Ryerson University

About: Ryerson University is a education organization based out in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 7671 authors who have published 20164 publications receiving 394976 citations. The organization is also known as: Ryerson Polytechnical Institute & Ryerson Institute of Technology.

The art and science of retail location decisions

Abstract: Although formal techniques of locational analysis have been available for over 50 years, most retailers traditionally made no use of them, relying instead on intuition guided by experience and “common sense”. However, the simultaneous advent in the last 15 years of low cost computing and the increasing availability of retail related data of all types has given retailers the opportunity to take a much more rational approach to decision making. This paper examines the extent to which retailers have taken advantage of the potential released by these developments, and adopted more “scientific” rules based methodologies. The analysis is based on an extensive questionnaire survey of UK retailers conducted in 1998 which encompassed organisations operating altogether more than 50,000 outlets across eight sectors. The survey sought to identify the use made both of particular types of techniques, and of Geographical Information Systems, which act as a platform for them. It was complemented by a series of in‐depth interviews with location specialists in a number of major retail organisations.

Empirical Bayes Procedure for Ranking Sites for Safety Investigation by Potential for Safety Improvement

Abstract: The identification of sites requiring investigation for possible safety treatment is one of the most important aspects of infrastructure safety management and has been the subject of considerable research aimed at improving the efficiency of the process. The more recent techniques use the empirical Bayes (EB) method for estimating the safety of specific sites. A refinement of the EB method that is conceptually sound and inherently simple to apply is the focus of this research. With this refinement, the EB estimate of the safety of a site is compared with its expected safety to determine the potential for safety improvement, which forms the basis for ranking sites for safety investigation. A comparative evaluation is provided of the proposed method against other EB methods and the more conventional ones, with data for signalized intersections and two-lane rural highway sections. The refined EB method is shown to be comparatively efficient.

VPR 5.0: FPGA cad and architecture exploration tools with single-driver routing, heterogeneity and process scaling

Abstract: The VPR toolset [6, 7] has been widely used to perform FPGA architecture and CAD research, but has not evolved over the past decade to include many architectural features now present in modern FPGAs. This paper describes a new version of the toolset that includes four significant features: first, it now supports a broad range of single-driver routing architectures [29, 4, 16]. Single-driver routing has significantly different architectural and electrical properties from the multi-driver approach previously modelled, and is now employed in the majority of FPGAs sold. Second, the new release can now model a heterogeneous selection of hard logic blocks, which could include the hard memory and multipliers that are now ubiquitous in FPGAs. Third, we provide optimized electrical models of a wide range of architectures in different process technologies, including a range of area-delay tradeoffs for each single architecture. Prior releases of VPR did not publish even one architecture file with accurate resistance and capacitance parameters. Finally, to maintain robustness and to support future development the release includes a set of regression tests to check functionality and quality of result of the output of the tools.To illustrate the use of the new features, we present a new look at the FPGA area vs. logic block LUT size question that shows that small LUT sizes, with the use of carefully optimized electrical design and single-driver architectures, have better area (relative to 4-LUTs) than previously thought. Another experiment shows that several of the previous architectural results are invariant in moving from multi-driver to single-driver routing architecture and across a range of process technologies.