Detroit Regional Transit Study: A Study of Factors that Enable and Inhibit Effective Regional Transit
A comprehensive study of the factors enabling or inhibiting the development of effective regional transit looked at Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, Denver and St. Louis. Six key variable in transit success were examined: politics and leadership; law and governance; finance and funding; transit-oriented development; equity and access; and, media and public opinion. The research methodology used firsthand narrative experience and involved 60 in-depth interviews. This document provides an overview and summaries of key findings in all six areas of focus. Six separate reports explore each area in greater depth.
In large-scale power systems, generating plants provide energy to consumers through exceedingly flexible and dynamic networks. The delivered electrical energy is maintained in high quality and the voltage profile is kept within acceptable limits by the utilization of control devices scattered in key locations over the power grid. Thus, one of the most important problems facing the electric utilities is to coordinate the reactive power compensation devices to maintain acceptable bus voltage profile while minimizing operational costs and assuring system stability in the presence of disturbances. In practice, the dispatcher, traditionally a trained human expert makes the decision as to the location, the switching sequence, and the amount of compensation needed of the control devices. To aid with this sometimes overwhelming decision-making task, a Matlab-based intelligent knowledge-based expert system for steady-state voltage control is developed.