Saiedeh N Razavi

Saiedeh N Razavi
McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Civil Engineering

About

105
Publications
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4,009
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Publications

Publications (105)
Article
Full-text available
In complex road networks, the persistent challenge of inefficiency prominently arises from traffic bottlenecks. Freight bottleneck is a unique type of road traffic bottleneck that exclusively involves the analysis of truck freight mobility. Precise detection and comprehensive analysis of freight bottlenecks are pivotal in shaping optimal goods move...
Article
Full-text available
This paper offers an empirical study to explore the relationship between transportation modalities and environmental concerns, promoting the adoption of synchromodality as a strategic pathway to achieving sustainable freight transport. The study uses a synchromodal freight transportation platform to analyze the impact of carbon tax policy on modal...
Conference Paper
In the era of an ever-volatile market landscape, and constant growth in port demand, numerous severe congestions have occurred that impacted the whole supply chain. The delay caused by the congestion and lack of proactive demand planning imposes significant pressure and cost penalties on the suppliers, manufacturers, and end customers. In light of...
Conference Paper
Synchromodal freight transportation offers proactive demand management and mode choice that is not only adaptive to physical network connectivity but also adaptive to sustainability and service connectivity. Although the synchromodality idea has been thoroughly explored in the Europe region, the concept is still in its infancy in the North American...
Article
Video, as a key driver in the global explosion of digital information, can create tremendous benefits for human society. Governments and enterprises are deploying innumerable cameras for a variety of applications, e.g., law enforcement, emergency management, traffic control, and security surveillance, all facilitated by video analytics (VA). This t...
Article
Full-text available
This paper offers an empirical study to explore the relationship between transportation modalities and environmental concerns, promoting the adoption of synchromodality as a strategic pathway to achieving sustainable freight transport. The study uses a synchromodal freight transportation platform to analyze the impact of carbon tax policy on modal...
Preprint
Video, as a key driver in the global explosion of digital information, can create tremendous benefits for human society. Governments and enterprises are deploying innumerable cameras for a variety of applications, e.g., law enforcement, emergency management, traffic control, and security surveillance, all facilitated by video analytics (VA). This t...
Article
Full-text available
Road-based freight movements are a critical component of the supply chain and transportation networks. With the drive to invest in big data collection capabilities, most of the collected freight movement data remain underutilized. To improve the efficiency and resiliency of the supply chain, it is essential to enhance the visibility of goods moveme...
Article
This paper investigates stakeholder’s perspectives about freight congestion in Canada’s major metropolitan regions. Interviews with 28 Canadian stakeholders from different sectors are analyzed using Strauss/Corbin extended approach of symbolic interactionism with the objective of producing an explanatory theory to identify barriers to freight in Ca...
Article
Ports are pivotal nodes in supply chain and transportation networks, in which most of the existing data remain underutilized. Machine learning methods are versatile tools to utilize and harness the hidden power of the data. Considering ever-growing adoption of machine learning as a data-driven decision-making tool, the port industry is far behind o...
Article
Out-of-home mobility has been identified as essential for older adults to access activities in their community that keep them healthy and well. As individuals grow older, they are more likely to experience medical conditions and other health-related changes that can affect their ability to drive. Balancing older peoples’ continued mobility against...
Article
Full-text available
Shared mobility is a viable choice to improve the connectivity of lower-density neighbourhoods or suburbs that lack high-frequency public transportation services. In addition, its integration with new forms of powertrain and autonomous technologies can achieve more sustainable and efficient transportation. This study compares four shared-mobility t...
Article
Congestion associated with freeway work zones can adversely affect mobility, safety, and sustainability. Variable speed limits (VSL) control has been widely studied to mitigate the congestion caused by lane closures at work zones. However, most VSL controllers are designed without consideration of traffic sensor faults, especially recurrent sensor...
Article
Advanced Vehicle Technologies (AVTs) have been purported to improve the behind-the-wheel experience of older adults (65+ years) by making driving safer, easier, and more enjoyable. The autonomous vehicle, in particular, is viewed as a promising innovation for those in older age groups. However, little is known about how older adults perceive AVTs a...
Article
Older pedestrians (65 years and above) are among the most vulnerable road users. As the number and proportion of older adults grows in many countries, and awareness of the benefits of active travel becomes increasingly evident, it behooves researchers to further investigate the safety of older pedestrians. This study contributes to the literature b...
Article
Despite the well-known benefits that autonomous technologies bring to supply chain and logistics, the adoption of such technologies remains a challenging task. This study seeks to investigate how firms that are associated with the generation of freight movements in Niagara Region (Canada) will respond to new autonomous technologies. Structural Equa...
Article
Road crashes impose an important burden on health and the economy. Numerous efforts have been undertaken to understand the factors that affect road collisions in general, and the severity of crashes in particular. In this literature several strategies have been proposed to model interactions between parties in a crash, including the use of variable...
Article
Freeway work zone with lane closure can lead to disruption to local traffic and cause significant impacts on mobility, safety and environmental sustainability. To mitigate traffic congestion near work zone area, many variable speed limits (VSL) control approaches have been developed. However, VSL control system, as a critical transportation managem...
Chapter
Construction industry is bracing for a paradigm shift resulting from the tightly integrated cyber and physical worlds. Advances in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in Construction have led to a variety of novel applications from additive manufacturing in construction to autonomous heavy equipment operations. Despite the high level of autonomy in some C...
Chapter
This chapter presents an application of the Cyber Physical Systems-based approach for enhancing real-time bi-directional progress monitoring and control of highway and road projects. The goal of the proposed CPS application is to enable deployment of integrated computational and physical systems in the construction phase of roadway projects. To thi...
Article
The number of fatal injuries in construction was the highest compared to that in other industries for many years. Particularly, a large number of fatal injuries were caused by struck by hazards. Safety leading indicators are the continuous measurements of safety performance of construction work and offer multiple advantages for safety management. H...
Article
Previous research studies have successfully developed adaptive traffic signal controllers using reinforcement learning; however, few have focused on analyzing what specifically reinforcement learning does differently than other traffic signal control methods. This study proposes and develops two reinforcement learning adaptive traffic signal contro...
Preprint
Sub-optimal control policies in transportation systems negatively impact mobility, the environment and human health. Developing optimal transportation control systems at the appropriate scale can be difficult as cities' transportation systems can be large, complex and stochastic. Intersection traffic signal controllers are an important element of m...
Article
Reinforcement learning has shown potential for developing effective adaptive traffic signal controllers to reduce traffic congestion and improve mobility. Despite many successful research studies, few of these ideas have been implemented in practice. There remains uncertainty about what the requirements are in terms of data and sensors to actualize...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Safety improvement in construction remains a high priority due to the significant rate of accidents compared to other industries. Despite the ongoing multitude of safety studies and policy recommendations concerning the high rate of injuries and casualties in construction, the extent of damage sustained is still significant. Major research studies...
Article
Freeway work zone with lane closure has a direct negative impact on travel time, safety, and environmental sustainability. The capacity drop at the onset of the congestion can also further reduce the discharging rate at the work zone area and worsen traffic conditions. Existing studies have developed various variable speed limit (VSL) control metho...
Article
In Brief • Construction leads all industries in total worker fatal injuries in the United States. Human unsafe behavior is considered a significant contributing factor towards occupational accidents in construction. • Technologies enable various innovative applications to enhance construction safety in a smart manner. Human-in-the-loop cyber-phys...
Article
Accessible and safe mobility is critical for those aged 65 years and older to maintain their health, quality of life, and well-being. Being able to move beyond one’s home and participate in activities in older adulthood requires consideration of both transportation needs and preferences. This paper aims to address a gap in evidence with respect to...
Article
Ensuring transportation systems are efficient is a priority for modern society. Intersection traffic signal control can be modeled as a sequential decision-making problem. To learn how to make the best decisions, we apply reinforcement learning techniques with function approximation to train an adaptive traffic signal controller. We use the asynchr...
Article
Autonomous Vehicle industry is making rapid progress in the development of commercial vehicles with higher levels of autonomy. Although, the general Advanced Driver Assistance System architecture is widely discussed, limited details are available about the functionality of the modules and their interactions, backed up by scientific justification. T...
Article
Full-text available
Reinforcement learning has shown potential for developing effective adaptive traffic signal controllers to reduce traffic congestion and improve mobility. Despite many successful research studies, few of these ideas have been implemented in practice. There remains uncertainty about what the requirements are in terms of data and sensors to actualize...
Article
Automated vehicles have begun to receive tremendous interest among researchers and decision-makers because of their substantial safety and mobility benefits. Although much research has been reported regarding the implications of Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) technologies for highway capacity, to our kn...
Article
Having an approach that can analyze and identify safety risks in the dynamic and hazardous construction environment is one of the key steps to the success of health and safety plans. Struck-by-equipment hazard is one of the leading causes of construction injuries and fatalities. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to investigate and p...
Conference Paper
There has been a need for a systematic risk analysis method for struck-by-equipment hazard that considers interactions and interrelationships among entities (equipment and workers-on-foot) on a job site and also analyzes safety risk at multiple levels. This paper presents a comprehensive spatio-temporal network-based model, developed for dynamic ri...
Conference Paper
Cyber-physical systems offer integrated sensing, computing and communication capabilities which drive innovation and competition in all industries including construction. Highway construction projects are major projects that, as a result of their sequential activity progress, are usually more vulnerable to schedule overruns. The schedules of highwa...
Article
This article introduces a methodology for determining the optimal number and locations of roadside equipment (RSE) units for travel time estimation in vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-vehicle communication environments. The developed approach is a novel technique for modeling RSE placement to optimize the number and positions of RSE units w...
Article
With the increasing popularity of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), updating their test procedures to have more accurate vehicle performance prediction has become essential. Traditionally, vehicles are tested using standardised drive cycles, which are not sufficient to represent real-life driving scenarios for different conditions that a vehicle mig...
Article
Schedules and physical workspaces are two key elements of linear construction projects that are extremely interdependent. Any negligence in incorporating spatial and temporal constraints in developing and improving schedules of linear projects results in inevitable delays and workspace congestions and can substantially hinder the performance of the...
Article
Full-text available
Ensuring transportation systems are efficient is a priority for modern society. Technological advances have made it possible for transportation systems to collect large volumes of varied data on an unprecedented scale. We propose a traffic signal control system which takes advantage of this new, high quality data, with minimal abstraction compared...
Article
Driving is full of unpredictability and uncertainty. Standardized drive cycles, traditionally defined as velocity–time profiles, serve as test-beds for performance prediction. However, these generalized patterns do not offer real-life testing scenarios for every trip a vehicle might encounter during its life cycle. Thus, the “Journey Mapping” conce...
Article
This technical note uses an integer programming formulation and GIS tools to explore the feasibility of eliminating door-to-door solid waste collection in a community and replacing this municipal service with resident haulage of solid wastes to centralized depots. Obtained results show technical feasibility and considerable cost savings, which coul...
Conference Paper
Struck-by-equipment hazard, i.e, contact collision between worker-on-foot and construction equipment or between equipment and equipment, is a major cause of injuries and fatalities in construction. A variety of smart technologies and systems have been developed and utilized to alleviate the risks of this type of hazard. However, most of the existin...
Conference Paper
Contact collisions associated with construction equipment, i.e., struck-by-equipment hazards, are a leading cause of construction injuries and fatalities. A cyber-physical system (CPS) approach is expected to prevent potential contact collisions by issuing warnings to construction entities (workers-on-foot or equipment operators) that exhibit a hig...
Conference Paper
Struck-by-equipment hazard is a leading cause of construction fatalities. Although several proximity detection systems have been developed to alleviate the risks of this type of hazard, the frequently generated false alarms which do not represent actual hazardous situations have limited their real-world application. Therefore, the time-cuboid model...
Article
Over the past decade, several smart and automated systems have been developed to address the issue of struck-by hazards in construction—that is, workers on foot struck by equipment or equipment struck by equipment. False alarms (false positives and false negatives) are common in such systems, but methods for limiting struck-by hazards have not yet...
Conference Paper
Electric vehicle battery modeling and state-of-charge prediction has gained a lot of importance with the growing range anxiety among electric vehicle users. The future of battery implementation in electric vehicles might be in their customized design according to specific journey conditions. As such, this paper highlights the application of a novel...
Article
Despite enhanced safety strategies, in-vehicles technologies, and improvements in infrastructure, urban transportation networks are still accident-prone. Connected vehicle offers the possibility to exchange data with vehicles and infrastructure in an effort to improve safety. The main objective of the research reported in this paper is to evaluate...
Article
Full-text available
Connected vehicle is emerging as a solution to exacerbating congestion problems in urban areas. It is important to understand the impacts of connected vehicle on network and travel behavior of road users. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of connected vehicle on the mode choice and mobility of transportation networks. An it...
Article
Connected vehicle is a rapidly emerging paradigm aiming at deploying and developing a fully connected transportation system that enables data exchange among vehicles, infrastructure, and mobile devices to improve mobility, enhance safety, and reduce the adverse environmental impacts of the transportation systems. This study focuses on micro modelin...
Conference Paper
Driving is full of unpredictability and uncertainty. Standardized drive cycles, traditionally defined as velocity-time profiles serve as test-beds for performance prediction. However, these generalized patterns do not offer real-life testing scenarios for every trip a vehicle might encounter during its life-cycle. Thus, the “Journey Mapping” concep...
Conference Paper
The emerging automotive, information and communication technologies have made cooperative and autonomous automated vehicles the focus of many current and upcoming research studies. In recent literature, there is evident redundancy, overlap and inconsistency in the use of the terms connected vehicles, automated vehicles and autonomous vehicles. In t...
Article
The research reported in this paper proposes and develops an unsafe-proximity detection model focused on decreasing false alarms. By considering three types of entity attributes [i.e., (1) position, (2) heading/moving direction, and (3) speed], more accurate unsafe-proximity identifications with reduced false alarms can be achieved. The proposed an...
Article
Space and time planning of construction activities is a key factor affecting safety and field performance in construction sites. When scheduling and controlling linear projects, identification of potential congestion and/or idling can assist in the timely execution of a project. With the advent of location-aware technologies, it becomes possible to...
Article
The housing options in North American suburbs will fail to meet many future housing needs. An aging population, a younger generation who prefer walkable places, economic shifts, and the environmental impacts of suburban development are all contributing factors. Suburban retrofitting is occurring or imminent in many suburbs to stave offobsolescence....
Article
Fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP)-confined concrete-steel composite columns have been recently introduced as a retrofit technique for structural steel columns. This technique involves placing a two-part FRP tube around an existing steel column and subsequently filling the void between the steel section and the FRP tube with concrete to create a compos...
Article
The construction industry is experiencing an array of significant, rapid, and revolutionary changes driven by forces such as globalization, advances in engineering technologies and information systems, sustainability requirements, and the multidisciplinary and complex nature of the problems in the 21st century. These changes require the higher educ...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Connected vehicle is a rapidly emerging paradigm aiming at developing and deploying a fully connected transportation system that enables data exchange among vehicles, infrastructure, and mobile devices to improve safety, mobility and reduce the adverse environmental impacts of the transportation systems. This research focuses on micro-modelling and...
Article
In this paper, we present the fusion of two complementary approaches for modeling and monitoring the spatio-temporal behavior of a fluid flow system. We also propose a mobile sensor deployment strategy to produce the most accurate estimate of the true ...
Conference Paper
Highway construction involves repetitive, sequential operations that make them vulnerable to time and cost overruns. In order to increase their chance of being completed on time and within budget, these projects need efficient resource scheduling methods. This study presents a new scheduling system for highway construction projects. Location data g...
Article
This paper introduces an interval binary programming (IBP) method to the selection of control measures for noise reduction under uncertainty, by incorporating the concepts of interval numbers and interval mathematical programming into a binary programming optimization framework. As an extension of the binary programming method, IBP can. explicitly...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Work zone is area of a highway or urban network which is under heavy construction to build new facilities or expand or maintain the existing infrastructure. Work zones can potentially cause significant disruptions to local traffic due to the dynamic nature of construction and the uncertainties involved in its related logistics The main focus of thi...
Article
In resource-driven and repetitive construction projects, location of resources is a key indicator of the status of the project. A number of methods have been proposed in the literature to integrate resource location information into construction processes. However, there is no method and visual support tool that can depict the movement of construct...
Technical Report
Successful use of technology to improve construction productivity involves more than the technical characteristics of the technology. Many factors simultaneously influence construction productivity, including work force characteristics, management processes, and technological innovations. To control for these and other external factors, Research Te...
Article
Location aware computing in construction is an emerging area where the location of materials, workforce, and equipment can be used to derive knowledge about the state of the project. This paper aims to provide a low-cost location sensing solution for indoor construction and underground facilities, where satellite navigation systems cannot be used....
Article
Dislocation is defined as the change between discrete sequential locations of critical items in field environments such as large construction projects. Dislocations on large sites of materials and critical items for which discrete time position estimates are available represent critical state changes. The ability to detect dislocations automaticall...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The Rehabilitation and maintenance of heavy and infrastructure projects, the fragmented nature of the construction supply chain, and the uncontrolled arrival of delivery vehicles to work sites can cause major disruptions to local traffic flow and elevate congestion, particularly in urban transportation networks. In construction projects, dealing wi...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Location awareness is essential to decisions pertinent to tracking and progress reporting, as well as to safety in construction projects. However, these applications have been mostly limited to the outdoor environment, where satellites for positioning information are in view. Recent studies on indoor location sensing systems are now overcom...
Article
Materials tracking and locating, which can be accomplished through various technologies and data sources, are key elements affecting construction productivity. The need for developing fundamental methods to take advantage of the relative strengths of each technology and data source while dealing with their limitations motivates the development in t...
Article
Highways, high-rise projects, and many other types of construction projects are characterized by repetitive operations, extremely inter-related activities, and assignment of resources in a serial fashion. In such projects, the movement of resources through locations and places is a key indicator of the project status. Having accurate and up to date...
Article
Fiber reinforced polymer (FRP)-confined concrete-steel composite columns have been investigated as a retrofit technique for structural steel columns. However, the application techniques required to utilize this type of composite column in a retrofit scenario have not yet been fully developed. This paper investigates the use of a split tube that can...
Article
Effective automated tracking and locating of the thousands of materials on construction sites improve materials management and project performance. Utilizing location sensing technologies such as RFID, GPS, Ultra-wideband, infrared, and others help to achieve this objective; however, they generally provide imperfect data which results in lack of ac...
Article
Full-text available
Data fusion can be defined as the process of combining data or information for estimating the state of an entity. Data fusion is a multidisciplinary field that has several benefits, such as enhancing the confidence, improving reliability, and reducing ambiguity of measurements for estimating the state of entities in engineering systems. It can also...
Article
There has been an ever-increasing interest in multidisciplinary research on multisensor data fusion technology , driven by its versatility and diverse areas of application. Therefore, there seems to be a real need for an analytical review of recent developments in the data fusion domain. This paper proposes a comprehensive review of the data fusion...
Article
The use of Public Private Partnership (PPP) for the delivery of infrastructure projects has been on the rise in recent years. This can be attributed to the increasing demand for improved and expanded public facilities and services and the insufficient government funds needed to meet such demand. This paper presents a methodology that assists decisi...
Article
Location aware computing in construction is an emerging area where the location of materials and equipment can be used to derive knowledge about the state of the project. This paper aims to provide a low-cost location sensing solution for indoor construction and underground facilities, where satellite navigation systems such as Global Positioning S...
Article
Automated materials tracking and locating on construction sites can significantly impact construction productivity. The ability to automatically detect the locations and multi-handling of thousands of items can improve the performance of material distribution, and ultimately improve project performance. Deploying a cost-effective, scalable, and eas...
Conference Paper
Successful, large scale field trials were conducted on two sites in Texas and Toronto using an integrated system of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, global positioning system (GPS) technology, map software, and hand held computing to automatically track materials in the projects' respective lay down yards. This paper addressed the unreso...
Article
Full-text available
Dislocation is defined as the change between discrete sequential locations of critical materials such as special valves or fabricated items, on a large construction project. Dislocations of construction materials on large sites represent critical state changes. Detecting these dislocations in a noisy information environment where low cost Radio Fre...
Article
Good materials management on large construction projects is critical for maximizing productivity and project performance. When key materials are temporarily lost, whole crews may be left idle and the project may be delayed. When key materials are completely lost, the impact can be enormous. In fact, one of the major problems in managing constructio...
Conference Paper
The notion of combining redundant and complementary sensory data to achieve higher quality information has been around for long time. For example, biological systems usually rely on fusion of multimodality sensory data to perceive the surrounding environment. There has been an ever-increasing interest in multi-disciplinary research on multisensor d...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Dislocations of construction materials on large sites represent critical state changes. The ability to detect dislocations automatically for tens of thousands of items can ultimately improve project performance significantly. A belief function based data fusion algorithm was developed to estimate materials locations and detect dislocations. Disloca...

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