Benefit-cost analysis guide

12

Bibliographic

BenefiWost Analysis Guide, Government

Section

of Canada,

Treasury

Board Secretariat,

Planning

Branch, March 1976.80 pages in English and 80 pages in French bound in the same volume. Available from Information Canada, Ottawa, KlA 0S9, Canada. $2.50; other countries $3.00 Reviewed

by David C. Major, Department of Civil Engineering, Massachusetts Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, U.S.A.

This volume is offered with “. . . the modest goal of providing readers with a good comprehension of the general conceptual framework and the fundamentals of benefit-cost analysis; it is not a detailed manual. . .“. The work has three chapters: a brief introduction, a chapter on the conceptual basis of benefit-cost analysis and a chapter with three examples of applications. There are two appendices (an inventory of “common errors in benefit-cost studies” and an English-French glossary) and a selected bibliography. The work is intelligently written and focusses on some of the central developments in modern benefit-cost analysis. There is, for example, a balanced discussion of and a commitment to the use of multiple objectives in benefit-cost analysis (rather than the use only of the traditional single objective of economic efficiency); and there is also a sensible discussion of interest rates, including the social rate of discount. The publication will be of interest to those who wish to keep up with the level of sophistication (fairly high in this

Institute

of

instance) with which governments approach project analysis, or wish it to be approached. In addition, readers will welcome the references to some of the principal Canadian articles in the field that might otherwise be overlooked. The volume will also be useful in certain instructional situations: short courses for government employees, and possibly as an additional reference for students in regular university courses. Despite its intended use as an introductory volume, however, the writing is at too high a level for the work to be fully successful as a primer for the non-specialist without the support of a formal instructional context. The volume shows signs of hasty editing. The most important work in the field of water resources project evaluation in the last two decades, A. Maass et al., Design of Water-Resource Systems Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1962) is listed under the wrong principal author; and some of the writing is not as carefully considered as one would wish. Nonetheless, this is a worthwhile effort.

Dissertation Abstracts Integrated Real-Time Freeway On Ramp Control Strategies, Menahem Eldor, Road Safety Centre, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, Haifa, Israel. (Dissertation at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley.) This study reports the analysis and design of a freeway on-ramp control methodology responsive to changing traffic conditions in real-time. The methodology’s components are: an optimization process, prediction logic and control tactics. The control logic is synthesized into two levels: strategic control and tactical control. A chanceconstrained linear program for freeway on-ramp control is introduced, and a supporting postoptimality-analysis methodology is developed. Short-term second- and third-generation control predictors are developed by means of Box and Jenkins time-series analysis, including a statistical and comparative analysis of these predictors. A detailed analysis and evaluation of a synthetic origindestination (O-D) algorithm is presented, and a new computer program named SYNODM (SYNthetic OriginDestination Matrices) for O-D synthesis is described. Real-time, capcity-estimation algorithms are developed, and guidelines and recommendations for estimating operational data (e.g. capacity buffers, metering rate limits) are provided. Control-tactic algorithms are developed which are unique in their response to short-term nonrecurrent and abnormal freeway conditions. An efficient software system named FRESCOT (Freeway RESponsive Control Optimization Techniques) is de-

veloped which includes an upper-bounding linear program supported by a postoptimality-analysis package. Statistical Analysis of Traffc Systems: A Time Series Approach, Neil W. Polhemus, Graduate School of Business Administration, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. (Dissertation at the Department of Civil Engineering, Princeton University.) This thesis presents a general approach for analyzing the dynamic behavior of traffic systems based on statistical methods of discrete time series analysis. Considerable emphasis is placed on modeling fluctuations in traffic parameters during periods when the rate of flow is not constant. Both time domain and frequency domain techniques are considered, with extensive application to eight-hour samples of traffic through several air traffic control sectors. While the conception of a traffic stream as a trajectory process in time and space leads to useful point process models for one-way traffic, a more general approach is necessary for more complicated traffic systems. By abstracting the concept of space, a traversal process is formulated which can be adapted to any traffic situation, including simple stream flows. The dynamic behavior of the process is analyzed by constructing serially correlated measurements of some fundamental traffic parameter. The resulting time series is then analyzed as a discrete time process with continuous state space. Under homogeneous flow conditions, a finite parameter