Search results for "Stain"
showing 10 items of 5524 documents
Unusually high frequency natural VLF radio emissions observed during daytime in Northern Finland
2016
Geomagnetic field variations and electromagnetic waves of different frequencies are ever present in the Earth's environment in which the Earth's fauna and flora have evolved and live. These waves are a very useful tool for studying and exploring the physics of plasma processes occurring in the magnetosphere and ionosphere. Here we present ground-based observations of natural electromagnetic emissions of magnetospheric origin at very low frequency (VLF, 3–30 kHz), which are neither heard nor seen in their spectrograms because they are hidden by strong impulsive signals (sferics) originating in lightning discharges. After filtering out the sferics, peculiar emissions are revealed in these dig…
Debt Sustainability and Fiscal Space in a Heterogeneous Monetary Union: Normal Times Vs the Zero Lower Bound
2020
In this paper we study fiscal policy effects and fiscal space for countries in a monetary union with different levels of public debt. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of a two-country monetary union, calibrated to match the characteristics of Spain and Germany, in which debt sustainability is endogenously determined a la Bi (2012) to shape the responses of the risk premium on public debt. Policy shocks change the market’s expectation about future primary surplus, producing a direct effect on the sovereign risk premium and macroeconomic responses of the economy. In normal times the costs of a government spending driven fiscal consolidation in the high-debt cou…
SUP R DSS: A sustainability-based decision support & system for road pavements
2019
Road pavement community members are increasingly becoming aware of the need to incorporating the principles of sustainable development into the sector. Policies are also going in this direction and as a consequence in the recent years researchers and practitioners are coming up with new materials, technologies and practices designed to reduce the negative impacts of their activities in the surroundings. Within this framework the road pavements sector is witnessing a paradigm shift towards the development of pavement technologies incorporating high-content of recycled materials, as well as best practices to decrease the overall carbon footprint. These are all promising solutions that to the …
Smart cities technologies applied to sustainable transport. Open data management
2016
One of the objectives of the Smart Cities is the efficient and sustainable use of transport infrastructures. Sustainability is understood as the application of new technologies to minimize the loss of time and energy, and at the same time, to improve the satisfaction of citizens. Achieving this objective calls for making use of the mobility data collected from the existing transport infrastructure and services, as well as from the citizens themselves. After the data collection process, information must be stored (use of open data bases) and made accessible (available) to specialized applications and users. This paper highlights the opportunity to take advantage of emerging technologies, lik…
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…
Systems Thinking and Sustainability in Organisations
2015
This set of articles arises from a series of conferences (Business Systems Laboratory Symposia, 2013-2015) and in particular from the 2nd Business systems Laboratory International Symposium, Rome 2014 with the theme ‘Systems Thinking for a Sustainable Economy’, concerned with systems thinking and its relations with sustainable management, where the relevance of systems thinking was demonstrated. The current period of our global society is characterised by intense transformations in the competitive logics of organisations, markets, and, generally speaking, society. Social circumstances today are typified by dynamism, connectivity, nonlinearity, and emergent properties — in other words by ‘co…
A decision support system based on multisensor data fusion for sustainable greenhouse management
2018
The sustainable exploitation of natural resources is nowadays an important challenge for governments and institutions, considering the expected increase of the world population. In order to respond to this emergent criticality, the principles of green economy have been introduced in the European policy discussion to achieve a good compromise between the sustainability and the profitability of productions by increasing the efficiency of farming operations. Such approach poses some technical and financial challenges for small-sized enterprises because they generally do not possess adequate internal knowledge, nor they can acquire external expertise due to their budget restrictions. Decision S…
Selecting sewage sludge treatment alternatives in modern wastewater treatment plants using environmental decision support systems
2015
The importance of the sewage sludge treatment within the field of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) suggests new dimensions of analysis where the relevance of economic criteria combined with the associated environmental issues are increasing the sludge management complexity. For supporting the decision process and for comparative purposes, this study assesses five alternative configurations for sludge treatment, namely: mesophilic and termophilic anaerobic digestion plus composting, incineration, gasification, and supercritical water oxidation (SCWO). The global warming potential (GWP) and the annual cash flow of each alternative are used to estimate a composite indicator for each alterna…
Decision-making in energy planning. Application of the Electre method at regional level for the diffusion of renewable energy technology
2003
The authors show an application of the multicriteria decision-making methodology used to assess an action plan for the diffusion of renewable energy technologies at regional scale. This methodological tool gives the decision-maker considerable help in the selection of the most suitable innovative technologies in the energy sector, according to preliminary fixed objectives. In this paper, a case study is carried out for the island of Sardinia. This region presents, on one hand, a high potential for energy resources exploitation, but on the other hand, it represents a specific case among other Italian regions, because of its socio-economic status and history. Three decision scenarios have bee…
Towards the development of a Decision Support System (DSS) for building renovation: Domain Mapping Matrix (DMM) for sustainability renovation criteri…
2018
Future building renovation concerns more holistic perspectives related to the sustainability seen in a wider range of objectives/criteria facilitated by the renovation scenarios. In this regard, based on the studies upon existing sustainability evaluation and assessment tools carried out in previous research works, a characteristic diagram including a value map for evaluating a holistic sustainable retrofitting was developed. Further, in present paper, by reviewing the relevant literature, looking into recent European renovation research projects, the Danish SIGMA database, and investigation of a real case, a comprehensive list of renovation approaches (i.e. insulation technologies, windows…