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There has been enormous progress in geospatial data acquisition in the last decade. Centralized data collection, mainly by land surveying offices and local government agencies, has changed dramatically to voluntary data provision by citizens. Among a broad list of initiatives dealing with user generated geospatial information, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is one of the most famous crowd-sourced products. It is believed that the quality of collected information remains a valid concern. Therefore, qualitative assessment of OSM data as the most significant instance of volunteered geospatial information (VGI) is a considerable issue in the geospatial information community. One aspect of VGI quality assessment pertains to its comparison with institutionally referenced geospatial databases. This paper proposes a new quality metric for assessment of VGI accuracy and as well as for quality analysis of OSM dataset by evaluating its consistency with that of a reference map produced by Municipality of Tehran, Iran. A gridded map is employed and heuristic metrics such as Minimum Bounding Geometry area and directional distribution (Standard Deviational Ellipse), evaluated for both VGI and referenced data, are separately compared in each grid. Finally, in order to have a specific output as an integrated quality metric for VGI, its consistency with ground-truth data is evaluated using fuzzy logic. The results of this research verify that the quality of OSM maps in the study area is fairly good, although the spatial distribution of uncertainty in VGI varies throughout the dataset.

In March 2020, the Austrian government introduced a widespread lock-down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on subjective impressions and anecdotal evidence, Austrian public and private life came to a sudden halt. Here we assess the effect of the lock-down quantitatively for all regions in Austria and present an analysis of daily changes of human mobility throughout Austria using near-real-time anonymized mobile phone data. We describe an efficient d ata a ggregation pipeline and analyze the mobility by quantifying mobile-phone traffic at specific point of interests (POIs), analyzing individual trajectories and investigating the cluster structure of the origin-destination graph. We found a reduction of commuters at Viennese metro stations of over 80% and the number of devices with a radius of gyration of less than 500 m almost doubled. The results of studying crowd-movement behavior highlight considerable changes in the structure of mobility networks, revealed by a higher modularity and an increase from 12 to 20 detected communities. We demonstrate the relevance of mobility data for epidemiological studies by showing a significant correlation of the outflow f rom t he t own o f I schgl ( an e arly COVID-19 hotspot) and the reported COVID-19 cases with an 8-day time lag. This research indicates that mobile phone usage data permits the moment-by-moment quantification of mobility behavior for a whole country. We emphasize the need to improve the availability of such data in anonymized form to empower rapid response to combat COVID-19 and future pandemics.Index Terms-big-data, call-data-records (CDR) Apache-Spark, graph-analysis, mobility This work was funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under project 857136, the Austrian Science Fund FWF under project P29252, the WWTF under project COV 20-017 and COV20-035 and the Medizinisch-Wissenschaftlicher Fonds des Buergermeisters der Bundeshauptstadt Wien under project CoVid004.

One of the important issues in the world is the significant growth of waste production, including waste that is not biodegradable in nature. According to the Kerman Municipality, 440 tonnes of municipal waste is collected daily in Kerman consisting of five major parts of paper, plastic, metal, glass, and wet waste. The major problems of municipal solid waste disposal are soil erosion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. The most important factors related to recycling are waste sorting and the relevant environmental conditions. This study aims to create a sustainable approach by locating the optimal sites to reduce environmental pollution, decrease costs, and improve the service system to the society. Optimal locations for establishing the collecting and sorting centers in the city are specified by the use of geographic information system software, based on criteria consisting of population density, road network, distance to health centers, distance to disposal center, waste sorting culture, land space, and land cost, which were weighted by an analytical hierarchy process. It was noteworthy that the criterion “waste sorting culture”, which has a foundation in human sciences and sociology, has been considered by experts in this study to be of the highest importance among other criteria at locating sorting centers. Subsequently, using a symmetric capacitated vehicle routing problem, the number and capacity of each vehicle are determined to serve the specified locations according to the economic, social, and environmental constraints.

ABSTRACT:In recent years, there has been a rapid growth of location-based social networking services, such as Foursquare and Facebook, which have attracted an increasing number of users and greatly enriched their urban experience. Location-based social network data, as a new travel demand data source, seems to be an alternative or complement to survey data in the study of mobility behavior and activity analysis because of its relatively high access and low cost. In this paper, three OD estimation models have been utilized in order to investigate their relative performance when using Location-Based Social Networking (LBSN) data. For this, the Foursquare LBSN data was used to analyze the intra-urban movement behavioral patterns for the study area, Manhattan, the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York city. The outputs of models are evaluated using real observations based on different criterions including distance distribution, destination travel constraints. The results demonstrate the promising potential of using LBSN data for urban travel demand analysis and monitoring.

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Designing a cellular manufacturing system involves four major decisions: cell formation, cellular layout, operator assignment and cellular scheduling which should be considered, simultaneously. This article presents a new mathematical model to solve the cell formation, operator assignment and inter-cell layout problems, concurrently. The objectives of proposed model are minimization of inter–intra cell part movements, machine relocation cost and operator-related issues including hiring, firing, training and salary costs. Two numerical examples in both small and large sizes are optimally solved by the Lingo software to verify and validate the proposed mathematical model. Also, a sensitivity analysis is performed to analyze the behavior of operators in different production periods.

ABSTRACT:Accessibility of positioning technologies such as GPS offer the opportunity to store one's travel experience and publish it on the web. Using this feature in web-based social networks and considering location information shared by users as a bridge connecting the users' network to location information layer leads to the formation of Geo-Social Networks. The availability of large amounts of geographical and social data on these networks provides rich sources of information that can be utilized for studying human behavior through data analysis in a spatial-temporal-social context. This paper attempts to investigate the behavior of around 1150 users of Foursquare network by making use of their check-ins. The authors analyzed the metadata associated with the whereabouts of the users, with an emphasis on the type of places, to uncover patterns across different temporal and geographical scales for venue category usage. The authors found five groups of meaningful patterns that can explore region characteristics and recognize a number of major crowd behaviors that recur over time and space.