Policies for capacity development

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Fluid Identities: Toward a Critical Security of Water

Water wars are coming! Water is the defining security threat of the 21st century! The future belongs to the water-rich! These types of warnings are frequently proclaimed, urging attention to looming water conflict, which will occur as stores of freshwater diminish in both quality and quantity. Yet the issue of water security is far more complex than as an inevitable source of future violent conflict. Water is a central component to all aspects of life and planetary health and thus it contains within it a multiplicity of social and political meanings, pivotal to our understandings of security. This dissertation begins with an acknowledgment that conceptions of security are conditioned by larger understandings of being and reality, and that water security in particular is emblematic of traditional allegiances within the subject of international relations that are resistant to change. At its core, it is designed to answer the question: What are the relationships between water and security? It adopts a critical security approach to excavate traditional security narratives and then construct and identify emancipatory visions immanent within relationships over water. It argues that an emancipatory vision of water security that is inclusive, communicative, and cosmopolitan is desirable and possible in human water relations. It concludes by identifying various contemporary water relationships that offer potential emancipatory appellations of water security

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Collaborative Models for Supply Networks Coordination and Healthcare Consolidation

This work discusses the collaboration framework among different members of two complex systems: supply networks and consolidated healthcare systems. Although existing literature advocates the notion of strategic partnership/cooperation in both supply networks and healthcare systems, there is a dearth of studies quantitatively analyzing the scope of cooperation among the members and its benefit on the global performance. Hence, the first part of this dissertation discusses about two-echelon supply networks and studies the coordination of buyers and suppliers for multi-period procurement process. Viewing the issue from the same angel, the second part studies the coordination framework of hospitals for consolidated healthcare service delivery. Realizing the dynamic nature of information flow and the conflicting objectives of members in supply networks, a two-tier coordination mechanism among buyers and suppliers is modeled. The process begins with the intelligent matching of buyers and suppliers based on the similarity of users profiles. Then, a coordination mechanism for long-term agreements among buyers and suppliers is proposed. The proposed mechanism introduces the importance of strategic buyers for suppliers in modeling and decision making process. To enhance the network utilization, we examine a further collaboration among suppliers where cooperation incurs both cost and benefit. Coalitional game theory is utilized to model suppliers\u27 coalition formation. The efficiency of the proposed approaches is evaluated through simulation studies. We then revisit the common issue, the co-existence of partnership and conflict objectives of members, for consolidated healthcare systems and study the coordination of hospitals such that there is a central referral system to facilitate patients transfer. We consider three main players including physicians, hospitals managers, and the referral system. As a consequence, the interaction within these players will shape the coordinating scheme to improve the overall system performance. To come up with the incentive scheme for physicians and aligning hospitals activities, we define a multi-objective mathematical model and obtain optimal transfer pattern. Using optimal solutions as a baseline, a cooperative game between physicians and the central referral system is defined to coordinate decisions toward system optimality. The efficiency of the proposed approach is examined via a case study

Alternative Theoretical Perspectives on the Political Economy of International Environmental Policy

In seeking to explain international behavior with regards to forging international environmental agreements, it is common to assume that countries act like unitary actors. While assuming that states act much like unitary actors certainly facilitates theoretical tractability, it involves forsaking analysis of the domestic determinants of international behavior. Clearly, the international political economy of international environmental agreements has its roots in the very real, and quite often pivotal, domestic political forces behind countries international negotiating positions. In this paper, we canvass the alternative theoretical perspectives within the political science and economics literatures that may enable us to more clearly connect (and thus explain) the domestic determinants of international behavior. We compare and contrast various perspectives for understanding the political economy of international public good provision involving the protection of the environment, illustrating various points through reference to the Montreal Protocol to preserve the ozone layer. The paper charts recent theoretical developments in the literature as well as directions for future research

A lightweight distributed super peer election algorithm for unstructured dynamic P2P systems

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresNowadays with the current growth of information exchange, and the increasing mobility of devices, it becomes essential to use technology to monitor this development. For that P2P networks are used, the exchange of information between agencies is facilitated, these now being applied in mobile networks, including MANETs, where they have special features such as the fact that they are semi-centralized, where it takes peers more ability to make a greater role in the network. But those peer with more capacity, which are used in the optimization of various parameters of these systems, such as optimization\to research, are difficult to identify due to the fact that the network does not have a fixed topology, be constantly changing, (we like to go online and offline, to change position, etc.) and not to allow the exchange of large messages. To this end, this thesis proposes a distributed election algorithm of us greater capacity among several possible goals, enhance research in the network. This includes distinguishing characteristics, such as election without global knowledge network, minimal exchange of messages, distributed decision made without dependence on us and the possibility of influencing the election outcome as the special needs of the network

Spatial planning in a complex unpredictable world of change:Towards a proactive co-evolutionary type of planning within the Eurodelta

This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being experts or mediators, we might appreciate planners becoming managers of change, transition managers, adaptive responders and social entrepreneurs, supporting and guiding the various parties within urban and rural areas to find the positions which suit them best.This book acknowledges these new identities and positions, with the planner acting as a manager of change. This book tries to present arguments in support of a discipline of spatial planning which adopts a different stance to the world, a more adaptive stance, and with a keen eye for self-organization processes: an eye for non-linear kinds of planning in a world of change.<br/