Aided diagnosis of structural pathologies with an expert system

Sustainability and safety are social demands for long-life buildings. Suitable inspection and maintenance tasks on structural elements are needed for keeping buildings safely in service. Any malfunction that causes structural damage could be called pathology by analogy between structural engineering and medicine. Even the easiest evaluation tasks require expensive training periods that may be shortened with a suitable tool. This work presents an expert system (called Doctor House or DH) for diagnosing pathologies of structural elements in buildings. DH differs from other expert systems when it deals with uncertainty in a far easier but still useful way and it is capable of aiding during the initial survey 'in situ', when damage should be detected at a glance. DH is a powerful tool that represents complex knowledge gathered from bibliography and experts. Knowledge codification and uncertainty treatment are the main achievements presented. Finally, DH was tested and validated during real surveys.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Risk analysis methodology survey

NASA regulations require that formal risk analysis be performed on a program at each of several milestones as it moves toward full-scale development. Program risk analysis is discussed as a systems analysis approach, an iterative process (identification, assessment, management), and a collection of techniques. These techniques, which range from simple to complex network-based simulation were surveyed. A Program Risk Analysis Handbook was prepared in order to provide both analyst and manager with a guide for selection of the most appropriate technique

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) selected papers – Technical annotated bibliography

Bureau of Economic Geolog

World Class Supply Chain 2019: Next Generation Ideas

Next Generation Ideas, being the theme for the Fourth Annual World Class Supply Chain Summit, reflected summit’s focus on understanding what is becoming and what will continue to be of increasingly of high priority for current and future supply chain professionals. The summit, which was held on May 8th, 2019 in Milton, Ontario, brought together invited executives, scholars, and students to present and carefully examine a range of emerging ideas that are worthy of the supply chain community’s interest. The diversity of such ideas (e.g., new technologies, geopolitical developments, and the role of supply chain analytics) necessitated a diverse range of perspectives for structuring the summit deliberations. This was done through a summit program comprising three presentations to feature the following perspectives: Perspectives of a vastly experienced industry executive perspective who has amassed an extensive body of material on ecological considerations in supply chains Perspectives of an economist with evidence-based understanding of how decisions by national governments impact firms with both domestic and transnational supply chains Perspectives of a supply chain scholar whose research projects are strongly motivated by how companies have had (and will have) to rethink their distribution networks From the formal presentations and the question and answer component for each presentation, the essence of the insights could be summarized by this notion: While firms must still exemplify traditional supply chain fundamentals (trusted partners, robust IT infrastructure, etc.), they face the additional and an increasingly pressing imperative of needing the agility to be responsive to changes, especially from customers and competitors. Arguably, this is not an original statement because one can make a convincing case that dynamic change has always been a feature of the business landscape. Rather than originality, the statement is meant to underscore that, at this time in the development of the supply chain field, practitioners seem to be experiencing a very distinct level of bewilderment about the array of changes to be contemplated. The summit not only brought that bewilderment to the fore, it also: facilitated discussion of the opportunities resulting from the changes presented real-world examples of innovative and entrepreneurial responses to the changes addressed the interests and concerns of students - the next generation of supply chain professionals This white paper reports on (1) the substantive specifics of those elements of the summit and (2) issues requiring further study in order to be understood more clearly

INSPIRAL: investigating portals for information resources and learning. Final project report

INSPIRAL's aims were to identify and analyse, from the perspective of the UK HE learner, the nontechnical, institutional and end-user issues with regard to linking VLEs and digital libraries, and to make recommendations for JISC strategic planning and investment. INSPIRAL's objectives -To identify key stakeholders with regard to the linkage of VLEs, MLEs and digital libraries -To identify key stakeholder forum points and dissemination routes -To identify the relevant issues, according to the stakeholders and to previous research, pertaining to the interaction (both possible and potential) between VLEs/MLEs and digital libraries -To critically analyse identified issues, based on stakeholder experience and practice; output of previous and current projects; and prior and current research -To report back to JISC and to the stakeholder communities, with results situated firmly within the context of JISC's strategic aims and objectives

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

espida Bibliography

This is the bibliography pulled together during research for the espida Project

Annotated bibliography on the economic effects of global climate change on fisheries

Fisheries, Bibliography, Climatic changes

Análisis de armónicos variando en el tiempo en sistemas eléctricos de potencia con parques eólicos, a través de la teoría de la posibilidad

This paper focuses on the analysis of the connection of wind farms to the electric power system and their impact on the harmonic load-flow. A possibilistic harmonic load-flow methodology, previously developed by the authors, allows for modeling uncertainties related to linear and nonlinear load variations. On the other hand, it is well known that some types of wind turbines also produce harmonics, in fact, time-varying harmonics. The purpose of this paper is to present an improvement of the former method, in order to include the uncertainties due to the wind speed variations as an input related with power generated by the turbines. Simulations to test the proposal are performed in the IEEE 14-bus standard test system for harmonic analysis, but replacing the generator, at bus two, by a wind farm composed by ten FPC type wind turbines.En este trabajo se analiza el impacto de la conexión de parques eólicos, en el flujo de cargas armónicas en un sistema de potencia. Algunos generadores eólicos producen armónicos debido a la electrónica de potencia que utilizan para su vinculación con la red. Estos armónicos son variables en el tiempo ya que se relacionan con las variaciones en la velocidad del viento. El propósito de este trabajo es presentar una mejora a la metodología para el cálculo de incertidumbre en el flujo de cargas armónicas, a través de la teoría de la posibilidad, la cual fue previamente desarrollada por los autores. La mejora consiste en incluir la incertidumbre debida a las variaciones de la velocidad del viento. Para probar la metodología, se realizan simulaciones en el sistema de prueba de 14 barras de la IEEE, conectando en una de las barras un parque eólico compuesto por diez turbinas del tipo FPC. Los resultados obtenidos muestran que la incertidumbre en la velocidad del viento tiene un efecto considerable en las incertidumbres asociadas a las magnitudes de las tensiones armónicas calculadas.Fil: Romero Quete, Andrés Arturo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Facultad de Ingeniería. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica; ArgentinaFil: Suvire, Gaston Orlando. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Facultad de Ingeniería. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica; ArgentinaFil: Zini, Humberto Cassiano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Facultad de Ingeniería. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica; ArgentinaFil: Ratta, Giuseppe. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Juan. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica. Universidad Nacional de San Juan. Facultad de Ingeniería. Instituto de Energía Eléctrica; Argentin