00 - Introduction

By -

Hello, my name is Federico Perrotta (FP13), I’m Italian and I’m 26 years old.
I’m a PhD student, Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow, at the University of Nottingham and this is my blog.

Here I’ll periodically insert (let’s say once a month) a summary of how’s going on my project and which are our plans for its future development. I’ll insert also news about trainings, meetings and conferences I think I should attend. It would be fun to discuss about what’s going on and any observation, question or suggestion is welcome.

My background is Civil Engineering and in particular it is Transportation Engineering. I got my Bachelor in Civil Engineering at the Università degliStudi di Parma in Italy and I got my Master - specialized in Transportation Engineering - in Parma as well.

How and when I decided to apply for a PhD position and start my research/academic career I cannot say precisely but I think the first time I got interested in research was during my master thesis training in EMPA. It is the Federal Laboratory for Materials Science and Technology, it is based in Zurich in Switzerland and I worked there as an Academic Guest for 6 months.

In EMPA my Supervisors were Dr Martin Arraigada and Dr Manfred N. Partl and my Professor Dr Gabriele Tebaldi from the Università degli studi di Parma. The title of the project we worked on was “Performance Characterization of Grid Reinforced Flexible Pavement using Accelerated Pavement Test”.

Currently, as I mentioned, I’m a PhD student at the University of Nottingham and my project is part of the TRUSS Innovative Training Network under the Horizon 2020 EU project. The title of the project is ESR13 “Using Truck Sensors for Road Performance Investigation” and basically it is about to assess the influence of road pavement conditions on truck fleet fuel consumption. It is a mixture of Civil, as well as Mechanical and Transportation Engineering. Basically, we will use geo-referenced data about road pavement conditions (roughness, texture, skid resistance and stiffness) and we will compare them with the truck fleet fuel consumption data all over the UK road network. The main aim of the project is to assess the influence of road pavement conditions on truck fleet fuel consumption. A GIS application will be developed and a Life-Cycle Assessment analysis will be performed in order to permit to road network owners when roads need to be maintained in order to save fuel, greenhouse gas emissions, social and vehicle operating costs. With a lower impact this tool might be useful to truck fleet managers to save fuel and vehicle operating costs related to road pavement conditions (especially because of road surface conditions) choosing the best route for their trucks journeys.

This is just an introduction to the project. In the next post we will discuss about the Literature Review, about what I found out from it and about what might be done in order to collect and analyse data to get the best results from them.

Think about this topic! As I said any suggestion is welcome!
Wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!


Stay tuned and see you soon!

FP13

For questions, observations or suggestions feel free to contact me at:

e-mail: perrottafederico2@gmail.com

Comments

  1. Anonymous11 December 2015 at 12:24

    Well done Federico! It looks great!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Federico P11 December 2015 at 13:53

    Thank you! First of all I have still to work more on the mobile version, then I'll improve this version! Hope also other visitors will enjoy!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Asthprash22 October 2019 at 13:06

    Well done Federico! It looks great!
    Asthprash supports regular elimination.
    www.asthprash.com

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

27 - Road to Project Management

By -
Image
Hi crew, How are you doing? I know that for most of you it is time for holidays but I hope that under the umbrella, on a beach, somewhere at the seaside, in the mountains, at home or (unlucky) at work in the office (as I am) you find the time to read this very brief post. Today I will talk with you about "Project Management". Since I started my studies in civil engineering one of my career goals was to manage a big project, taking responsibility for delivering beautiful constructions and valuable consultancies to international clients, having the possibility to work in various places around the globe and being able to use the mix of my personal, interpersonal and technical skills to meet customer expectations and overcome challenges that in a project can happen. Well, these are just some of the things that Project Managers (PM) do but, you know, I was a kid and my idea of project management was vague but somewhat exciting. Motivational. A few weeks ago, tha
Read more

22 - The IEEE Big Data 2017 in Boston

By -
Image
Hi crew, I hope you are doing well. Today I want to share with you my experience at the IEEE Big Data conference 2017 in Boston. This is huge event organised by the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE ) that is one of the world largest organization for professional engineers. I attended the conference to present my paper at the workshop about applications of ‘Big Data’ technologies in the transport industry. The paper is about “Application of machine learning to fuel consumption modelling of trucks” and you can find more information about it, including an abstract and a copy of the paper before acceptance, on my Research Gate . The workshop was last week on Monday afternoon (that is in the night in Europe as there are 5 hour difference between Boston and the UK) and brought together data scientists and engineers working on applications of Big Data and machine learning in the transport industry all over the world. This include, for example, the manag
Read more

26 - A nice afternoon with SMARTI ETN

By -
Image
Hi crew, I hope that you are all doing great. First of all, today, I would like to thank you all for the fantastic achievement that this blog reached last week: 10,000 views from all over the world!!! How cool is that??!! It is just awesome and you are awesome that you keep visiting and reading my blog. Thanks a lot for that. But lets focus on today's topic. Today I am going to share with you another of my great experiences. A few weeks ago, I have been invited by Dr. Davide Lo Presti and Dr. Ana Jiménez del Barco Carrión, respectively Coordinator and Project Managers of SMARTI ETN , to share with their fellows my experience about the use of social media and blog for communicating Science. Honestly, in my experience, I never had the possibility of lecturing to a proper classroom and I thought that this was another massive opportunity, which I could not miss. I was honoured and excited about being invited for sharing my own perspectives with other researchers, and i
Read more