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Elsevier

Books in Social sciences

The Social Sciences collection forms a definitive resource for those entering, researching, or teaching in any of the many disciplines making up this interdisciplinary area of study. Written by experts and researchers from both Academic and Commercial domains, titles offer global scope and perspectives.

Key subject areas include: Library and Information Science; Transportation; Urban Studies; Geography, Planning, and Development; Security; Emergency Management.

  • Rethinking Rural

    Data-Driven Approaches for Sustainable Development
    • 1st Edition
    • Luca Salvati
    • English
    Rethinking Rural: Data-Driven Approaches for Sustainable Development offers a comprehensive, interdisciplinary exploration of sustainable rural development through a quantitative lens. Drawing on official statistics, spatial analysis, and refined indicators, this edited volume brings together leading scholars from ecology, economics, and planning to rethink the environmental-econom... nexus shaping rural territories. With a focus on Europe and the Mediterranean, but applicable globally, the book emphasizes continuous, spatially explicit monitoring of socioecological and socioeconomic complexities to inform effective, place-specific policies that enhance sustainability and resilience.Structure... in three parts, the book first presents integrated perspectives on rural system evolution, including climate change impacts, land use, and socioeconomic drivers across diverse contexts such as Mediterranean landscapes and Colombia’s deforestation. The second part details traditional and advanced tools for monitoring rural environments, from territorial indicators to wildfire and habitat assessment. The final section addresses planning and policy challenges, evaluating natural disaster management, resilience strategies, environmental degradation costs, and socio-demographic influences on tourism insurance.

  • Autonomous Driving and Mixed Traffic Dynamics

    Modeling, Simulation, and Control
    • 1st Edition
    • Michail Makridis + 1 more
    • English
    Autonomous Driving and Mixed Traffic Dynamics: Modeling, Simulation, and Control provides an introduction to autonomous vehicles (AV) in road transport systems, along with discussions on the critical similarities and differences with human drivers. Focusing on key concepts in traffic dynamics and AI-based modeling, the book also offers a comprehensive discussion of the unique dynamics introduced by AVs and their impacts on congestion, safety, energy, and their role in sustainable future intelligent transportation systems. Sections delve into traditional driving behaviors, examining the basics of car-following, driver characteristics, lateral movement, and how well AI models generalize these behaviors.Further sections covers shifts to autonomous driving systems, analyzing their operational principles and providing comparative evidence with human drivers. Assessments on the performance of traditional car-following models against artificial intelligence developments that highlight strengths and weaknesses for each approach are also included. Final sections integrate human drivers and AVs into broader traffic flow theories, presenting findings on how autonomous driving impacts traffic patterns, look at the role of AI and modeling, explore the pros and cons of various methods and data sources, and discuss real-world traffic management applications, combining AI and traditional models for traffic estimation, control, and ensuring fair, disruption-resilient outcomes.

  • Hospital and Healthcare Security

    • 7th Edition
    • Tony W. York
    • English
    Hospital and Healthcare Security, Seventh Edition reflects the current state of healthcare security, particularly in data security and privacy, patient-generated violence, new technologies, and regulatory changes. The book explains the basics and higher expertise concerns, such as the roles of design, emergency management, and policy. Conveying a wide spectrum of topics in an easy-to-comprehend format, it provides a thorough understanding of how the modern healthcare security program should be structured, resourced, and integrated around the principles of people, processes, and technology. This industry-leading resource includes best practices, security master planning, and how to layer in protection philosophies in policies and procedures. Due to rapid changes in violence in healthcare, regulatory requirements, litigation, accreditation standards, advancements in technology, and new healthcare security issues and topics, the new edition contains approximately 25-30% new and updated data and corresponding examples. It is deemed by healthcare executives, accrediting agencies, and industry associations to set the standard of care for healthcare security systems and programs.

  • Smart Cities of AI Robots and Autonomous Vehicles

    The Vision for 2030
    • 1st Edition
    • Paras Chawla + 2 more
    • English
    Smart Cities of AI Robots and Autonomous Vehicles: The Vision for 2030 explores the transformative potential and challenges of integrating AI-powered robots and autonomous vehicles in urban landscapes, envisioning a futuristic smart city landscape by 2030. It examines how artificial intelligence (AI) robots and self-driving cars will transform daily life, healthcare, education, industry, agriculture, and transportation.

  • Mobility Patterns, Big Data and Transport Analytics

    Tools and Applications for Modeling
    • 2nd Edition
    • Constantinos Antoniou + 2 more
    • English
    Mobility Patterns, Big Data and Transport Analytics: Tools and Applications for Modeling, Second Edition provides a guide to the new analytical framework and its relation to big data, focusing on capturing, predicting, visualizing, and controlling mobility patterns—a key aspect of transportation modeling. The book features prominent international experts who provide overviews on new analytical frameworks, applications, and concepts in mobility analysis and transportation systems. Fields covered are evolving rapidly, and this new edition updates existing material and provides new chapters that reflect recent developments in the field (such as the emergence of active, transfer and reinforcement learning).Users will find a detailed, mobility ‘structural’ analysis and a look at the extensive behavioral characteristics of transport, observability requirements, limitations for realistic transportation applications, and transportation systems analysis that are related to complex processes and phenomena. This book bridges the gap between big data, data science, and transportation systems analysis with a study of big data’s impact on mobility and an introduction to the tools necessary to apply new techniques.

  • New Transportation Modes and ‘Old’ Transportation Modes that are in the Process of Renewing Themselves

    • 1st Edition
    • Volume 17
    • English
    New Transportation Modes and ‘Old’ Transportation Modes that are in the Process of Renewing Themselves, Volume 17 highlights new advances in the field, with this new volume presenting interesting chapters written by an international board of authors. Topics in this new release include The environmental impact of high-speed rail, Past, Present and Future States of Research on Autonomous Electric Vehicles, Urban Air mobility, Micromobility, Mobility as a Service, Aviation, Sustainable city logistics, Autonomous vehicles, Light Rail, Bus Rapid Transit, and more.

  • Spatial Analysis for Complex Territorial Systems

    Geo-information Technologies and European Official Statistics
    • 1st Edition
    • Luca Salvati
    • English
    Spatial Analysis for Complex Territorial Systems: Geo-information Technologies and European Official Statistics offers a multidisciplinary exploration of spatial analysis, geo-information technologies, and official statistics, focusing on their applications in environmental, economic, and planning challenges in Europe and the Mediterranean. Comprising 16 insightful chapters authored by leading scholars from Southern and Eastern Europe, Ireland, and the United States, the book delves into the complexities of socio-ecological monitoring through data integration and refined statistical indicators. Key topics include climate monitoring, land degradation, settlement patterns, and disaster resilience, providing a comprehensive understanding of local contexts and policy implications.The book begins with contributions from a traditional ecological, agronomic, and environmental vision, then continues with a set of studies with stricter socio-demographic and economic focus. It then discusses how other quantitative approaches (e.g., based on big data and primary surveys) may clarify the role of policies and planning, addressing sustainable development goals in the ‘kaleidoscopic’ European landscapes. Conclusions confirm the urgent need of integrating the vast potential of geo-information techniques, together with spatial analysis and official statistics, into more flexible sustainable development strategies that reflect local conditions and spatially explicit background contexts.

  • Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling

    • 2nd Edition
    • Dominique Lord + 2 more
    • English
    Highway Safety Analytics and Modeling, Second Edition comprehensively covers the key elements for effective transportation engineering and policy decisions based on highway safety data analysis in a single reference. It includes all aspects of the decision-making process, from collecting and assembling data to developing models and evaluating results. It discusses the challenges of working with crash and naturalistic data, identifies problems, and proposes well-researched methods to solve them. It examines the nuances associated with safety data analysis and shows how to best use the information to develop countermeasures, policies, and programs to reduce the frequency and severity of traffic crashes.This thoroughly updated second edition updates the material contained in the book based on the latest advancements in highway safety research as well as feedback from readers. It includes entirely new sections on topics such as digital twins as a source of data, model validation, extreme value models, temporal instability, joint crash frequency and severity modeling, sample size, quasi-induced exposure method, autonomous vehicle safety estimate, and more.This book serves as a valuable reference for students, researchers, and practitioners alike. It provides more examples and exercises to help in using the book for courses, and it continues to complement the Highway Safety Manual (HSM) published by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AAHSTO), thus helping in the training of engineers and practitioners to better understand the concepts and methods outlined in the forthcoming HSM.

  • The Digital Student

    Challenges for Universities in a Post COVID World and How to Address Them
    • 1st Edition
    • Andy Phippen + 1 more
    • English
    The Digital Student: Challenges for Universities in a Post-Covid World and How to Address Them provides a thorough discussion of digital pedagogy, enabling readers to understand effective digital teaching methodologies, particularly post-Covid, to enhance online learning experiences and quality. The book discusses issues that have little coverage elsewhere, including the social dimension of online student life, the needs of neurodiverse students, those with mental health concerns and acknowledges that students differ in their level of awareness and competency of how to operate within the digital world. Insights into the impact of digital technologies on student well-being and mental health are discussed and ways that students can be supported are suggested. Online harms to students posed by digital environments are explored, together with cybersecurity and strategies to mitigate the risks. Guidance is provided on digital policy development and implementation. Strategies are suggested to help universities adapt to the evolving digital landscape. A self-assessment tool is provided enabling universities to benchmark their policies and activities against best practice in order to develop and enhance their digital operations

  • Traffic Flow Theory

    • 2nd Edition
    • Daiheng Ni
    • English
    Creating traffic models is a complex task due to the intricacies of road networks, space–time dependencies, heterogeneous traffic patterns, and numerous interacting components. The second edition of Traffic Flow Theory builds on foundational knowledge to express these elements in mathematical form and offers updated coverage of the latest field developments.Authore... by a leading academic, the volume dissects everyday traffic phenomena, detailing their characteristics, mechanisms, and dynamics through multi-level modeling approaches (macroscopic, microscopic, mesoscopic, and picoscopic) to explain why these phenomena occur and how they can be effectively simulated. The book then explores the practical applications of these simulations and contributes new, research-informed evidence showing that integrating the various analytical frameworks leads to a unified perspective—with significant benefits for optimizing safety and efficiency in transportation systems.With its comprehensive, coherent, and self-contained treatment, Traffic Flow Theory 2E is set to become a staple reference for a broad transportation engineering audience and a valuable resource for readers in interconnected disciplines.

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