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Connected autonomous intelligent agents (AIA) can improve intersection performance and resilience for the transportation infrastructure. An agent is an autonomous decision maker whose decision making is determined internally but may be altered by interactions with the environment or with other agents. Implementing agent-based modeling techniques to advance communication for more appropriate decision making can benefit autonomous vehicle technology.

This research examines vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to infrastructure (V2I), and infrastructure to infrastructure (I2I) communication strategies that use gathered data to ensure these agents make appropriate decisions under operational circumstances. These vehicles and signals are modeled to adapt to the common traffic flow of the intersection to ultimately find an traffic flow that will minimizes average vehicle transit time to improve intersection efficiency. By considering each light and vehicle as an agent and providing for communication between agents, additional decision-making data can be transmitted. Improving agent based I2I communication and decision making will provide performance benefits to traffic flow capacities.

 

In order to accurately predict the performance of materials under dynamic loading conditions, models have been developed that describe the rate-dependent material behavior and irrecoverable plastic deformation that occurs at elevated strains and applied loads. Most of these models have roots in empirical fits to data and, thus, require the addition of specific parameters that reflect the properties and response of specific materials. In this work, we present a systematic approach to the problem of calibrating a Johnson-Cook plasticity model for 304L stainless steel using experimental testing in which the parameters are treated as dependent on the state of the material and uncovered using experimental data. The results obtained indicate that the proposed approach can make the presence of a discrepancy term in calibration unnecessary and, at the same time, improve the prediction accuracy of the model into new input domains and provide improved understanding of model bias compared to calibration with stationary parameter values.

 

Due to reductions in both time and cost, group testing is a popular alternative to individual‐level testing for disease screening. These reductions are obtained by testing pooled biospecimens (eg, blood, urine, swabs, etc.) for the presence of an infectious agent. However, these reductions come at the expense of data complexity, making the task of conducting disease surveillance more tenuous when compared to using individual‐level data. This is because an individual's disease status may be obscured by a group testing protocol and the effect of imperfect testing. Furthermore, unlike individual‐level testing, a given participant could be involved in multiple testing outcomes and/or may never be tested individually. To circumvent these complexities and to incorporate all available information, we propose a Bayesian generalized linear mixed model that accommodates data arising from any group testing protocol, estimates unknown assay accuracy probabilities and accounts for potential heterogeneity in the covariate effects across population subgroups (eg, clinic sites, etc.); this latter feature is of key interest to practitioners tasked with conducting disease surveillance. To achieve model selection, our proposal uses spike and slab priors for both fixed and random effects. The methodology is illustrated through numerical studies and is applied to chlamydia surveillance data collected in Iowa.

 

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a well-known imaging technique for detecting the electrical properties of an object in order to detect anomalies, such as conductive or resistive targets. More specifically, EIT has many applications in medical imaging for the detection and location of bodily tumors since it is an affordable and non-invasive method, which aims to recover the internal conductivity of a body using voltage measurements resulting from applying low frequency current at electrodes placed at its surface. Mathematically, the reconstruction of the internal conductivity is a severely ill-posed inverse problem and yields a poor quality image reconstruction. To remedy this difficulty, at least in part, we regularize and solve the nonlinear minimization problem by the aid of a Krylov subspace-type method for the linear sub problem during each iteration. In EIT, a tumor or general anomaly can be modeled as a piecewise constant perturbation of a smooth background, hence, we solve the regularized problem on a subspace of relatively small dimension by the Flexible Golub-Kahan process that provides solutions that have sparse representation. For comparison, we use a well-known modified Gauss–Newton algorithm as a benchmark. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained reconstructions indicate that the Krylov subspace method is better adapted to solve the ill-posed EIT problem and results in higher resolution images and faster convergence compared to reconstructions using the modified Gauss–Newton algorithm.