Municipal Emergency Plans in Italy: requirements and drawbacks

In order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of land use planning and emergency panning policies and strategies in EU, the Italian regulations and guidelines are used as example to discuss the distance between the European and national regulation and the disaster management and post-disaster procedures, that together with the land use planning are often conceived for a Municipal scale. Both anthropic and natural risks are dealt with in the emergency planning, but risk information derive from very diverse sources, with different levels of detail - from the risk assessment of major risk plants to the representation of risks provided by sectorial plans, each one focused on a single type of risk (i.e. flood, seismic, fire…). Emergency plans should aim at correlating the various risk evaluations, thus being able to provide a comprehensive emergency programme, both for people and territorial safety, but indeed the land use is often regulated by a completely different legislation and designing system. This lack of linkage between the procedures for Emergency and for Land Use Planning makes the emergency management less effective towards the achievement of a real safety of territories, as proved by recent disastrous events in the European territory. In order to solve these critical issues, the paper aims at providing hints on how to achieve a different approach both in land use and emergency planning, conceiving risk assessment as part of an integrated process composed by many important and interrelated phases, not only postdisaster emergency, but also structural interventions for the long- term prevention

Orthogonal polynomials in badly shaped polygonal elements for the Virtual Element Method

In this paper we propose a modified construction for the polynomial basis on polygons used in the Virtual Element Method (VEM). This construction is alternative to the usual monomial basis used in the classical construction of the VEM and is designed in order to improve numerical stability. For badly shaped elements the construction of the projection matrices required for assembling the local coefficients of the linear system within the VEM discretization of Partial Differential Equations can result very ill conditioned. The proposed approach can be easily implemented within an existing VEM code in order to reduce the possible ill conditioning of the elemental projection matrices. Numerical results applied to an hydro-geological flow simulation that often produces very badly shaped elements show a clear improvement of the quality of the numerical solution, confirming the viability of the approach. The method can be conveniently combined with a classical implementation of the VEM and applied element-wise, thus requiring a rather moderate additional numerical cost

Open Data Quality Measurement Framework: Definition and Application to Open Government Data

The diffusion of Open Government Data (OGD) in recent years kept a very fast pace. However, evidence from practitioners shows that disclosing data without proper quality control may jeopardize datasets reuse and negatively affect civic participation. Current approaches to the problem in literature lack of a comprehensive theoretical framework. Moreover, most of the evaluations concentrate on open data platforms, rather than on datasets. In this work, we address these two limitations and set up a framework of indicators to measure the quality of Open Government Data on a series of data quality dimensions at most granular level of measurement. We validated the evaluation framework by applying it to compare two cases of Italian OGD datasets: an internationally recognized good example of OGD, with centralized disclosure and extensive data quality controls, and samples of OGD from decentralized data disclosure (municipalities level), with no possibility of extensive quality controls as in the former case, hence with supposed lower quality. Starting from measurements based on the quality framework, we were able to verify the difference in quality: the measures showed a few common acquired good practices and weaknesses, and a set of discriminating factors that pertain to the type of datasets and the overall approach. On the basis of this evaluation, we also provided technical and policy guidelines to overcome the weaknesses observed in the decentralized release policy, addressing specific quality aspect

Impact behavior of a fully thermoplastic composite

Composites are materials of choice for lightweight structures due to their excellent strength/weight/and stiffness/weight/properties. For several years, the application of composite materials with continuous fiber was limited to those with thermosetting matrix. Recently, interest in composites with thermoplastic matrix is growing thanks to their considerable advantages also in terms of recyclability. The thermoplastic composites appear to be the right alternative to the materials currently used, replacing not only the non-structural parts, but also the structural components located in areas potentially subject to impacts. This paper presents the results of an experimental campaign made on a fully thermoplastic composite, where both the reinforcement and the matrix are made in polypropylene. The target is to analyze its behavior under different impact loading conditions using a drop weight testing machine. The influence of the impact mass and of the velocity on the energy absorption capability of the material have been analyzed and discussed. During the tests, the material showed a ductile behavior and developed extended plasticity without a crack tip. The main observed damage mechanisms were the yarn sliding

A STUDY OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TRAFFIC NOISE AND ANNOYANCE FOR DIFFERENT URBAN SITE TYPOLOGIES

The paper intends to analyse the different attitudes of residents in urban areas in regard to annoyance induced by traffic noise, account taken of the effects of the street configuration and of the presence of specific public transport modes in the definition of the dose-response curves. People's annoyance was investigated through a campaign of noise and traffic measurements and an epidemiological survey, administered to a sample of 830 residents in the buildings close to the measurement points. An ordinal regression model taking into account environmental and urban characteristics was used to identify a dose-response relationship. The cumulative probabilities allowed to define two cut points on the dose-response curves (60 and 75 dB(A)), grouping people in three classes and making the representation of the dose-response relationships different from those traditionally defined that use only the percentage of highly annoyed people. The results show different people's attitudes towards the annoyance in the urban sites while the dose-response relationship shows that the correlation between annoyance and noise is low. For the same value of day equivalent level, 10% more people are annoyed in L sections (broad streets) than in U sections (narrow streets). Furthermore, all the dose-response curves show a higher sensitivity of people living in L sections; this difference can be measured as a shift of about 4 dB(A). Noise levels are, arguably, a useful indicator, but they are not reliable enough to define the discomfort of the residents, while the site characteristics could shed light on annoyance variabilit

Human Assisted Robotic Vehicle Studies - A conceptual end-to-end mission architecture

With current space exploration roadmaps indicating the Moon as a proving ground on the way to human exploration of Mars, it is clear that human-robotic partnerships will play a key role for successful future human space missions. This paper details a conceptual end-to-end architecture for an exploration mission in cis-lunar space with a focus on human-robot interactions, called Human Assisted Robotic Vehicle Studies (HARVeSt). HARVeSt will build on knowledge of plant growth in space gained from experiments on-board the ISS and test the first growth of plants on the Moon. A planned deep space habitat will be utilised as the base of operations for human-robotic elements of the mission. The mission will serve as a technology demonstrator not only for autonomous tele-operations in cis-lunar space but also for key enabling technologies for future human surface missions. The successful approach of the ISS will be built on in this mission with international cooperation. Mission assets such as a modular rover will allow for an extendable mission and to scout and prepare the area for the start of an international Moon Village