Sheng-Jie Qiang’s research while affiliated with East China JiaoTong University and other places

Relationship between matter and energy transport has always been one of the key issues that researchers have been searching for in statistical physics and complexity science. In many transport phenomena, the active transport with zero or even no external force in life activities has attracted extensive attention of scholars. As a special kind of active particles, active Brownian particles have received the attention of physicists and biophysicists. These active particles are natural or artificially designed particles, whose scale is in the order of micrometer or nanometer. Different from the traditional passive Brownian particles driven by the equilibrium heat wave generated by the random collision of the surrounding fluid molecules, active Brownian particles can extract energy from their own environment to drive their own motion. Here, directional transport process of active particles in the two-dimensional asymmetric ratchet potential field is analyzed. Both the overdamped medium and the critically damped one are emphasized. Langevin equations with inertia term are introduced to describe the impacts of the self-driven force, friction coefficient, etc. on the directional motion. Then, the average particle speed is found. Thereafter, the relationships between the speed and critical parameters like self-driven force, friction coefficient, etc. are obtained. Two different dynamical domination mechanisms are found, which are expressed as the random collision domination and the self-driven force domination, respectively. Furthermore, the random collision domination is found to correspond to the much higher peak of the two-dimensional asymmetric Brownian rachet potential field, while the self-driven force domination is found to correspond to the much lower peak of the introduced potential. The study will be helpful for discovering the stochastic thermodynamics mechanisms in nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear properties of such multibody interaction system in statistical physics and complex system science.

Enplaning and deplaning processes are two main activities that passengers experience in an airplane. They are also the main factors contributing to the airplane turn time. Thus, both processes need to be carefully considered when designing a new strategy. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we propose a symmetrical design of deplaning strategies to match three typical grouped enplaning strategies (back-to-front, windows-to-aisle and reverse pyramid), in which the groups are organized in a LIFO (Last In First Out) manner. Secondly, we present an integrated cellular automaton model to describe the dynamic characteristics of passengers in the enplaning and deplaning processes. Numerical evaluation results indicate that the proposed windows-to-aisle and reverse pyramid strategies perform better in the following aspects: (i) the total operation time decreases; (ii) the two strategies are less sensitive to the load condition, e.g., luggage distribution and cabin occupancy rate; (iii) passengers’ satisfaction is enhanced since both individual waiting time and processing time lower down; (iv) the two strategies are fairer for the passengers since the difference among the groups remarkably shrinks.

The increase of air travel puts tremendous burden on airline companies. A time saving boarding strategy is required to improve the utilization of airplane boarding time and explore flexible time management strategies. Firstly, an improved boarding strategy is introduced by assigning individual passengers to seats based on the number of luggage they carry. Passengers with the most luggage board onto the plane first. To test the behavior of boarding strategies under different conditions, a sophisticated simulation environment based on cellular automata model is designed. Simulation results indicate that the improved boarding strategy shows an excellent efficiency and robustness comparing with other strategies.