Search Results (716)

The increasing demand for efficient parking lots in urban environments has intensified research into puzzle-based storage parking systems. However, this high-density approach introduces challenges related to optimizing retrieval time and determining efficient vehicle access paths. Research shows that standardized testing platforms are needed to enable fair comparisons of algorithmic approaches in the puzzle-based storage (PBS) field. This study introduces a comprehensive, modular, and free environment for the systematic evaluation of shortest-path algorithms within PBS problems. The paper provides a practical example of the environment’s application and outlines future development perspectives. Moreover, the article provides a comparative analysis of vehicle retrieval performance across a spectrum of scenarios, including variations in parking lot dimensions, occupancy densities, movement strategies (orthogonal versus octilinear), and input/output point configurations. Experiments reveal that grid size, storage density, and depot placement significantly influence retrieval efficiency, computational complexity, and solution optimality, which is consistent with the literature. This study demonstrates that the environment encompasses all essential elements for conducting research and allows reliable comparisons of results across various algorithm implementations. Full article

Current scheduling strategies for energy storage batteries in agricultural parks generally overlook the issue of battery lifespan degradation, which significantly undermines the system’s economic efficiency and long-term reliability. To address this problem, this paper proposes an optimal scheduling method for integrated energy systems in agricultural parks that takes into account the operational reliability of energy storage batteries. First, a battery capacity degradation model integrating both cycle aging and calendar aging is established, and the reliability of multiple components within the energy storage system is evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation. On this basis, an optimization scheduling model aimed at minimizing the total system operating cost is developed, dynamically balancing economic performance and battery service life. Finally, the proposed method is validated through a practical case study of a facility-based agricultural industrial park. The results demonstrate that, while ensuring stable system operation, the approach effectively extends the service life of energy storage equipment by 8–9 years, reduces the average daily operating cost by 61.94 yuan, and increases the power supply reliability rate to 99.921%. Full article

In the 21st century, Saudi cities have witnessed a high rate of private car ownership, averaging 1.38 vehicles per family. This has significantly increased demand for parking in residential areas, leading to unregulated parking behaviors that negatively affect street and sidewalk infrastructure. Although some research has been conducted in Saudi Arabia on illegal parking in commercial streets, research on unregulated parking in residential streets remains underexplored. This study investigates the impact of unregulated parking behavior on street and sidewalk infrastructure in residential districts with apartment zones in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, determining the extent to which current sidewalk strips have been modified to extend on-street parking, create front setbacks for parking, and provide access to ground-floor private parking and residential building entrances. We selected six typical apartment building zones and mapped parking behavior through direct observations, processing collected data through ArcGIS. Our findings reveal negative impacts, resulting in significant parts of sidewalks, front setbacks, and streets being used for parking, thereby creating unhealthy and unsafe residential areas for walking and other physical activities. This study offers a comprehensive understanding of the unregulated parking problem and its subsequent impact on residents’ quality of life, particularly in terms of walking accessibility and safety. Full article

This exploratory study addresses the problem of limited research on quality assessments of newly emerging multi-use market formats that function as social hubs and their management as privately managed public spaces. Using Āgenskalns Market, a revitalised multi-use market hall in Riga, as a case study, the authors apply an assessment framework based on Yuri Impens’ study on covered food halls, incorporating quality criteria from Vikas Mehta’s Public Space Index and the UN-Habitat’s Site-Specific assessment methodology. Leclercq et al.’s works on privatisation of public spaces are integrated in the analysis of “publicness”. This framework evaluates user and observer perceptions across four dimensions: environmental quality and comfort, accessibility and amenities, social experience, and market offer. Data comprised an online survey of 318 respondents and 21 structured observations conducted during summer in 2024 and 2025. The preliminary results suggest users perceive the market as a well-maintained, aesthetically pleasing, accessible space, while identifying room for improvement regarding restroom facilities, indoor thermal regulation, noise mitigation, outdoor weather protection and parking arrangements. As for meaningful use and promoting sociability, findings highlight that flexible seating areas that allow high degrees of temporary personalisation and appropriation, alongside tailored programming and diverse activities beyond retail and dining, play an important role in attracting and retaining diverse audiences. While pricing concerns were noted for specific product groups, exclusionary effects appear to be counterbalanced by openness and inclusivity of cultural programmes and free events. The findings contribute to broader urban scholarship discussions calling for new typologies that better capture the changing character of public space use. This research suggests that private-public partnerships involving multiple stakeholders can enhance “publicness” by promoting inclusivity and social life through accessible infrastructure, diverse activities and free events, as well as enabling opportunities for temporary appropriation by users. Full article

Background. Exposure to artificial light at night can lead to circadian disruption and health risks. It can cause mood swings, confusion, and depression. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to assess the relationship between the illuminance of urban lighting and the health of residents. Methods: This study was carried out among residents of two similar towns, one with typical street lighting and a Dark Sky Park characterized by reduced lighting. A total of 272 respondents participated in this study. A self-administered questionnaire and the WHOQOL-BREF were used among the respondents. Results. People living in the Dark Sky Park were more likely to be satisfied with their sleep (p < 0.001). In fact, 58.7% of Dark Sky Park residents reported no sleep problems. In the control town, only 49.25% did (p = 0.04). The sleep duration was similar in the two towns, but Dark Sky Park residents were statistically less likely to use sleeping pills and window blinds. People exposed to typical street lighting at night reported suffering from eye diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and mood changes more often than those living in the Dark Sky Park. The environmental and physical quality of life, as measured by the WHOQOL-BREF, were significantly higher in the Dark Sky Park residents than in the control town (p < 0.05). Conclusions. People living in places with limited illuminance declare better health and a higher quality of life in the physical and environmental domains. Full article

The effort to reduce the intensity of car traffic in city centres is among the core objectives of sustainable development. One important means of achieving this aim is the creation of Park-and-Ride facilities. This article examines the challenges encountered during the planning and construction of a Park-and-Ride designed to ease the transport burden of a larger city, yet situated on the edge of a small historic town in Poland. Using a research-through-design method, the study identifies the project’s challenges. The article highlights the overlooked issue of locating Park-and-Ride schemes within sensitive contexts. The accompanying interventions enabled the realisation of an undertaking, originally conceived as a strictly engineering investment fulfilling global policy objectives, but ultimately adapted to manage local priorities. The pursuit of sustainable transport development thus became an opportunity to foreground the dual role of transport spaces: both as organisers of movement and as educators in conveying cultural meaning. The project serves as an example of how local problems may be addressed through investments framed as advancing global political goals. The Park-and-Ride in Stary Sącz also provides material evidence of the significance of decisions made by local authorities to resolve local challenges while contributing to global goals. Full article

In urban design, public open spaces (POS) are essential for enhancing health and well-being across the lifetime. High-quality public open spaces facilitate the maintenance of optimal physical and mental health in older individuals by encouraging activities like physical exercise and social engagement. Preserving the physical and mental well-being of elderly individuals is a fundamental concern for aging policy. Nevertheless, urbanization presents considerable problems with the provision of public open spaces for activities aimed at the elderly. South Korea has more significant issues than other nations globally. This study, based on data from 477 valid questionnaires collected in and around Tapgol Park in Jung-gu, Seoul, employed a decision tree approach to identify key factors and paths that influence overall satisfaction. The goal was to identify decision paths that improve satisfaction while ensuring interpretability, thereby providing a scientific basis for urban space design and renovation. The results show that: (1) The decision tree of this study presents a hierarchical logic of quietness first, then accessibility and cleanliness, and finally price and vitality, which is consistent with the high frequency of use of Tapgol Park by the elderly and the diverse facilities in the surrounding area. (2) The key to improving the management and satisfaction of Tapgol Park in Seoul is the quietness of the site. (3) When the park is not quiet, users are most sensitive to bottom-line factors, such as commercial supply, evacuation safety, transportation accessibility, price perception, barrier-free, and anti-slips. (4) When the park is quiet, basic comfort factors such as smooth walking, all-day opening, sunlight, and no odor constitute the minimum condition set for entering the comfort zone. (5) Water experience, waterfront accessibility, proximity to cultural resources, and moderate business and community-oriented leisure facilities are key plus points. Methodologically, this study is among the first to apply a decision tree approach to low-income elderly using a small public open space in a historic city center, clarifying the nonlinear and hierarchical relationships among environmental factors within these low-income elderly groups. This provides empirical support and reference for the aging-friendly urban space in world heritage cities and other historical and cultural cities. Full article

Visual SLAM systems face significant performance degradation under dynamic lighting conditions, where traditional feature extraction methods suffer from reduced keypoint detection and unstable matching. This paper presents LDFE-SLAM, a novel visual SLAM framework that addresses illumination challenges through a Light-Aware Deep Front-End (LDFE) architecture. Our key insight is that low-light degradation in SLAM is fundamentally a geometric feature distribution problem rather than merely a visibility issue. The proposed system integrates three synergistic components: (1) an illumination-adaptive enhancement module based on EnlightenGAN with geometric consistency loss that restores gradient structures for downstream feature extraction, (2) SuperPoint-based deep feature detection that provides illumination-invariant keypoints, and (3) LightGlue attention-based matching that filters enhancement-induced noise while maintaining geometric consistency. Through systematic evaluation of five method configurations (M1–M5), we demonstrate that enhancement, deep features, and learned matching must be co-designed rather than independently optimized. Experiments on EuRoC and TUM sequences under synthetic illumination degradation show that LDFE-SLAM maintains stable localization accuracy (∼1.2 m ATE) across all brightness levels, while baseline methods degrade significantly (up to 3.7 m). Our method operates normally down to severe lighting conditions (30% ambient brightness and 20–50 lux—equivalent to underground parking or night-time streetlight illumination), representing a 4–6× lower illumination threshold compared to ORB-SLAM3 (200–300 lux minimum). Under severe (25% brightness) conditions, our method achieves a 62% tracking success rate, compared to 12% for ORB-SLAM3, with keypoint detection remaining above the critical 100-point threshold, even under extreme degradation. Full article

The last kilometer connection problem of metro transit stations is the core factor to measure the connection efficiency and service quality. Establishing the spatiotemporal distribution pattern of the connection distance is conducive to clarifying the interaction mechanism between bike-sharing connections and urban space. This study focuses on the travel behavior of shared bicycle users accessing metro stations, aiming to reveal the access distance decay patterns and their relationship with influence factors. Finally, the random forest algorithm was used to explore the nonlinear relationship between the influencing factors and the connection decay distance, and to clarify the importance of the factors. Multiple linear regression was applied to examine the linear correlation between the distance decay coefficient and the factors influence. The geographically weighted regression was further employed to explore spatial variations in their effects. Finally, the random forest algorithm was used to rank the importance of the impact factors. The results indicate that proximity distance to metro stations, proximity distance to bus stops, and the number of bus routes serving the station area have significant negative correlations with the distance decay coefficient. Significant spatial heterogeneity was observed in the influence of each factor on the distance decay coefficient, based on the geographically weighted regression analysis. With a high goodness-of-fit (R² = 0.8032), the Random Forest regression model furthermore quantified the relative importance of each factor influencing the distance decay coefficient. The findings can be directly applied to optimize the layout of shared bicycle parking, metro access facilities planning, and multi-modal transportation system design. Full article

The global elderly population continues to increase, and the demand for leisure programs that support active aging is growing. In particular, group-based outdoor activities for seniors are often conducted in large public areas such as parks, ecological gardens, and cultural sites. As many of these spaces are now being integrated into smart city infrastructures equipped with IoT-based sensing and location-aware services, opportunities for data-driven safety support are expanding. However, in these wide and crowded environments, a small number of social workers are responsible for supervising many elderly participants, which creates monitoring blind spots. In addition, age-related cognitive and physical decline increases the risk of wandering and sudden health deterioration, making timely detection and response difficult. To address this problem, we propose a safety monitoring system for seniors. The system is based on a cloud platform that collects location data from GPS modules and motion information from embedded sensors on mobile devices. It provides real-time tracking of each participant and periodically evaluates their safety state. When abnormal conditions are detected, alerts are delivered to both social workers and the corresponding senior. A prototype implementation, consisting of a cloud server and mobile applications for social workers and elderly users, has been developed. The system is evaluated through a field test conducted on a university campus. Full article

The article proposes a concept for a mobile robot designed to detect hazardous and explosive materials in airport parking lots. The problem with operating such a robot is twofold. Firstly, it must move in a dynamic environment, between vehicles that are parked or also in motion, but without stopping vehicles that are in motion. The second problem is the detection of hazardous and explosive materials. For robot mobility solutions, an obstacle analysis system based on popular, low-cost LIDAR sensors and cameras was proposed. For the detection of hazardous and explosive materials, a dual vehicle monitoring system was proposed for airport parking lots. The first is based on vision techniques, where cameras and image recognition procedures are used to examine the undercarriages of parked vehicles. This system is designed to detect unusual objects mounted on vehicle undercarriages. The second is based on the analysis of volatile substances produced by explosives and hazardous materials found under or inside car chassis and gasoline and oils. The aim of the project is to develop a functional prototype of such a robot and describe its capabilities. The article describes the preliminary findings of the research. Full article

With the deepening of multi-energy coupling and the integration of high proportions of renewable energy, the Park Integrated Energy System (PIES) 1demonstrates enhanced energy utilization flexibility. However, the random fluctuations in photovoltaic (PV) output also pose new challenges for system dispatch. Existing distributed robust scheduling approaches largely rely on offline predictive models and therefore lack dynamic correction mechanisms that incorporate real-time operational data. Moreover, the initial probability distribution of PV output is often difficult to obtain accurately, which further degrades scheduling performance. To address these limitations, this paper develops a PV digital twin model capable of providing more accurate and continuously updated initial probability distributions of PV output for distributed robust scheduling in PIESs. Building upon this foundation, this paper proposes a distributed robust scheduling method for the PIES based on digital twins. This approach aims to maximize the flexibility of energy utilization in PIESs and overcome the challenges posed by random fluctuations in PV output to PIES operational scheduling. First, a PIES model is established after investigating a park-level practical integrated energy system. To describe the uncertainty of PV output, a PV digital twin model that incorporates historical data and temporal features is developed. The long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is employed for output prediction, and real-time data are integrated for dynamic correction. On this basis, error perturbations are introduced, and PV scenario generation and reduction are carried out using Latin hypercube sampling and k-means clustering. To achieve multi-energy cascade utilization, the objective of optimization is defined as the minimization of the sum of system operating cost and curtailment cost. To this end, a two-stage distributed robust optimization model is constructed. The optimal scheduling scheme was obtained by solving the problem using the column-and-constraint generation (CCG) algorithm. The proposed method was finally validated through a case study involving an actual industrial park. The findings indicate that the constructed digital twin model achieves a significant improvement in prediction accuracy compared to traditional models, with the root mean square error and mean absolute error reduced by 13.3% and 10.81%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed distributed robust scheduling strategy significantly enhances the operational economics of PIESs while maintaining system robustness, compared to conventional methods, thereby demonstrating its practical application value in PIES scheduling. Full article

This paper investigates a UAV-assisted wireless communication system that integrates optical wireless communication (LiFi) with conventional RF links to enhance network capacity in crowd-gathering scenarios. While the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) serves as a flying base station providing downlink transmission to mobile ground users, the study places particular emphasis on the role of LiFi as a complementary physical layer technology within heterogeneous networks—an aspect closely connected to optical and photonics advancements. The proposed system is designed for environments such as theme parks and public events, where user groups move collectively toward points of interest (PoIs). To maintain quality of service (QoS) under dynamic mobility, we develop a joint optimization framework that simultaneously designs the UAV’s flight path and resource allocation over time. Given the problem’s non-convexity, a block coordinate descent (BCD) based approach is introduced, which decomposes the problem into power allocation and path planning subproblems. The power allocation step is solved using convex optimization techniques, while the path planning subproblem is handled via successive convex approximation (SCA). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves rapid convergence within 3–5 iterations while guaranteeing 100% heterogeneous QoS satisfaction, ultimately yielding nearly 15.00 bps/Hz system capacity enhancement over baseline approaches. These findings motivate the integration of coordinated three-dimensional trajectory planning for multi-UAV cooperation as a promising direction for further enhancement. Although LiFi is implemented in free-space optics rather than fiber-based sensing, this work highlights a relevant optical technology that may inspire future cross-domain applications, including those in optical sensing, where UAVs and reconfigurable optical links play a role. Full article

The article outlined a method to examine the compositional development of some well-known 19th century European public parks with rich historic character. It focused on investigations forming the foundation for a research and design approach ensuring diversity and similarity of the sites, contexts and design problems. Backgrounds and principles that underpin the relation between conservation and development in historical settings of parks are addressed. The survey and comparative analysis of old maps, designs, descriptions and documentation of the current conditions of the investigated parks primarily through remote sensing methods provided an overview of the development and state of preservation of key compositional aspects: spatial structure, design, tree canopy coverage, road and water system, visual connections, dendrological species and forms during the last two centuries. This design analysis approach served as a research method supporting new landscape architecture challenges in conservation and restoration in a changing ecological environment and with new requirements from contemporary planning and design. Full article

The aim of this article is to assess micromobility infrastructure from the perspective of the development of electromobility in Poland. The research problem was formulated in the form of a question: To what extent does the development of micromobility infrastructure contribute to changes in the electromobility process? In conceptual terms, point and linear transport infrastructure and means of transport adapted to a given infrastructure were identified. For the purposes of infrastructure research, models relating to point and linear micromobility infrastructure were used. The methodological basis was the adoption of five criteria for the design and evaluation of bicycle infrastructure, on the basis of which a theoretical model of sustainable micromobility development was created. In Poland, there is considerable interest in personal transportation devices. This is due to the high availability of PTMs, mainly because they do not require much parking space (point infrastructure) and provide relatively cheap travel compared to traveling by car, and they also speed up the first and last kilometers of the journey. In recent years, Poland has seen significant growth and development regarding linear infrastructure. Full article