58,082 research outputs found
Enhancing Infrastructure Resilience Under Conditions of Incomplete Knowledge of Interdependencies
Today’s infrastructures — such as road, rail, gas, electricity and ICT — are highly interdependent, and may best be viewed
as multi-infrastructure systems. A key challenge in seeking to enhance the resilience of multi-infrastructure systems in
practice relates to the fact that many interdependencies may be unknown to the operators of these infrastructures.
How can we foster infrastructure resilience lacking complete knowledge of interdependencies? In addressing this
question, we conceptualize the situation of a hypothetical infrastructure operator faced with incomplete knowledge of
the interdependencies to which his infrastructure is exposed. Using a computer model which explicitly represents failure
propagations and cascades within a multi-infrastructure system, we seek to identify robust investment strategies on the part
of the operator to enhance infrastructure resilience.
Our results show that a strategy of constructing redundant interdependencies may be the most robust option for a
financially constrained infrastructure operator. These results are specific to the infrastructure configuration tested. However,
the developed model may be tailored to the conditions of real-world infrastructure operators faced with a similar dilemma,
ultimately helping to foster resilient infrastructures in an uncertain world
Modeling Renewable Energy Readiness: The UAE Context
Modeling technology policy is becoming an increasingly important capability to steer states and societies toward sustainability. This paper presents a simulation-modeling approach to evaluate renewable energy readiness, that is, the ability to develop renewable energy, taking into account critical ecological, economic, governance, and institutional factors that generally shape energy policy. While the dynamics underlying shifts towards renewable energy are generic, we focus on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as a counter-intuitive case. The UAE is a major oil rich and oil exporting country, with large untapped reserves. Yet it has made a policy decision to develop sources of renewable energy. The absence of basic institutional, managerial, and infrastructure requirements creates major barriers that must be surmounted if this policy is to be effectively pursued. For these and other reasons, the UAE serves as a "hard test" for the potentials of renewable energy and can eventually be used as a model for other oil exporting countries. The UAE has already made strides along a trajectory in trial and error ways. As such, it helps demonstrate in theory and practice the readiness for renewable energy-that can help articulate effective policy trajectories
Assessing and augmenting SCADA cyber security: a survey of techniques
SCADA systems monitor and control critical infrastructures of national importance such as power generation and distribution, water supply, transportation networks, and manufacturing facilities. The pervasiveness, miniaturisations and declining costs of internet connectivity have transformed these systems from strictly isolated to highly interconnected networks. The connectivity provides immense benefits such as reliability, scalability and remote connectivity, but at the same time exposes an otherwise isolated and secure system, to global cyber security threats. This inevitable transformation to highly connected systems thus necessitates effective security safeguards to be in place as any compromise or downtime of SCADA systems can have severe economic, safety and security ramifications. One way to ensure vital asset protection is to adopt a viewpoint similar to an attacker to determine weaknesses and loopholes in defences. Such mind sets help to identify and fix potential breaches before their exploitation. This paper surveys tools and techniques to uncover SCADA system vulnerabilities. A comprehensive review of the selected approaches is provided along with their applicability
Towards a service-oriented e-infrastructure for multidisciplinary environmental research
Research e-infrastructures are considered to have generic and thematic parts. The generic part provids high-speed networks, grid (large-scale distributed computing) and database systems (digital repositories and data transfer systems) applicable to all research commnities irrespective of discipline. Thematic parts are specific deployments of e-infrastructures to support diverse virtual research communities. The needs of a virtual community of multidisciplinary envronmental researchers are yet to be investigated. We envisage and argue for an e-infrastructure that will enable environmental researchers to develop environmental models and software entirely out of existing components through loose coupling of diverse digital resources based on the service-oriented achitecture. We discuss four specific aspects for consideration for a future e-infrastructure: 1) provision of digital resources (data, models & tools) as web services, 2) dealing with stateless and non-transactional nature of web services using workflow management systems, 3) enabling web servce discovery, composition and orchestration through semantic registries, and 4) creating synergy with existing grid infrastructures
Grid simulation services for the medical community
The first part of this paper presents a selection of medical simulation applications, including image reconstruction, near real-time registration for neuro-surgery, enhanced dose distribution calculation for radio-therapy, inhaled drug delivery prediction, plastic surgery planning and cardio-vascular system simulation. The latter two topics are discussed in some detail. In the second part, we show how such services can be made available to the clinical practitioner using Grid technology. We discuss the developments and experience made during the EU project GEMSS, which provides reliable, efficient, secure and lawful medical Grid services
Multiresolution modeling and simulation of an air-ground combat application
The High Level Architecture (HLA) establishes a common modeling and simulation framework facilitating interoperability and reuse of simulation components. Since 1996, ONERA (French Aeronautics and Space Research Centre) carries out several studies on HLA in order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of HLA implementations. The first critical step of this initiative was to develop our own RTI from the HLA specifications. In order to evaluate the cost of making a transition from legacy simulations to HLA, we first developed an HLA federation simulating an air-ground combat involving a set of aircraft's engaged against a surface to air defense system. Current studies on HLA distributed simulation include security, WAN simulations and multiresolution.
Conventional simulations represent entities at just one single level of resolution. Multiresolution representation of entities consists in maintaining multiple and concurrent representations of entities. In this paper we address the problem of how HLA services may allow to achieve multiresolution modeling and simulation. Our goal is not to provide a general framework as a basis for designing simulations of entities at different levels of resolution concurrently. We focus on experience feedback we have obtained by migrating a single level resolution HLA federation to a multi-level resolution federation. The selected application is an air-ground combat simulation involving aggregated patrols of aircraft's engaged against a surface to air defense system.
In this paper, we briefly describe the air-ground combat simulation application. We then detail the multiresolution representation of entities (patrols and aircraft's), and discuss the chosen mechanisms allowing triggering aggregation from an entity-level representation, and conversely, triggering disaggregation from an aggregate representation. We focus on the HLA services we have selected to maintain several levels of representation concurrently and on methodological issues in designing multiresolution HLA simulations. We have tackled some difficulties and we propose a new HLA service that should make easier the user's task. This multiresolution management service can be added to our RTI or written by using existing HLA services. Finally, future trends are discussed
mRUBiS: An Exemplar for Model-Based Architectural Self-Healing and Self-Optimization
Self-adaptive software systems are often structured into an adaptation engine
that manages an adaptable software by operating on a runtime model that
represents the architecture of the software (model-based architectural
self-adaptation). Despite the popularity of such approaches, existing exemplars
provide application programming interfaces but no runtime model to develop
adaptation engines. Consequently, there does not exist any exemplar that
supports developing, evaluating, and comparing model-based self-adaptation off
the shelf. Therefore, we present mRUBiS, an extensible exemplar for model-based
architectural self-healing and self-optimization. mRUBiS simulates the
adaptable software and therefore provides and maintains an architectural
runtime model of the software, which can be directly used by adaptation engines
to realize and perform self-adaptation. Particularly, mRUBiS supports injecting
issues into the model, which should be handled by self-adaptation, and
validating the model to assess the self-adaptation. Finally, mRUBiS allows
developers to explore variants of adaptation engines (e.g., event-driven
self-adaptation) and to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability
of the engines
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