Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> Automotive

Engineers and scientists often need to sell an innovative idea for a new product or a new product improvement to top management. Sometimes their tendency is to focus on the "WOW " of the new technology at the expense of making a convincing business case. When the new technology represents a large cost reduction, there will be much less of a problem in convincing management to approve the project if the investment level is acceptable. The major rub comes when the new feature or technology is an improvement in customer value that also generates an increase in cost. This makes the sell...

Each year billions of dollars are being spent to develop, manufacture, and operate transportation systems such as aircraft, ships, trains, and motor vehicles throughout the world. During their operation thousands of lives are lost annually due to various types accidents. Needless to say, approximately 70 to 90 percent of transportation crashes are the result of human error to a certain degree. Moreover, it may be added that human errors contribute significantly to most transportation crashes across all modes of transportation.

Human Reliability and Error in Transportation Systems is...

Although huge, Chinese Railways are a bottleneck for economic growth in China. The state-owned enterprise returns a small profit but is severely capacity constrained and burdened with inefficiency. Based on interviews with Chinese experts, benchmarking with railways in the US, Germany, Russia, and Japan as well as broad coverage of Chinese-language sources, the book makes detailed recommendations on how to design a comprehensive turnaround program for Chinese Railways.

The upcoming change of costumers' preferences and state regulations towards safety, sustainability and comfort of a car is calling the automotive industry to make the necessary innovations available in order to accelerate its pace on the way out of the economic crisis. Smart miniaturized systems and ICT based solutions are considered the key enablers of future mobility technologies like novel power train concepts including electrical traction, cooperative safety systems, advanced driver assistance systems as well as car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication.

The International...

The 26th International Symposium on Shock Waves in Gottingen, Germany was jointly organised by the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the French-German Research Institute of Saint Louis ISL. The year 2007 marked the 50th anniversary of the Symposium, which first took place in 1957 in Boston and has since become an internationally acclaimed series of meetings for the wider Shock Wave Community. The ISSW26 focused on the following areas: Shock Propagation and Reflection, Detonation and Combustion, Hypersonic Flow, Shock Boundary Layer Interaction, Numerical Methods, Medical, Biological and...

Urban Transport Development is a contribution to the ongoing global discussion on the future of urban transport. The main themes are how to cope with the complexity of urban transport development and the process of change including its determining factors. The role of leadership in the development process is the key issue. Main areas of discussion are the historical background, the diversity and complexity of present problems, and the outcome of attempts to promote positive future development in urban environments around the world.

This book provides the latest information in intelligent vehicle control and intelligent transportation. Detailed discussions of vehicle dynamics and ground-vehicle interactions are provided for the modeling, simulation and control of vehicles. It includes an extensive review of past and current research achievements in the intelligent vehicle motion control and sensory field, and the book provides a careful assessment of future developments.

The book investigates how, and which, forgiving road environments (FOR) and self-explaining road measures (SER) will contribute to increasing road safety and also increase network efficiency on the road.

It presents both the general approach and the methodology for generating the possible FOR and SER measures. The book further discusses the prioritization and the testing methodologies, as well as the designing VMS methodology.

The next parts of the book present a few important examples: lane departure warning systems; intelligent speed adaptation systems and perception...

"Optimal Design of Complex Mechanical Systems" presents the foundations and practical application of multi-objective optimization methods to Vehicle Design Problems with an extensive overview of examples. The first part provides an introduction and a general theoretical information about the optimization of complex mechanical systems and multi-objective optimization methods. Several presented applications such as the global approximation approach are brand new in literature and extensively exposed the first time in this book. The second Part of the book shows some examples of the...