Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) is a private university located in&nbsp;Tamil Nadu, India. Founded in 1984, as Vellore Engineering College, the institution offers 20 undergraduate, 34 postgraduate, four integrated and four research programs. It has campuses in Vellore, Amravati, Bhopal and Chennai.

VIT is one of the top ranked private universities in India according to NIRF, THE and QS Rankings.&nbsp;Govt. of India has recognized&nbsp;VIT, Vellore as an&nbsp;Institution of Eminence. This has allowed VIT to take independent quality initiatives and move up in world ranking.

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VIT University

An airport and its region have a mutual interaction. Thus, the airport's performance is crucial for its region. Moreover, airport's performance is influenced by air transport network. The measurement of the quality and capacity of the air transport network is multifaceted. The study assesses an airport's network in terms of its type, accessibility and connectivity. It focusses on 12 Tier-II Indian cities having medium-hub international airports because of their huge growth potential and under-addressed assessment. Furthermore, it is in coherence with the current policies of boosting regional air connectivity. Specific analyses for Tier-II cities' airports is important as a comparison with the bigger metropolises will be skewed. This exploration puts special emphasis on their relationship with the Tier-I cities as the connectivity of Indian airports is majorly complementary than competitive. Measures used for assessment are concentration indices, graph theory-based connectivity and accessibility indices (shortest path length and quickest time length) and partial accessibility indicators (daily accessibility, potential indicator, location indicator and network efficiency). Modifications and synthesis of partial indicators are also attempted. Annual data sets for the financial year 2017–18 and real-time data from 25–July 31, 2018 are used and the analysis was carried out from April–August 2018. The study identifies future potential (hubs/feeders) among the Tier-II cities' airports and proposes to align policies accordingly. The results illustrate the need for more strong hubs in northern India and reveal the potential of Amritsar, Calicut and Trichy of becoming future regional hubs.

Department of Architecture

School of Architecture

Vellore Campus

World University root node

Transport Policy

Network assessment of Tier-II Indian cities' airports in terms of type, accessibility and connectivity

Urban Ecology

Assessing the role of urban design in a rapidly urbanizing historical city and its contribution in restoring its urban ecology: the case of Varanasi, India

Urbanisation as a phenomenon has existed since long. By 2050 almost 70 $\backslash${\%} of world's population will live in cities, hence a demand for more efficient urban systems. With many trends coming up on the urbanisation front, from `liveable cities' to `inclusive urban growth', the latest concern is of `smart cities'. As an umbrella concept, smart cities have three subparts: human intelligence, collective intelligence and artificial intelligence (ICT), of which the latter is taking up the major limelight. While assessing India's urban conditions, it can be gauged out that there are various prerequisites before embedding ICT into the system. This paper attempts to redefine the smart city concept in Indian perspective reviewed through the lens of human + collective intelligence. Varanasi which has been proposed as one of the smart cities to be developed would be taken as a case study. Varanasi, being synonymous to living continuity of traditions and deep culture, possesses a legacy of institutions for learning and innovation. However, rapid and haphazard urbanisation has disturbed the delicate balance between the city's various facets thereby making it a living laboratory for carrying out the `smart' urban experiments. The paper takes up a holistic approach for evolving the smart city criteria and intends to define it on the basis of prioritisation models. The approach used in this paper for the purpose of analytics is `interpretive structural modelling (ISM)'.