Collision avoidance is a priority task for ensuring the safety of a maritime transportation system. However, for a ship towing system, which is characterized by multiple vessels and physical connections, the research works about collision avoidance is limited. Thus, this paper proposes a speed and heading control-based conflict resolution of a ship towing system for collision avoidance. Two systems compose the core of the proposed conflict resolution: the risk assessment system and the coordination control system. The risk assessment is to identify the conflict and determine the time of avoiding action by calculating the index of conflict and the available maneuvering margin. The coordination control is based on the model predictive control (MPC) strategy to cooperatively control two tugboats for regulating the position, heading, and speed of the manipulated ship. Simulation experiments show that according to the index of conflict, the time cost, and the fuel consumption, a selected operation of combined heading and speed can be recommended for a ship towing system to provide a safer and more efficient towage manipulation.

@en

High-tech giants and start-ups are investing in drone technologies to provide urban air delivery service, which is expected to solve the last-mile problem and mitigate road traffic congestion. However, air delivery service will not scale up without proper traffic management for drones in dense urban environment. Currently, a range of Concepts of Operations (ConOps) for unmanned aircraft system traffic management (UTM) are being proposed and evaluated by researchers, operators, and regulators. Among these, the tube-based (or corridor-based) ConOps has emerged in operations in some regions of the world for drone deliveries and is expected to continue serving certain scenarios that with dense and complex airspace and requires centralized control in the future. Towards the tube-based ConOps, we develop a route network planning method to design routes (tubes) in a complex urban environment in this paper. In this method, we propose a priority structure to decouple the network planning problem, which is NP-hard, into single-path planning problems. We also introduce a novel space cost function to enable the design of dense and aligned routes in a network. The proposed method is tested on various scenarios and compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Results show that our method can generate near-optimal route networks with significant computational time-savings.

@en

This article proposes a fixed-time adaptive fault-tolerant control methodology for a larger class of high-order (powers are positive odd integers) nonlinear systems subject to asymmetric time-varying state constraints and actuator faults. In contrast with the state-of-the-art control methodologies, the distinguishing features of this study lie in that: (a) high-order asymmetric time-varying tan-type barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) is devised such that the state variables can be convergent to the preassigned compact sets all the time provided their initial values remain therein, which not only preserves the constraints satisfaction, but warrants the validity of the adopted neural network approximator; (b) the proposed control design ensures the tracking errors converge to specified residual sets within fixed time and makes the size of the convergence regions of tracking errors adjustable a priori by means of a new BLF-based tuning function and a projection operator; (c) a variable-separable lemma is delicately embedded into the control design to extract the control terms in a “linear-like” fashion which not only overcomes the difficulty that virtual control signals appear in a non-affine manner, but also solves the problem of actuator faults. Comparative simulations results finally validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

@en

In human activity recognition (HAR) based on radar, significant research exists on statistical features extracted from the spectrogram (μD), whereas the research which considers other domains is less developed. This paper is aimed to investigate three domains of radar data: μD, Cadence Velocity Diagram (CVD), and range-time (RT) information, evaluating which ones are best suited to classify specific activities. In addition, information fusion is applied to enhance classification accuracy and compare it with the results of single domain approach. Based on the previous results, a hierarchical structure is proposed to improve the performance of classification further. The preliminary results show that different domains have distinctive sensitivity to specific activities. RT information is sensitive to the moving target crossing range bins, while CVD is more sensitive to body movement. The μD is more balanced, which means it can observe both moving targets and body movements. Furthermore, improvement in accuracy is approximately 6-23 % using feature-level fusion. A hierarchical classification approach is also investigated, which has accuracy in the order of approximately 92 %.

@en

The functional efficiency of the pervious pavement is evaluated in terms of skid resistance and tire/road noise, which determines the highway safety and comfort benefits to the travellers. The primary objective of this paper is to incorporate the functional performances such as frictional and acoustic characteristics into the pervious pavement design procedures. The existing pervious pavement design procedures assume that the functional requirement is satisfied arbitrarily with the volumetric and composition requirement. This paper formulates the functional design of porous mixture as the bi-objective optimization model, which maximizes the skid number and minimizes the tire/road noise level, both were obtained from the numerical simulation models. A fast nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA II) was adopted as the solution algorithm to solve the optimization model. Pareto solutions from this model indicate that the performance of skid resistance could not be improved without increasing the tire/road noise. The optimum solutions for this model were selected as the appropriate trade-off between both the parameters. This model allows a highway agency for the incorporation of frictional and acoustic parameters into the existing pervious pavement mixture and thickness design procedures.@en