Search results for "ASTER"
showing 10 items of 2223 documents
Designing for Networked Community Resilience
2016
Abstract Communities have been described to be at the heart of the preparedness for and the response to disasters. The increasing connectedness has made communities more vulnerable for their dependence on a complex network of critical infrastructures. At the same time, this very connectedness has the potential to enable communities to self-organise, engage, and connect with other communities to improve their resilience. While the pathway to more resilience is promising and has many advocates, the response to crises and disasters, time and again reveals the challenges related to (i) ad-hoc switching from preparedness to response; (ii) ad-hoc connecting professional responders, communities, v…
Sensing and Generating New Opportunities for Value Innovation: How Team Behaviour Contributes to Success or to Failure?
2017
The behavioral side of the decision process inherent to strategy is an issue that is gaining attention from both academic and practitioners. At the same time, the Schumpeterian conception of innovation, returns to gain relevance in an environment where technology leads to process dematerialization and exponential paths of change. In this context, this paper analyses which decision processes, cognitive abilities and heuristics lead to sense and generate value innovation for customers. The analysis of 26 master student teams that ran the same strategy simulator show that the consideration and description of a wide range of alternatives and team agreement as a result of discussion of such alte…
Risk Accelerators in Disasters
2014
Published version of a chapter in the book: Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07881-6_2 Modern societies are increasingly threatened by disasters that require rapid response through ad-hoc collaboration among a variety of actors and organizations. The complexity within and across today's societal, economic and environmental systems defies accurate predictions and assessments of damages, humanitarian needs, and the impact of aid. Yet, decision-makers need to plan, manage and execute aid response under conditions of high uncertainty while being prepared for further disruptions and failures. This paper argues tha…
An integrated and shared approach to sea of the regional town master plan of Sicily
2006
The work addresses one of the most important problems in contemporary environmental land planning. Already existing procedures, in fact, must now conform to the new requirements imposed by the recent national and international regulations and standards that call for a more conscious approach to the use of natural resources. Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), for example, takes into account, the different effects of a plan in various fields such as the environment, the economy and the development. This obviously calls for global analysis tools that could help administrators, stakeholders and technicians in the decision-making process of such complex systems. SEA of the Town Master Pla…
Drosophila-inspired visual orientation model on the Eye-Ris platform: Experiments on a roving robot
2011
Behavioral experiments on fruit flies had shown that they are attracted by near objects and they prefer front-to-back motion. In this paper a visual orientation model is implemented on the Eye-Ris vision system and tested using a roving platform. Robotic experiments are used to collect statistical data regarding the system behaviour: followed trajectories, dwelling time, distribution of gaze direction and others strictly resembling the biological experimental setup on the flies. The statistical analysis has been performed in different scenarios where the robot faces with different object distribution in the arena. The acquired data has been used to validate the proposed model making a compa…
Plaster ventilated façade system for renovating modern and ancient buildings. A CFD analysis
2021
In the past decades several researches have been related to energy saving and emissions reduction. The technologies that exploit passive natural ventilation, like ventilated roofs and fa ades, have been recognized as the effective methods to provide energy saving and comfort. Ventilated fa ades represent dry assembled coating systems for buildings, traditionally made of panels in different materials. Very few ventilated fa ade systems with plaster finishes are already present on the building market. The potentiality of their design solution can be considered, e.g., when an historic building has to be recovered, since they can enhance the energy efficiency of building without changing its ap…
A knowledge-based master-model approach with application to rotating machinery design
2011
Novel rotating machinery design concepts and architectures are being explored to reduce mass, energy consumption, manufacturing costs, and environmental impact while increasing performance. As component manufacturers supply parts to original equipment manufacturers, it is desirable to design the components using a systems approach so that they are optimized for system-level performance. To accomplish that, suppliers must be able to model and predict the behavior of the whole machinery. Traditional computer-aided design/computer-aided engineering master-modeling approaches enable manual changes to be propagated to linked models. Novel knowledge-based master-modeling approaches enable automa…
An extension of the fractional model for construction of asphalt binder master curve
2015
Knowledge and prediction of viscoelastic behaviour of asphalt binder is of great interest in order to design asphalt mixtures for civil construction of road and airports with good performances. The capability of a fractional model – requiring a very limited number of parameters – to describe and predict the linear viscoelastic behaviour of asphalt binder subjected to sinusoidal oscillations is investigated. Experimental data of complex modulus, |G*|, and phase angle, δ, are used to validate the proposed constitutive model. Based on the proposed extension of a fractional model, complex modulus isotherms for a range of frequencies can be created simply starting from isochronals at frequency v…
Stop there’s water on the road! Identifying key beliefs guiding people’s willingness to drive through flooded waterways
2016
Floods are among the most widespread of natural disasters and exposure to floodwaters increases drowning risk. A leading cause of flood related drowning deaths is driving through flooded waterways. Drawing on the Theory of Planned Behaviour, a two-phased research program was conducted. Phase 1 (N = 25; Mage = 32.38, SD = 11.46) identified common beliefs about driving through a flooded waterway. Phase 2 (N = 174; Mage = 27.43, SD = 10.76) adopted a cross-sectional design to examine the belief predictors of drivers' willingness to drive through a flooded waterway. Given differences in consequences due to the depth of water, scenarios of low (road covered in 20 cm of water) and high (road cove…
On the validity of non-Markovian master equation approaches for the entanglement dynamics of two-qubit systems
2010
In the framework of the dissipative dynamics of coupled qubits interacting with independent reservoirs, a comparison between non-Markovian master equation techniques and an exact solution is presented here. We study various regimes in order to find the limits of validity of the Nakajima–Zwanzig and the time-convolutionless master equations in the description of the entanglement dynamics. A comparison between the performances of the concurrence and the negativity as entanglement measures for the system under study is also presented.