Search results for "Risk Analysi"
showing 10 items of 380 documents
Intelligent Management Systems for Energy Efficiency in Buildings: A Survey
2014
In recent years, reduction of energy consumption in buildings has increasingly gained interest among researchers mainly due to practical reasons, such as economic advantages and long-term environmental sustainability. Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to address this important issue from complementary perspectives, which are often hard to capture in a comprehensive manner. This survey article aims at providing a structured and unifying treatment of the existing literature on intelligent energy management systems in buildings, with a distinct focus on available architectures and methodology supporting a vision transcending the well-established smart home vision, in favor o…
A Simulation Software for the Evaluation of Vulnerabilities in Reputation Management Systems
2019
Multi-agent distributed systems are characterized by autonomous entities that interact with each other to provide, and/or request, different kinds of services. In several contexts, especially when a reward is offered according to the quality of service, individual agents (or coordinated groups) may act in a selfish way. To prevent such behaviours, distributed Reputation Management Systems (RMSs) provide every agent with the capability of computing the reputation of the others according to direct past interactions, as well as indirect opinions reported by their neighbourhood. This last point introduces a weakness on gossiped information that makes RMSs vulnerable to malicious agents’ intent …
A meta-cognitive architecture for planning in uncertain environments
2013
Abstract The behavior of an artificial agent performing in a natural environment is influenced by many different pressures and needs coming from both external world and internal factors, which sometimes drive the agent to reach conflicting goals. At the same time, the interaction between an artificial agent and the environment is deeply affected by uncertainty due to the imprecision in the description of the world, and the unpredictability of the effects of the agent’s actions. Such an agent needs meta-cognition in terms of both self-awareness and control. Self-awareness is related to the internal conditions that may possibly influence the completion of the task, while control is oriented t…
Understanding short- and long-term implications of “myopic” fleet maintenance policies: a system dynamics application to a city bus company
2010
Financial losses recorded in city bus companies often force managers to implement restructuring strategies aimed at improving business results. However, such decisions may not produce the expected consequences for a number of reasons. Both the internal and external environment in which such companies operate can make the design and implementation of long-term sustainable policies quite difficult. In fact, the result may be that decision makers introduce "effective" policies in a company subsystem, while ignoring the medium- and long-term implications of such decisions in the performance of the whole company. With the aim to detect the main causes underlying "myopic" fleet maintenance polici…
Community-based Immunization Strategies for Epidemic Control
2014
Understanding the epidemic dynamics, and finding out efficient techniques to control it, is a challenging issue. A lot of research has been done on targeted immunization strategies, exploiting various global network topological properties. However, in practice, information about the global structure of the contact network may not be available. Therefore, immunization strategies that can deal with a limited knowledge of the network structure are required. In this paper, we propose targeted immunization strategies that require information only at the community level. Results of our investigations on the SIR epidemiological model, using a realistic synthetic benchmark with controlled community…
Spatial [Elements] Decision Support System Used in Disaster Management
2007
Natural disasters profoundly affect the development of human society, they are the most pervasive disasters in the world and they cause the greatest property and human loss. Considering the natural disasters that have struck Romania these years, we believe that is it is absolutely necessary to develop a spatial [elements] decision support system, which would prevent - as much as possible - natural disasters from occurring or would help mitigate their effects. All these objectives are unattainable without effectively applying information and communication technology in the field of natural disasters.
The importance of standard operating procedures in physical fitness assessment: a brief review
2022
Abstract Background Physical fitness status is a key aspect of health and, consequently, it is important to create and adopt appropriate interventions to maintain or improve it, and assess it using valid measures. While in other testing contexts, standard operating procedures (SOPs) are commonly and widely adopted, in physical fitness testing, a variety of unstandardized testing protocols are proposed. Aims The topic of this review was to evaluate the existing literature on SOPs in physical fitness assessment and to provide guidelines on how SOPs could be created and adopted. Method The electronic databases PubMed, Web of Science and Scopus were screened and original, peer-reviewed studies …
Safety assessment of food-contact paper and board using a battery of short-term toxicity tests: European union BIOSAFEPAPER project.
2005
International audience; An European Union (EU)-funded project QLK1-CT-2001-00930 (BIOSAFEPAPER) involves the development, validation and intercalibration of a short-term battery of toxicological tests for the safety assessment of food-contact paper and board. Dissemination of the results to industry, legislators (e.g. DG Consumer Protection, DG Enterprises, DG Research), standardization bodies such as CEN, and consumers will create an agreed risk evaluation procedure. The project involves pre-normative research in order to establish a set of in-vitro cytotoxicity and genotoxicity tests that will be easily adaptable to food-contact fibre-based materials and have endpoints relevant to consume…
Perspectives for Globalized Natural Medicines
2011
Natural medicines provide valuable resources to meet the requirements for global health care at affordable prices. Therefore, safety and efficacy need to be proven in a comparable manner to conventional drugs. Evidence-based natural and western medicine may merge to a “one-world medicine” for the sake of all patients in industrialized and developing countries. In the present review, we discuss strategies for (1) preservation of traditional knowledge on natural medicines, (2) sustainability of medicinal herbs and natural products, and (3) standardization and quality control. Novel technologies will impact research on natural medicines in the years to come, e.g. remote sensing to map medicina…
Assessing the quality of studies in meta-research: Review/guidelines on the most important quality assessment tools
2020
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses pool data from individual studies to generate a higher level of evidence to be evaluated by guidelines. These reviews ultimately guide clinicians and stakeholders in health-related decisions. However, the informativeness and quality of evidence synthesis inherently depend on the quality of what has been pooled into meta-research projects. Moreover, beyond the quality of included individual studies, only a methodologically correct process, in relation to systematic reviews and meta-analyses themselves, can produce a reliable and valid evidence synthesis. Hence, quality of meta-research projects also affects evidence synthesis reliability. In this overview…