Political and Economic Analysis of the South Silk Road： from a Transportation Safety Perspective

With a long history, the South Silk Road has been and will continue to be an important corridor of economic, political, cultural and religious exchange between Southwest China and Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, West Asia and Europe. The transportation corridor established by the South Silk Road has both important strategic significance and value for China's transportation safety, and the potential to bring huge political and economic benefits to our country. However, all kinds of challenges and threats need to be dealt with in order for it to achieve strategic value and play the role of a transportation corridor, thereby ensuring China's strategic security.

Collision mitigation and vehicle transportation safety using integrated vehicle dynamics control systems

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of vehicle dynamics control systems （VDCS） on both the collision of the vehicle body and the kinematic behaviour of the ve- hicle＇s occupant in case of offset frontal vehicle-to-vehicle collision. A unique 6-degree-of- freedom （6-DOF） vehicle dynamics/crash mathematical model and a simplified lumped mass occupant model are developed. The first model is used to define the vehicle body crash parameters and it integrates a vehicle dynamics model with a vehicle front-end structure model. The second model aims to predict the effect of VDCS on the kinematics of the occupant. It is shown from the numerical simulations that the vehicle dynamics/crash response and occupant behaviour can be captured and analysed quickly and accurately. Yurthermore, it is shown that the VDCS can affect the crash characteristics positively and the occupant behaviour is improved.

Construction and Application of Knowledge Graph for Quality and Safety Supervision of Transportation Engineering

Knowledge graph technology play a more and more important role in various fields of industry and academia.This paper firstly introduces the general framework of the knowledge graph construction,which includes three stages:information extraction,knowledge fusion and knowledge processing.In order to improve the efficiency of quality and safety supervision of transportation engineering construction,this paper constructs a knowledge graph by acquiring multi-sources heterogeneous data from supervision of transportation engineering quality and safety.It employs a bottom-up construction strategy and some natural language processing methods to solve the problems of the knowledge extraction for transportation engineering construction.We use the entity relation extraction method to extract the entity triples from the multi-sources heterogeneous data,and then employ knowledge inference to complete the edges in the constructed knowledge graph,finally perform quality evaluation to add the valid triples to the knowledge graph for updating.Subgraph matching technology is also exploited to retrieve the constructed knowledge graph for efficiently acquiring the useful knowledge about the quality and safety of transportation engineering projects.The results show that the constructed knowledge graph provides a practical and valuable tool for the quality and safety supervision of transportation engineering construction.

A Prediction Model for Railway Transportation Sofety and Its Application

This paper discusses the characterization of railway transportation safety, andapplies the Grey-Markov forecasting model to predict the occurrences of thedriving accident on railway according to their speciality. It will offer a reliableargument for taking measures to prevent driving accidents.

Modeling of Hydrogen Blending on the Leakage and Diffusion of Urban Buried Hydrogen-Enriched Natural Gas Pipeline

With the introduction of various carbon reduction policies around the world,hydrogen energy,as a kind of clean energy with zero carbon emission,has attracted much attention.The safe and economical transportation of hydrogen is of great significance to the development of hydrogen energy industries.Utilizing natural gas pipelines to transport hydrogen is considered to be an efficient and economical way.However,hydrogen has a higher risk of leakage due to its strong diffusion capacity and lower explosive limit than conventional natural gas.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the leakage and diffusion law of hydrogen-enriched natural gas(HENG)pipelines for the safe transportation of hydrogen energy.In this study,the leakage and diffusion characteristics of urban buried HENG pipelines are investigated numerically,and the dangerous degree of leakage is analyzed based on the time and area when the gas concentration reaches the lower explosive limit.The influences of hydrogen blending ratio(HBR),operating pressure,leakage hole size and direction,as well as soil type on the leakage and diffusion law of HENG are analyzed.Results show that the hydrogen mixing is not the key factor in increasing the degree of risk after gas leakage for urban buried HENG pipelines.When the HBR is 5%,10%,15% and 20%,the corresponding first dangerous time is 1053,1041,1019 and 998 s,respectively.Thiswork is expected to provide a valuable reference for the safe operation and risk prevention of HENG pipelines in the future.

An automated geo-spatial correction framework for transportation

In this paper, we present a framework to validate and to correct the location information in crash reports. The proposed system is composed of several modules: creation of intersection network and pre-processing, validation, snapping, updating, and manual-spotting.The proposed system utilizes GPS coordinates(latitude/longitude), primary and reference road names, primary direction, and distance to the reference road. The algorithm starts at an initial GPS coordinate provided in the crash report. Additional location information is utilized in case this coordinate does not satisfy certain criteria. After verification of the road names, the correct snapping location is determined using the primary direction and primary distance information. At the final stage, the attributes in the crash data are retrieved from the base map given the snapping point. We tested the proposed system by three different test data sets. The number of correctly identified matches and the average snapping error are calculated for assessment. The experiments show that the proposed framework is capable of geocoding the crashes up to 98% accuracy with the average of 37 feet of snapping error and 64% of the matching records have less than snapping error of 1 foot. However, we observed that considering highly specific cases as an outlier, the snapping error significantly drops. We discuss these cases in detail and propose a remedy as a future work.

Opportunities and challenges of smart mobile applications in transportation

Smart mobile applications are software applications that are designed to run on smart phones, tablets, and other mobile electronic devices. In this era of rapid technological advances, these applications have become one of the primary tools we use daily both in our personal and professional lives. The applications play key roles in facilitating many applications that are pivotal in our today＇s society including communication, education, business, entertainment, medical, finance, travel, utilities, social, and transportation. This paper reviewed the opportunities and challenges of the applications related to transportation. The opportunities revealed include route planning, ridesharing/carpooling, traffic safety, parking information, transportation data collection, fuel emissions and consumption, and travel information. The potential users of these applications in the field of transportation include （I） transportation agencies for travel data collection, travel information, ridesharing/carpooling, and traffic safety, （2） engineering students for field data collection such as travel speed, travel time, and vehicle count, and （3） general traveling public for route planning, ridesharing/carpooling, parking, traffic safety, and travel information. Significant usage of smart mobile applications can be potentially very beneficial, particularly in automobile travel mode to reduce travel time, cost, and vehicle emissions. In the end this would make travel safer and living environments greener and healthier. However, road users＇ interactions with these applications could manually, visually, and cognitively divert their attention from the primary task of driving or walking. Distracted road users expose themselves and others to unsafe behavior than undistracted. Road safety education and awareness programs are vital to discourage the use of applications that stimulate unsafe driving/walking behaviors. Educating the traveling public about the dangers of unsafe driving/walking behavior could have significant safety benefits to all road users. Future research needs to compare accuracies of the applications and provide guidelines for selecting them for certain transportation related applications.