Vanadium dioxide (VO₂) thermochromic thin films with various thicknesses were grown on quartz glass substrates by radio frequency (RF)-plasma assisted oxide molecular beam epitaxy (O-MBE). The crystal structure, morphology and chemical stoichiometry were investigated systemically by X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM), Raman spectroscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) analyses. An excellent reversible metal-to-insulator transition (MIT) characteristics accompanied by an abrupt change in both electrical resistivity and optical infrared (IR) transmittance was observed from the optimized sample. Remarkably, the transition temperature (T_MIT) deduced from the resistivity-temperature curve was reasonably consistent with that obtained from the temperature-dependent IR transmittance. Based on Raman measurement and XPS analyses, the observations were interpreted in terms of residual stresses and chemical stoichiometry. This achievement will be of great benefit for practical application of VO₂-based smart windows.

This research examined the evaluation of service quality in the public bicycle system (PBS) in Hangzhou, China, along with a measurement of user satisfaction, and of how an individual's perceived satisfaction influenced his or her PBS use. A 30-item PBS service quality scale was first developed and then applied to the empirical study of PBS service in Hangzhou. On the basis of a finally validated sample of 231 responses, an item-based PBS service quality assessment and an individual-based satisfaction assessment were obtained with a Rasch model. Thereafter, individual satisfaction was introduced as one of the explanatory variables in modeling PBS customers' frequency of use in a logistic regression approach. According to the analysis, environmental factors, such as nighttime illumination and shade along the bicycle way, and service factors, such as convenient withdrawal of the deposit, proper handling of customer complaints, and an increase in station density, were thought to be in most urgent need of improvement by the interviewed Hangzhou PBS users. The respondents tended to give positive marks to the PBS service in Hangzhou, with a quantitative measure of 1.49 ± 0.31, in a range of [-7.74, 7.89] [all in the log-odds unit (logit)]. The present work also proved that a one-unit increase in user-perceived satisfaction would increase the likelihood of a user's moving into a higher use-frequency level, as defined in the study, by almost 35%.

This study develops a traffic-responsive control technique for fully-actuated coordinated signals (TCT) to minimize investment in data collection and engineering judgment for signal timing. The operating process of TCT in a day is divided into consecutive cycle sets with $N$ cycles for each. A vehicle detector is placed on every approach lane to detect time headways and actuate the coordinated and uncoordinated phases. Control center creates the background plans for all the intersections once per cycle set. The fully-actuated logic settings are directly determined by the timing parameters of the background plans in signal controllers. Signal controllers operate the fully-actuated logic and yield the expected greens of the 1 ^st through the $(N-1)^{\mathrm{ th}}$ cycles of the current cycle set for the coordinated and uncoordinated phases. After the $N^{\mathrm{ th}}$ cycle starts, the expected greens are sent to control center. Control center processes the expected greens generated in the past cycles of the day and feeds them into Brown’s double exponential smoothing to predict the expected base greens of the next cycle set. They pave the way to stepwise creating the new background plan without using any optimization models. The simulation results indicated that the TCT-enabled intersections could reactively vary their vehicle handling capacity to accommodate the variation in the vehicle demand. In contrast to the conventional control technique for fully-actuated coordinated signals, TCT could provide more progression opportunities to the coordinated movement and serve vehicles with less number of stops and equivalent delay from a system-wide perspective.