Determining the optimal location of an urban transport interchange hub

Several possible options for the location of Pyatiletka transport interchange hub in the Samara city district are considered. In order to determine the optimal option, the hub location is compared by several parameters. Such values as passenger traffic, existing routes of urban public transport, priority directions of passenger traffic, and capital investments in construction are selected as optimization parameters. To determine the values of passenger traffic, an analysis of the existing passenger traffic was performed, with its allocation by capacity and routing. The unevenness of passenger traffic by days of the week and periods of the day is determined, the minimum and maximum values of passenger traffic are revealed, as well as its fluctuations over the considered periods. The construction of public urban transport routes allowed to identify the busiest routes and the availability of transport for different variants of the transport interchange hub location. The options of organizing the possible arrival/departure of urban public transport to/from the transport interchange hub are considered. Using the obtained data, a SWOT analysis was performed to determine the strengths and weaknesses of each hub placement option and the optimal variant was selected.

Reducing cloud infrastructure costs through task management

The transition of more and more companies from their own computing infrastructure to the clouds is due to a decrease in the cost of maintaining it, the broadest scalability, and the presence of a large number of tools for automating activities. Accordingly, cloud providers provide an increasing number of different computing resources and tools for working in the clouds. In turn, this gives rise to the problem of the rational choice of the types of cloud services in accordance with the peculiarities of the tasks to be solved. One of the most popular areas of effort for cloud consumers is to reduce rental costs. The main base of this direction is the use of spot resources. The article proposes a method for reducing the cost of renting computing resources in the cloud by dynamically managing the placement of computational tasks, which takes into account the possible underutilization of planned resources, the forecast of the appearance of spot resources and their cost. For each task, a state vector is generated that takes into account the duration of the task and the required deadline. Accordingly, for a suitable set of computing resources, an availability forecast vectors are formed at a given time interval, counting from the current moment in time. The technique proposes to calculate at each discrete moment of time the most rational option for placing the task on one of the resources and the delay in starting the task on it. The placement option and launch delays are determined by minimizing the rental cost function over the time interval using a genetic algorithm. One of the features of using spot resources is the auction mechanism for their provision by a cloud provider. This means that if there are more preferable rental prices from any consumer, then the provider can warn you about the disconnection of the resource and make this disconnection after the announced time. To minimize the consequences of such a shutdown, the technique involves preliminary preparation of tasks by dividing them into substages with the ability to quickly save the current results in memory and then restart from the point of stop. In addition, to increase the likelihood that the task will not be interrupted, a price forecast for the types of resources used is used and a slightly higher price is offered for the auction of the cloud provider, compared to the forecast. Using the example of using the Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment of the cloud provider AWS, the effectiveness of the proposed method is shown.

TYPES OF WELL GRIDS. THE VALUE OF THE GRID DENSITY

В статье представлен общий обзор форм и видов размещения сетки скважин. Обозначены факторы, определяющие выбор того или иного варианта размещения. Указана зависимость дебита от плотности сетки скважин. The article provides a general overview of the forms and types of placement of the well grid. The factors that determine the choice of a particular placement option are indicated. The dependence of the flow rate on the density of the well grid is indicated.

Challenges posed by kinship care: A study focussing on New South Wales

Kinship care as a formal placement option has been steadily increasing over recent years, particularly in New South Wales. This paper draws on a report of research on kinship care in New South Wales, in which the two authors participated (Mason et al, 2002). In conducting the research, qualitative and quantitative methods were used to explore both ‘top down’ perspectives (from policy documents and statistics) and ‘bottom up’ perspectives (from child protection practitioners and those who experience policy as service recipients – kinship carers, young people in kinship care and parents of children in kinship care).In this paper we briefly outline the research and discuss findings relating to definitions of kinship care, the extent of kinship care in NSW, decision making around the placement of children in kinship care, reasons given by participants for kinship care, and support for carers.

Physical Education and Sport for the Deaf: Rethinking the Least Restrictive Environment

Efforts to include children with disabilities in mainstream settings often raise questions as to what constitutes “least restrictive.” This paper addresses educational placement of deaf children, especially as it pertains to physical education and sport. Many leaders in deaf education hold that placement of deaf children in public schools often occurs without regard to their socioemotional/cultural/language needs. This paper provides a rationale for the residential school as a viable and legitimate placement option for deaf children. Also included in the paper is a brief historical overview of deaf education including the contributions of residential schools to deaf sport and deaf culture.