Search results for "Marking"
showing 10 items of 154 documents
Energy saving in WWTP: Daily benchmarking under uncertainty and data availability limitations
2016
Efficient management of Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs) can produce significant environmental and economic benefits. Energy benchmarking can be used to compare WWTPs, identify targets and use these to improve their performance. Different authors have performed benchmark analysis on monthly or yearly basis but their approaches suffer from a time lag between an event, its detection, interpretation and potential actions. The availability of on-line measurement data on many WWTPs should theoretically enable the decrease of the management response time by daily benchmarking. Unfortunately this approach is often impossible because of limited data availability. This paper proposes a methodolo…
Energy saving in wastewater treatment plants: A plant-generic cooperative decision support system
2017
Abstract In Europe, the analysis of Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTPs) shows a significant energy efficiency potential (up to 25%). Optimistically, plant managers assess their plant efficiency once or twice per year. Consequently, the time gap between an inefficiency and its detection produces avoidable operational costs. Although the installation of multiple on-line sensors can provide detailed energy information, for a human operator it is unrealistic to analyse the produced data in a satisfactory time-scale. This paper proposes a cooperative tool for energy saving that remotely accesses and evaluates WWTP databases to produce daily energy assessment reports. The novelty of this decisio…
In vivo fate mapping with SCL regulatory elements identifies progenitors for primitive and definitive hematopoiesis in mice.
2009
10 páginas, 6 figuras.-- et al.
Combining Haar Wavelet and Karhunen Loeve Transforms for Medical Images Watermarking
2014
This paper presents a novel watermarking method, applied to the medical imaging domain, used to embed the patient’s data into the corresponding image or set of images used for the diagnosis. The main objective behind the proposed technique is to perform the watermarking of the medical images in such a way that the three main attributes of the hidden information (i.e., imperceptibility, robustness, and integration rate) can be jointly ameliorated as much as possible. These attributes determine the effectiveness of the watermark, resistance to external attacks, and increase the integration rate. In order to improve the robustness, a combination of the characteristics of Discrete Wavelet and K…
Assessing the sustainability of water companies: A synthetic indicator approach
2016
Performance indicators (PIs) are essential in the benchmarking process used to rate and rank water companies. However, a set of individual PIs does not provide a holistic assessment of company performance from multiple perspectives. A multidimensional evaluation of the performance of water companies can be achieved by aggregating the PIs into a synthetic indicator. Although the concept of sustainability involves economic, environmental and social criteria, most of the previous studies have not considered these three dimensions simultaneously. This paper discusses a process of indicator aggregation using two approaches based on multi-criteria decision analysis to evaluate and compare the sus…
How does seasonality affect water reuse possibilities? An efficiency and cost analysis
2012
Abstract Because of the harsh conditions of water stress and seasonal water demand in many zones, water reuse has emerged as a key alternative for achieving sustainable water management. An efficient performance by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in technical and economic terms favors water reuse. However, seasonality in the flow of wastewater and in the pollutant load may be a determining factor in the efficiency of WWTPs. To evaluate if seasonality affects WWTP efficiency, analytical benchmarking methodology Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to obtain an average efficiency score for seasonal and non-seasonal plants. Given the importance of extended aeration (EA) and activated sl…
Tariffs and efficient performance by water suppliers: an empirical approach
2012
Water leaks are an environmental and sustainable issue as well as an economic issue. The objective of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of a sample of Spanish urban water systems by considering water leaks in a network as undesirable outputs. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), an analytical benchmarking methodology, is used to calculate technical and economic efficiency. We also discuss the possible relationship between efficiency and tariffs charged to users. Results show that the possibilities for reducing water leaks in networks are high, thus demonstrating that there is room for savings from an economic and environmental point of view. The assessment of efficiency performance could …
Examining Benchmark Indicator Systems for the Evaluation of Higher Education Institutions
2009
Higher Education Institutions are undergoing important changes involving the development of new roles and missions, with implications for their structure. Governments and institutions are implementing strategies to ensure the proper performance of universities and several studies have investigated evaluation of universities through the development and use of indicator systems. In this paper, we review some of the systems applied to the OECD countries, with special attention to Spain. We demonstrate the difficulty involved in establishing classification criteria for existing indicators, on which there is currently no consensus.
On benchmarking the dependability of automotive engine control applications
2004
The pervasive use of ECUs (electronic control units) in automotive systems motivates the interest of the community in methodologies for quantifying their dependability in a reproducible and cost-effective way. Although the core of modern vehicle engines is managed by the control software embedded in engine ECUs, no practical approach has been proposed so far to characterise the impact of faults on the behaviour of this software. This paper proposes a dependability benchmark for engine control applications. The essential features of such type of applications are first captured in a general model, which is then exploited in order to specify a standard procedure to assess dependability measure…
Benchmarking in Romanian industrial environment
2017
Benchmarking is a managerial tool that can assist the organizational change and the innovation. The paper aims to discover the degree in which Romanian managers in various industrial fields use this modern tool in the improvement of business strategy or organizational processes. In this context, we presented some results of a selective research made in Romanian industrial environment. The respondents were experts in creativity management and benchmarking, acting in big, medium or small enterprises. They offered many solutions for increase the rate of use of benchmarking and creativity couple in the management of Romanian organizations.