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Purpose: China is a critical factor for constructing an all-round well-off society. Infrastructure construction, especially high-grade highways, in the western area is an essential component of the strategy for large-scale development of west China. It is crucial to evaluate investment projects for high-grade highways and select the best one. Testing investment projects and selecting the best one can be recognized as a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In this process, decision-makers (DMs) usually face with uncertain information because of complicated decision environment or their limited knowledge. Design/methodology/approach: A new Evaluation based on the Distance from Average Solution (EDAS) for PFS based on the DEMATEL is proposed: The authors offer a new score function and prove some properties for the score function. They put forward a novel Decision-making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method for PFS to analyze the relations of criteria and get criteria weights. Considering the bounded rationality of DM, the authors propose a new EDAS method for PFS based on prospect theory. They apply their proposed approach to a western city's actual case in selecting a suitable project for building a high-grade highway. Findings: By comparison, the authors can observe that our method has some traits: (1) considering bounded rationality of DM; (2) fewer computation; (3) having the ability to obtain the relation of criteria and finding the critical factor in the decision system. Originality/value: In this paper, the authors propose a new EDAS method for PFS based on the DEMATEL technique. They transform PFS into crisp numbers by their proposed new score function for PFN to make the decision process more convenient. Then, the authors use the DEMATEL method to obtain the relationship between criteria and criteria weights. Furthermore, they propose a new EDAS method for PFS based on DEMATEL to reduce the computational complexity. Finally, they apply our method to a real case and compare our method with two traditional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a compilation of road infrastructure works carried out in Chile, a country with a coastline of 4,329 km, making it an area with a variety of climatic conditions in each of their cities. Despite being among the most developed countries in Latin America, in Chile there is currently 64% of road network with basic solutions in road infrastructure (dirt roads and low standard), simple 12% of basic solutions (treatment, double, soil stabilization, etc.) and only 24% of paved roads (concrete or asphalt). Thus construction companies has been a great challenge to face different climatic conditions for the construction of roads, both in concrete and asphalt. Has been also necessary to develop new technologies and temperate paving pavements with emulsion and recycling, and fracturing concrete slabs through rubblizing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The North Tarrant Express (NTE) is a US$2.1 Billion, that includes the design, construction, financing, operation and maintenance of 13.5-mile highway reconstruction project that was built to double the capacity of IH 820 and SH 121/183, a major east-west corridor in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area (Texas- USA). All of the general-purpose and frontage/service roads were reconstructed and, in addition, two new lanes with dynamic tolling (known as TEXpress lanes) were added in each direction. Motorists using the TEXpress do not to stop to pay the tolls, which change based on traffic congestion. The project design started at the end of 2009 and one year later began construction that was completed in October 2014, nine months ahead of schedule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 2014, after 60 months of design and construction works, DRAGADOS completed the last section of the first public-private partnership project (PPP) in the State of Florida; the 1-595 Corridor Improvement Project. The main challenge that DRAGADOS faced up was the construction of a new roadway within a corridor of high capacity, maintaining the level of traffic service, during all phases of the works, that were finally completed ahead of schedule. It is important to highlight the operations carried out on the University Drive Interchange, in which, instead of demolishing the existing bridge, it was proposed to adapt its alignment and rise it 45 centimeters, improving safety, cost and time. DRAGADOS developed an Environmental Compliance Plan (ECP) which included the rehabilitation of the North River Channel, and the construction of greenways along the entire route. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Implementation of the project and building works of section 3 of the Lugoj-Deva highway in Romania by an association of companies in which COMSA has the role of leader. The project's budget is 132 million euros and its completion timescale is 30 months, with 48 additional months for conservation and maintenance works. The execution contract is basically governed by the FIDIC ("Fédération Internationale Des Ingénieurs-Conseils") regulations and specifically by the "Yellow Fidic" (project and works). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the Dynamic Speed Limit (DSL) experiment that took place in June 2013 on the last 13 km stretch of B-23 freeway accessing Barcelona. The DSL system installed on that freeway in addition to the high density of surveillance equipment available makes this stretch a suitable highway tab. The objective of the experiment was to construct a comprehensive database when different speed limits apply. Detailed measurements of speed, vehicle count, occupancy, lane changing activity and travel time were taken. These simultaneous measurements obtained from very different types of monitoring equipment have been grouped into a single database. This comprehensive DSL database, unique in its nature, is made publicly available to the whole research community. The paper describes in detail the experiment and presents some preliminary results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2012 and March 2013, Colombia's National Infrastructure Agency (ANI) awarded a consortium in which TYPSA has a 75% stake as many contracts for conducting Additional Technical Studies and the Technical Structuring of Autopistas para la Prosperidad. Over the more than two years that have passed, TYPSA has become the indispensable technical support that the ANI required to drive forward the calls for tender in a project that is not only the most ambitious in the country's history but also the largest road infrastructure works in the world undergoing a bidding or execution process, with an estimated global investment of 14 billion pesos, around 5.6 billion euros. The work undertaken by TYPSA had multiple facets: on one hand it has undertaken a comprehensive review of the designs executed to date and has completed and improved them on the basis of a series of additional multidisciplinary field and desk studies. It has also drafted a series of new designs that the ANI wished to incorporate into the concessions package. On the other, it has analysed all the technical aspects of the new concessions, including the drafting of rules for the corresponding invitations to tender, and has accompanied the entity throughout the bidding process. At the present time the ANI has issued a call for tender for part of the concessions and has even awarded some of the sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portugal, since the 9th, began to look with greater concern for the high levels of claims that if there were Portuguese roads, watching in the last 20 years to a growing importance of road safety-related issues. It is recalled that Portugal, in 1995, recorded the highest number of fatalities per million inhabitants of the European Union, about 271 fatalities per million inhabitants, which compared with 72 deaths per million inhabitants that in 2012 (1). The high road safety indicators resulted in accident reduction policies associated with the improvement of infrastructure, with major investments in new ways and the elimination of "black spots", and introducing legislative measures relating to the vehicles and the drivers. The idea of dealing with road safety in a preventive manner gained power and importance, in view of the significant resource savings resulting. However, the financial adjustment that Portugal had to do in recent years threatens this strategy, constituting a real challenge to continue to reduce the rate of accidents with the resources available. Audits and road safety Inspections must have a key role in the evaluation of security conditions and may contribute to investments are optimized and can achieve more with fewer resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of new technologies to traffic engineering has allowed the development of Intelligent Transport Systems. ITS improve traffic management and increase road safety optimizing the use of the existing road infrastructure. ITS systems make easy traffic dynamic management. One of most used parameters in traffic management is the Level of Service. Currently, Level of Service are based on the Highways Capacity Manual from Transportation Research Board. However, the proposed model is completely static. Thus, this model is considered suitable for the dimensioning of future road network, but not for dynamic traffic management. This paper presents a new model for the identification of level of service in highways that allows a dynamic traffic management in real time. This model is based on the fundamental relation between speed and occupancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing development of new traffic monitoring technologies gives rise to a situation with multiple sources of data and multiple algorithms for the estimation of variables that may be of interest, among them information on travel time. This context with data from different sources, all of them imprecise to varying degrees, is the right one for applying data merging techniques. Their objective is to obtain a more reliable and precise merged value than that obtained from any individual estimations by themselves. This article presents a simple data merging methodology for the estimation of travel time on the highway. The proposed method uses data from loop detectors and toll tickets and would be easy to extend to other data sources. Its pilot application on the AP-7 highway has produced promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the pigs were killed [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama is expected to sign the $305 billion bill on Friday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Pope has a lot to say about problems of cities. But how would he solve them? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Los Angeles has the dubious claim to being home to more traffic bottlenecks than any other metropolitan area, the prize for the single worst… [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Denver itself only got some light snow from the powerful winter storm [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

He was dragged by a huge huge gust of wind [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mathematician John Nash died in crash Saturday [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The double entendre was intentional but some felt it was too risqué [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scientists combat excessive use of road salt, which damages roads, vehicles and the environment [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article briefly discusses a storm in Great Britain in late October 2013 that has resulted in flood warnings and disruptions in highway, railroad, and air travel.