The Third Civil Engineering Annual Student Symposium: A report

The Civil Engineering Department organized its third in-house Annual Student Symposium on Aug 26-27, 2010. An outcome of the enthusiastic initiative of the students of the Department, the first symposium was held in 2008-2009, the Centenary Year of the Institute. Under the umbrella of the Department comes three divisions – Structural Engineering, Geotechnical Engineering and Water Resources and Environmental Engineering, and a centre – Centre for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transport and Urban Planning (CiSTUP).
Forty Six students, from all the divisions, presented their research work over these two days under four broad themes: I. Analytical and Numerical Modeling, II. Laboratory Testing and Experiments, III. Uncertainty and Stochastic Modeling, and IV. Other themes. There were 10 sessions of presentations, all chaired by senior research students themselves.
Five student volunteers under the supervision of Prof. Madhavilatha managed the event. Breakfast, lunch and tea on both the days were provided by the Department. All the student presenters were gifted a watch and an Institute bag.
“The idea with which the Annual Student Symposium was started is to increase the interactions between the students from the different divisions, who would otherwise be oblivious of each others’ research initiatives, and to enhance the academic vibrancy in the Department and I think we have been successful in achieving that feat” remarked visibly contented chairman Prof. P. P. Mujumdar after the completion of the event. “It is truly a technical feast, in which we celebrate our academic energies” he added.
There was a wide range of topics covered varying over different spatial and temporal scales. Some works focused entirely on theoretical research while some were staunchly application oriented. While some presentations portrayed technical work at large depths, some were preliminary studies or literature surveys. Even the freshly admitted students could benefit from such an exposure to the wide spectrum of research going on in the Department.
This year there were two awards adjudicated by a jury of three judges – Prof. Srinivas, Prof. Debraj Ghosh and Prof. Tejas Murthy. The award for best technical paper went to research student Asha Nair, and research student Guruprasad bagged the award for the best presentation.
The professors also pointed out suggestions for improving one’s content and style of presentation. Sticking to time during presentations was particularly stressed upon. Students were also invited to offer constructive feedbacks. It was an informal exchange of ideas all throughout. The ceremony was concluded by felicitating the volunteers and the judges.

Arpita Mondal (Civil)

A Friend on Your Path

Most big cities to which the so-called ‘brain-drain’ from India is directed, have one thing in common – their public transport is exceptionally well organized and there are websites which can guide you wherever you want to go, literally giving you instructions at each step with precise estimates of times which would be followed to perfection in real time. Obviously, for such a thing to happen in India it would take a while, specially to build transit models that can compute paan or biri breaks for drivers or bus stoppages during rush hours for the conductor to come out of one gate and enter through the other to make sure no one gets down at the next stop without paying the fare (or lesser fare in exchange of no tickets to fill the conductor’s pocket). Let us not harp on faults in the Indian systems and give you some good news instead. Change has started.

The Center for Infrastructure, Sustainable Transport and Urban Planning (CiSTUP), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore now offers you ‘Maargamitra’ – a friend on your path. Launched on the 23^rd of July, 2012 the Maargamitra website (planyourtrip.civil.iisc.ernet.in/Bangalore_PIS/) is an interactive interface that can help you plan your trip within Bangalore before you step out of home.

Funded jointly by CiSTUP, Department of Science and Technology, Govt. of India and IISc, the interactive web-based interface will not only display the best path (based on minimizing the combination of walking time, travel time, waiting and transfer time) over a map and as text, but will also tell the approximate travel time and fare and number of transfers involved (if any). Other than the best path based on minimum total travel time, the trip planner also gives best path based on a unique concept of ‘generalized cost’, in which the best path is obtained based on a weighted combination of walking time, travel time, waiting time, transfer time as well as fare. Generally, it is a natural tendency of a public transport user to attach differential importance to various legs of a trip. For example, a person might perceive waiting time at terminals as uncomfortable and would attach higher preference to a route on which the waiting time is less or minimum. Similarly, an elderly or disabled person may not like to walk more to reach a bus stop or train station and thus will prefer a route that has less walking time, while planning a trip. Some users may prefer direct routes as compared to routes involving transfers, even when the direct route involves higher in-vehicle travel time. All these considerations relevant for Indian conditions can be imitated in trip itinerary planning, by considering the generalized cost approach during shortest path analysis for finding the optimum route through a multi-modal public transport network.

To keep it simple at the beginning, the system has used default weightage values based on an initial study, however, in coming months the trip planner will be updated to allow users to provide their own weights. At present, Maargamitra covers Big-10, Vayu Vajra, Vajra, and Metro Reach-1 services since data on all Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) buses is not available with BMTC either. Within the next year or two, most of the public bus routes and Metro routes will also be covered. Other than this, future plans to improve Maargamitra include providing k-shortest paths instead of one best path that is presented currently, increasing user choices and customization by giving option to the users to provide the maximum number of acceptable modal transfers and their own weights for different legs of the trip as input, as well as refining the travel time modeling further to improve the travel time predictions for pre-trip planning. Using Google Maps, C#ASP.net, TransCAD (a Geographical Information System based transport modeling tool) and C# windows.net, it has taken about two years to build the interface.

So what is so unique in Maargamitra that sets it apart from Google Transit and other similar applications? When asked, Dr Ashish Verma of CiSTUP, who has headed the project, replies: ‘Most of the other applications predict travel time based on an average travel speed of 15kmph, whereas we have developed travel time models for better estimation of travel time and which is used for pre-trip planning. Moreover, Maargamitra is the first public transport trip planner developed in India.’

As part of IISc, that does make you feel special, doesn’t it?

Arpita Mondal (CIVIL)
(With inputs from Dr. Ashish Verma, Asst. Prof., CiSTUP)