Detecting longitudinal damages in the internal coating of a tube

Longitudinal defects of the internal coated surface of a metal pipe can be evaluated in a fast, precise and cheap way from thermal measurements on the external surface. In this paper, we study two classes of real situations in which the thickness of the coating is much smaller than the thickness of the metal tube: the transportation of potable water and crude oil. A very precise and stable reconstruction of damages is obtained by means of perturbation methods. To do this, first we translate a composite (coating-plus-tube) boundary value problem in a virtual one on the metallic part only.

Preventing the drop in security investments for non-competitive cyber-insurance market

The rapid development of cyber insurance market brings forward the question about the effect of cyber insurance on cyber security. Some researchers believe that the effect should be positive as organisations will be forced to maintain a high level of security in order to pay lower premiums. On the other hand, other researchers conduct a theoretical analysis and demonstrate that availability of cyber insurance may result in lower investments in security. In this paper we propose a mathematical analysis of a cyber-insurance model in a non-competitive market.

Traffic Data Classification for Police Activity

Traffic data, automatically collected en masse every day, can be mined to discover information or patterns to support police investigations. Leveraging on domain expertise, in this paper we show how unsupervised clustering techniques can be used to infer trending behaviors for road-users and thus classify both routes and vehicles. We describe a tool devised and implemented upon openly-available scientific libraries and we present a new set of experiments involving three years worth data.

Two algorithms for a fully coupled and consistently macroscopic PDE-ODE system modeling a moving bottleneck on a road

In this paper we propose two numerical algorithms to solve a coupled PDE-ODE system which models a slow vehicle (bottleneck) moving on a road together with other cars. The resulting system is fully coupled because the dynamics of the slow vehicle depends on the density of cars and, at the same time, it causes a capacity drop in the road, thus limiting the car flux. The first algorithm, based on the Wave Front Tracking method, is suitable for theoretical investigations and convergence results. The second one, based on the Godunov scheme, is used for numerical simulations.

Comparing comparisons between vehicular traffic states in microscopic and macroscopic first-order models

In this paper we deal with the analysis of the solutions of traffic flow models at multiple scales, both in the case of a single road and of road networks. We are especially interested in measuring the distance between traffic states (as they result from the mathematical modeling) and investigating whether these distances are somehow preserved passing from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale.

A "pay-how-you-drive" car insurance approach through cluster analysis

As discussed in the recent literature, several innovative car insurance concepts are proposed in order to gain advantages both for insurance companies and for drivers. In this context, the "pay-how-you-drive" paradigm is emerging, but it is not thoroughly discussed and much less implemented. In this paper, we propose an approach in order to identify the driver behavior exploring the usage of unsupervised machine learning techniques. A real-world case study is performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Optimal spatiotemporal effort allocation for invasive species removal incorporating a removal handling time and budget

Improving strategies for the control and eradication of invasive species is an important aspect of nature conservation, an aspect where mathematical modeling and optimization play an important role. In this paper, we introduce a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation to model the spatiotemporal dynamics of an invasive species, and we use optimal control theory to solve for optimal management, while implementing a budget constraint. We perform an analytical study of the model properties, including the well-posedness of the problem.

Numerical evidence of electron hydrodynamic whirlpools in graphene samples

We present an extension of recent relativistic Lattice Boltzmann methods based on Gaussian quadratures for the study of fluids in (2+1) dimensions. The new method is applied to the analysis of electron flow in graphene samples subject to electrostatic drive; we show that the flow displays hydro-electronic whirlpools in accordance with recent analytical calculations as well as experimental results.