197,931 research outputs found
The Canadian âModel Forestâ approach : a way forward for Tasmania?
Forest policy and forestry management in Tasmania have undergone a number of changes in the last thirty years, many explicitly aimed at improving industry sustainability, job security, and forest biodiversity conservation. Yet forestry remains a contentious issue in Tasmania, due to a number of interacting factors, most significant of which is the prevalence of a âcommand and controlâ governance approach by policymakers and managers. New approaches such as multiple-stakeholder decision-making, adaptive management, and direct public participation in policymaking are needed. Such an approach has been attempted in Canada in the last decade, through the Canadian Model Forest Program, and may be suitable for Tasmania. This paper seeks to describe what the Canadian Model Forest approach is, how it may be implemented in Tasmania, and what role it may play in the shift to a new forestry paradigm. Until such a paradigm shift occurs contentions and confrontations are likely to continue
Resilient Critical Infrastructure Management using Service Oriented Architecture
AbstractâThe SERSCIS project aims to support the use of interconnected systems of services in Critical Infrastructure (CI) applications. The problem of system interconnectedness is aptly demonstrated by âAirport Collaborative Decision Makingâ (ACDM). Failure or underperformance of any of the interlinked ICT systems may compromise the ability of airports to plan their use of resources to sustain high levels of air traffic, or to provide accurate aircraft movement forecasts to the wider European air traffic management systems. The proposed solution is to introduce further SERSCIS ICT components to manage dependability and interdependency. These use semantic models of the critical infrastructure, including its ICT services, to identify faults and potential risks and to increase human awareness of them. Semantics allows information and services to be described in such a way that makes them understandable to computers. Thus when a failure (or a threat of failure) is detected, SERSCIS components can take action to manage the consequences, including changing the interdependency relationships between services. In some cases, the components will be able to take action autonomously â e.g. to manage âlocalâ issues such as the allocation of CPU time to maintain service performance, or the selection of services where there are redundant sources available. In other cases the components will alert human operators so they can take action instead. The goal of this paper is to describe a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can be used to address the management of ICT components and interdependencies in critical infrastructure systems. Index Termsâresilience; QoS; SOA; critical infrastructure, SLA
IDEALIST control and service management solutions for dynamic and adaptive flexi-grid DWDM networks
Wavelength Switched Optical Networks (WSON) were designed with the premise that all channels in a network have the same spectrum needs, based on the ITU-T DWDM grid. However, this rigid grid-based approach is not adapted to the spectrum requirements of the signals that are best candidates for long-reach transmission and high-speed data rates of 400Gbps and beyond. An innovative approach is to evolve the fixed DWDM grid to a flexible grid, in which the optical spectrum is partitioned into fixed-sized spectrum slices. This allows facilitating the required amount of optical bandwidth and spectrum for an elastic optical connection to be dynamically and adaptively allocated by assigning the necessary number of slices of spectrum. The ICT IDEALIST project will provide the architectural design, protocol specification, implementation, evaluation and standardization of a control plane and a network and service management system. This architecture and tools are necessary to introduce dynamicity, elasticity and adaptation in flexi-grid DWDM networks. This paper provides an overview of the objectives, framework, functional requirements and use cases of the elastic control plane and the adaptive network and service management system targeted in the ICT IDEALIST project
Presidential Exit
The biggest problem that we\u27re facing right now has to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that\u27s what I intend to reverse when I\u27m president of the United States of America.
Why is @BarackObama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?
President Trump signed the 30th executive order of his presidency on Friday, capping off a whirlwind period that produced more orders in his first 100 days than for any president since Harry Truman. The rash of executive orders underlines Trump\u27s focus on reversing as much of the Obama administration\u27s policy agenda as he can
Engineering a QoS Provider Mechanism for Edge Computing with Deep Reinforcement Learning
With the development of new system solutions that integrate traditional cloud
computing with the edge/fog computing paradigm, dynamic optimization of service
execution has become a challenge due to the edge computing resources being more
distributed and dynamic. How to optimize the execution to provide Quality of
Service (QoS) in edge computing depends on both the system architecture and the
resource allocation algorithms in place. We design and develop a QoS provider
mechanism, as an integral component of a fog-to-cloud system, to work in
dynamic scenarios by using deep reinforcement learning. We choose reinforcement
learning since it is particularly well suited for solving problems in dynamic
and adaptive environments where the decision process needs to be frequently
updated. We specifically use a Deep Q-learning algorithm that optimizes QoS by
identifying and blocking devices that potentially cause service disruption due
to dynamicity. We compare the reinforcement learning based solution with
state-of-the-art heuristics that use telemetry data, and analyze pros and cons
Adaptation of WASH Services Delivery to Climate Change and Other Sources of Risk and Uncertainty
This report urges WASH sector practitioners to take more seriously the threat of climate change and the consequences it could have on their work. By considering climate change within a risk and uncertainty framework, the field can use the multitude of approaches laid out here to adequately protect itself against a range of direct and indirect impacts. Eleven methods and tools for this specific type of risk management are described, including practical advice on how to implement them successfully
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