Yikang Rui

An Enhanced Variable Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Method for Measuring Spatial Accessibility to Residential Care Facilities in Nanjing

Civil administration departments require reliable measures of accessibility so that residential care facility shortage areas can be accurately identified. Building on previous research, this paper proposes an enhanced variable two-step floating catchment area (EV2SFCA) method that determines facility catchment sizes by dynamically summing the population around the facility until the facility-to-population ratio (FPR) is less than the FPR threshold (FPRT). To minimize the errors from the supply and demand catchments being mismatched, this paper proposes that the facility and population catchment areas must both contain the other location in calculating accessibility. A case study evaluating spatial accessibility to residential care facilities in Nanjing demonstrates that the proposed method is effective in accurately determining catchment sizes and identifying details in the variation of spatial accessibility. The proposed method can be easily applied to assess other public healthcare facilities, and can provide guidance to government departments on issues of spatial planning and identification of shortage and excess areas.

Exploring the relationship between street centrality and land use in Stockholm

This paper examines the relationship between different street centralities and land-use types in Stockholm. Major centrality measures of closeness, betweenness, and straightness are calculated at both global and local levels in both the primary and dual representations of the urban street network. Adaptive kernel density estimation is adopted to transform all unevenly distributed datasets to one continuous raster framework for further analysis. After computing statistical and spatial distribution of each centrality and land-use density map, we find that the density of each street centrality is highly correlated with one type of land use. Results imply that various centralities representing street properties from different aspects can capture the land development patterns of different land-use types by reflecting human activities, and are consequently important indicators to describe urban structure.

Urban Growth Modeling with Road Network Expansion and Land Use Development

Land use and transportation systems are considered as two most important subsystems determining urban form and structure, and are assumed to mutually influence each other overtime. To better understand the relationship between them, we build a simple dynamic model to simulate longterm urban growth instead of a static one. Our urban simulation combines vector road network growth with grid land use dynamics. Vector model has advantages in topological analysis and we use space syntax metrics to control road network growth by estimating road traffic flow, which is also adopted to calculated accessibility for land use simulation. The land use model includes five land use categories and two behavior sub-models: mobility model and location choice model. Our preliminary simulation results show similar land use patterns of how real cities grow.

Network-constrained and category-based point pattern analysis for Suguo retail stores in Nanjing, China

The distribution of many geographical objects and events is affected by the road network; thus, network-constrained point pattern analysis methods are helpful to understand their space structures and distribution patterns. In this study, network kernel density estimation and network K-function are used to study retail service hot-spot areas and the spatial clustering patterns of a local retail giant (Suguo), respectively, in Nanjing city. Stores and roads are categorized to investigate the influence of weighting different categories of point events and network on the analysis. In addition, the competitive relation between Suguo and foreign-brand retail chains was revealed. The comprehensive analysis results derived from the combination of the first-order and second-order properties can be further used to examine the reasonability of the existing store distribution and optimize the locational choice of new stores.

Spatial Distribution Characteristics of Healthcare Facilities in Nanjing: Network Point Pattern Analysis and Correlation Analysis

The spatial distribution of urban service facilities is largely constrained by the road network. In this study, network point pattern analysis and correlation analysis were used to analyze the relationship between road network and healthcare facility distribution. The weighted network kernel density estimation method proposed in this study identifies significant differences between the outside and inside areas of the Ming city wall. The results of network K-function analysis show that private hospitals are more evenly distributed than public hospitals, and pharmacy stores tend to cluster around hospitals along the road network. After computing the correlation analysis between different categorized hospitals and street centrality, we find that the distribution of these hospitals correlates highly with the street centralities, and that the correlations are higher with private and small hospitals than with public and large hospitals. The comprehensive analysis results could help examine the reasonability of existing urban healthcare facility distribution and optimize the location of new healthcare facilities.

Novel parallel algorithm for constructing Delaunay triangulation based on a twofold-divide-and-conquer scheme

To increase the efficiency when processing large data sets, a novel parallel algorithm is proposed for constructing the Delaunay triangulation of a planar point set based on a twofold-divide-and-conquer scheme. This algorithm automatically divides the planar point set into several non-overlapping subsets along the x-axis and y-axis directions alternately, according to the number of points and their spatial distribution. Next, the Guibas–Stolfi divide-and-conquer algorithm is applied to construct Delaunay sub-triangulations in each subset. Finally, the sub-triangulations are merged based on the binary tree. All three sequential steps are processed using multitasking parallel technology. Our results show that the proposed parallel algorithm is efficient for constructing the Delaunay triangulation with a good speed-up.

Flood inundation extent mapping based on block compressed tracing

Flood inundation extent, depth, and duration are important factors affecting flood hazard evaluation. At present, flood inundation analysis is based mainly on a seeded region-growing algorithm, which is an inefficient process because it requires excessive recursive computations and it is incapable of processing massive datasets. To address this problem, we propose a block compressed tracing algorithm for mapping the flood inundation extent, which reads the DEM data in blocks before transferring them to raster compression storage. This allows a smaller computer memory to process a larger amount of data, which solves the problem of the regular seeded region-growing algorithm. In addition, the use of a raster boundary tracing technique allows the algorithm to avoid the time-consuming computations required by the seeded region-growing. Finally, we conduct a comparative evaluation in the Chin-sha River basin, results show that the proposed method solves the problem of flood inundation extent mapping based on massive DEM datasets with higher computational efficiency than the original method, which makes it suitable for practical applications. We have developed a block compressed tracing method for flood extent mapping.Run-length encoding and raster boundary tracing techniques are applied.The problem of flood extent mapping based on massive DEM datasets is solved.Our method has advantages of higher efficiency and lower memory requirements.

A parallel algorithm for constructing Voronoi diagrams based on point-set adaptive grouping

This paper presents a parallel algorithm for constructing Voronoi diagrams based on point‐set adaptive grouping. The binary tree splitting method is used to adaptively group the point set in the plane and construct sub‐Voronoi diagrams for each group. Given that the construction of Voronoi diagrams in each group consumes the majority of time and that construction within one group does not affect that in other groups, the use of a parallel algorithm is suitable. After constructing the sub‐Voronoi diagrams, we extracted the boundary points of the four sides of each sub‐group and used to construct boundary site Voronoi diagrams. Finally, the sub‐Voronoi diagrams containing each boundary point are merged with the corresponding boundary site Voronoi diagrams. This produces the desired Voronoi diagram. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency of this parallel algorithm, and its time complexity is calculated as a function of the size of the point set, the number of processors, the average number of points in each block, and the number of boundary points. Copyright

A Synthetic Method for Atmospheric Diffusion Simulation and Environmental Impact Assessment of Accidental Pollution in the Chemical Industry in a WEBGIS Context

The chemical industry poses a potential security risk to factory personnel and neighboring residents. In order to mitigate prospective damage, a synthetic method must be developed for an emergency response. With the development of environmental numeric simulation models, model integration methods, and modern information technology, many Decision Support Systems (DSSs) have been established. However, existing systems still have limitations, in terms of synthetic simulation and network interoperation. In order to resolve these limitations, the matured simulation model for chemical accidents was integrated into the WEB Geographic Information System (WEBGIS) platform. The complete workflow of the emergency response, including raw data (meteorology information, and accident information) management, numeric simulation of different kinds of accidents, environmental impact assessments, and representation of the simulation results were achieved. This allowed comprehensive and real-time simulation of acute accidents in the chemical industry. The main contribution of this paper is that an organizational mechanism of the model set, based on the accident type and pollutant substance; a scheduling mechanism for the parallel processing of multi-accident-type, multi-accident-substance, and multi-simulation-model; and finally a presentation method for scalar and vector data on the web browser on the integration of a WEB Geographic Information System (WEBGIS) platform. The outcomes demonstrated that this method could provide effective support for deciding emergency responses of acute chemical accidents.