A number of social, economic, and technological trends will work together to disrupt mobility, potentially creating three new urban models by 2030.

Source: www.mckinsey.com

Intuition informs a widespread policy of epidemic response, replacing infected workers in classrooms or hospitals with healthy substitutes. But modelling now suggests that this mechanism may be a key factor in the accelerated spread of an epidemic.

 

Complex networks: Don’t call in sick

Thilo Gross
Nature Physics 12, 995–996 (2016) doi:10.1038/nphys3939

Source: www.nature.com

We investigated different dense multirotor UAV traffic simulation scenarios in open 2D and 3D space, under realistic environments with the presence of sensor noise, communication delay, limited communication range, limited sensor update rate and finite inertia. We implemented two fundamental self-organized algorithms: one with constant direction and one with constant velocity preference to reach a desired target. We performed evolutionary optimization on both algorithms in five basic traffic scenarios and tested the optimized algorithms under different vehicle densities. We provide optimal algorithm and parameter selection criteria and compare the maximal flux and collision risk of each solution and situation. We found that i) different scenarios and densities require different algorithmic approaches, i.e., UAVs have to behave differently in sparse and dense environments or when they have common or different targets; ii) a slower-is-faster effect is implicitly present in our models, i.e., the maximal flux is achieved at densities where the average speed is far from maximal; iii) communication delay is the most severe destabilizing environmental condition that has a fundamental effect on performance and needs to be taken into account when designing algorithms to be used in real life.

 

Self-organized UAV Traffic in Realistic Environment

Csaba Virágh, Máté Nagy, Carlos Gershenson, Gábor Vásárhelyi

Source: arxiv.org