Search results for "ECIS"

Governing at the frontier of the European Commission : the case of seconded national officials

2005

Studies of executive institutions have largely dealt separately with national and international executive institutions (IEIs). This study unpacks and repacks four conflicting decision-making dynamics that unfolds at the frontier of IEIs – that is, at the institutional rim where national and international executive institutions meet, interact and collide. The empirical laboratory utilised is seconded national experts in the European Commission. The survey and interview data presented demonstrates that the decision-making behaviour of seconded national experts includes a mix of departmental (portfolio), epistemic (expert) and supranational behaviour. The suspicion early voiced by Coombes (197…

DEVELOPMENT OF SUSTAINABLE METROPOLITAN AREAS USING A MULTI-SCALE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM

2012

A sustainable and sustaining planning strategy is globally important for metropolitan areas. Sustainable planning addresses the development of strategies to reduce the use of resources, increase economic efficiency and improve integration of social aspects. In contrast, splinter development (e.g. urban sprawl) involves damage to nature and generation of an increasing volume of traffic (these are the main criticisms following a study by Newman and Kenworthy (1989) on the relationship between settlement density and energy consumption). Interestingly, the overly compact city also has this effect as it may generate traffic flows for accessing green and leisure areas, or changes of residence due…

A System Dynamics approach to improve clinical risk management effectiveness in an italian hospital ward: a case study.

Biomass estimator for NIR image with a few additional spectral band images taken from light UAS

2012

A novel way to produce biomass estimation will offer possibilities for precision farming. Fertilizer prediction maps can be made based on accurate biomass estimation generated by a novel biomass estimator. By using this knowledge, a variable rate amount of fertilizers can be applied during the growing season. The innovation consists of light UAS, a high spatial resolution camera, and VTT's novel spectral camera. A few properly selected spectral wavelengths with NIR images and point clouds extracted by automatic image matching have been used in the estimation. The spectral wavelengths were chosen from green, red, and NIR channels.

Wastewater treatment: New insight provided by interactive multiobjective optimization

2011

In this paper, we describe a new interactive tool developed for wastewater treatment plant design. The tool is aimed at supporting the designer in designing new wastewater treatment plants as well as optimizing the performance of already available plants. The idea is to utilize interactive multiobjective optimization which enables the designer to consider the design with respect to several conflicting evaluation criteria simultaneously. This is more important than ever because the requirements for wastewater treatment plants are getting tighter and tighter from both environmental and economical reasons. By combining a process simulator to simulate wastewater treatment and an interactive mul…

E-NAUTILUS: A decision support system for complex multiobjective optimization problems based on the NAUTILUS method

2015

Interactive multiobjective optimization methods cannot necessarily be easily used when (industrial) multiobjective optimization problems are involved. There are at least two important factors to be considered with any interactive method: computationally expensive functions and aspects of human behavior. In this paper, we propose a method based on the existing NAUTILUS method and call it the Enhanced NAUTILUS (E-NAUTILUS) method. This method borrows the motivation of NAUTILUS along with the human aspects related to avoiding trading-off and anchoring bias and extends its applicability for computationally expensive multiobjective optimization problems. In the E-NAUTILUS method, a set of Pareto…

Linear fusion of interrupted reports in cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radio networks

2015

Interrupted reporting has recently been introduced as an effective method to increase the energy efficiency of cooperative spectrum sensing schemes in cognitive radio networks. In this paper, joint optimization of the reporting and fusion phases in a cooperative sensing with interrupted reporting is considered. This optimization aims at finding the best weights used at the fusion center to construct a linear fusion of the received interrupted reports, jointly with Bernoulli distributions governing the statistical behavior of the interruptions. The problem is formulated by using the deflection criterion and as a nonconvex quadratic program which is then solved for a suboptimal solution, in a…

Synchronous R-NSGA-II: An Extended Preference-Based Evolutionary Algorithm for Multi-Objective Optimization

2015

Classical evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithms aim at finding an approx- imation of the entire set of Pareto optimal solutions. By considering the preferences of a decision maker within evolutionary multi-objective optimization algorithms, it is possible to focus the search only on those parts of the Pareto front that satisfy his/her preferences. In this paper, an extended preference-based evolutionary algorithm has been proposed for solving multi-objective optimiza- tion problems. Here, concepts from an interactive synchronous NIMBUS method are borrowed and combined with the R-NSGA-II algorithm. The proposed synchronous R-NSGA-II algorithm uses preference information provid…

An intelligent learning support system

2017

Fast-growing technologies are shaping many aspects of societies. Educational systems, in general, are still rather traditional: learner applies for school or university, chooses the subject, takes the courses, and finally graduates. The problem is that labor markets are constantly changing and the needed professional skills might not match with the curriculum of the educational program. It might be that it is not even possible to learn a combination of desired skills within one educational organization. For example, there are only a few universities that can provide high-quality teaching in several different areas. Therefore, learners may have to study specific modules and units somewhere e…

Methods for estimating forest stem volumes by tree species using digital surface model and CIR images taken from light UAS

2012

In this paper we consider methods for estimating forest tree stem volumes by species using images taken from light unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). Instead of using LiDAR and additional multiband imagery a color infrared camera mounted to a light UAS is used to acquire both imagery and the DSM of target area. The goal of this study is to accurately estimate tree stem volumes in three classes. The status of the ongoing work is described and an initial method for delineating and classifying treetops is presented.