characteristics for Safety Analyst. To test the proposed system and tools, data from Clark County, which is the largest county in Nevada and includes the cities of Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City, and North Las Vegas, was used. The database and Safety Analyst together help identify the sites with the potential for safety improvements. Specifically, this study examined the results from two case studies. The first case study, which identified sites having a potential for safety improvements with respect to fatal and all injury crashes, included all roadway elements and used default and calibrated Safety Performance Functions (SPFs). The second case study identified sites having a potential for safety improvements with respect to fatal and all injury crashes, specifically regarding intersections; it used default and calibrated SPFs as well. Conclusions were developed for the calibration of safety performance functions and the classification of site subtypes. Guidelines were provided about the selection of a particular network screening type or performance measure for network screening.

Solving the Manufacturing Cell Design Problem through Binary Cat Swarm Optimization with Dynamic Mixture Ratios.

In this research, we present a Binary Cat Swarm Optimization for solving the Manufacturing Cell Design Problem (MCDP). This problem divides an industrial production plant into a certain number of cells. Each cell contains machines with similar types of processes or part families. The goal is to identify a cell organization in such a way that the transportation of the different parts between cells is minimized. The organization of these cells is performed through Cat Swarm Optimization, which is a recent swarm metaheuristic technique based on the behavior of cats. In that technique, cats have two modes of behavior: seeking mode and tracing mode, selected from a mixture ratio. For experimental purposes, a version of the Autonomous Search algorithm was developed with dynamic mixture ratios. The experimental results for both normal Binary Cat Swarm Optimization (BCSO) and Autonomous Search BCSO reach all global optimums, both for a set of 90 instances with known optima, and for a set of 35 new instances with 13 known optima.