Integrated System for Hydraulic Simulations

The work described in this paper is aimed at applying and co-operating of modern information technologies and mathematical modeling to make a risk analysis of the water-supply in big cities. It is instrumental in the investigation of the hydraulics of water-supply systems using the simulation model EPANET executed on the underlying high-performance computing infrastructure. The simulation process is integrated with the GIS environment in order to correct input data and visualize the simulation output. Input data for the model can be modified directly within the designed scientific gateway which enables hydraulic domain experts to interact comfortably with the HPC capacity. Furthermore, the system includes some data mining capabilities forming bridges between the hydraulic data storage and available hydrological measurements focused on water consumption modeling and predictions. In simulating the main emphasis is given to optimize the measure of a similarity between the mathematical model and the real system in order to obtain reliable results

Price Formation of Dry Bulk Carriers in the Chinese Shipbuilding Industry

In this paper we present, for the first time, the price formation of China’s dry bulk carrier using vessel prices quoted by major Chinese shipyards in actual shipbuilding orders. This allows us to investigate the relationship of price and determinants in the Chinese shipbuilding industry by including generic market factors as well as Chinese elements. The analysis, employing Principal Component Regression (PCR) approach, indicates that the time charter rate has the most significantly positive impact. While increases in other four factors, namely shipbuilding cost, price cost margin, shipbuilding capacity utilization and credit rate, have descending order of positive influences. Different from traditional perception, we assert that the most important role of time charter rate plays mainly attributes to the ‘China Factor’ in bulk carrier sector. In addition, simulations are performed to investigate what would happen to the Chinese dry bulk carrier prices under changes of time charter rate and shipbuilding cost. This paper has implications for the Chinese shipyards, shipbuilding industry customers and industry policy makers. Acknowledgment - This research is partly funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council and TORM Foundation.Price Formation, Dry Bulk Carrier, Chinese Shipbuilding Industry

Decision support systems (DSS) for wastewater treatment plants: a review of the state of the art

The use of decision support systems (DSS) allows integrating all the issues related with sustainable developmentin view of providing a useful support to solve multi-scenario problems. In this work an extensive review on theDSSs applied to wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) is presented. The main aim of the work is to provide anupdated compendium on DSSs in view of supporting researchers and engineers on the selection of the mostsuitable method to address their management/operation/design problems. Results showed that DSSs weremostly used as a comprehensive tool that is capable of integrating several data and a multi-criteria perspective inorder to provide more reliable results. Only one energy-focused DSS was found in literature, while DSSs based onquality and operational issues are very often applied to site-specific conditions. Finally, it would be important toencourage the development of more user-friendly DSSs to increase general interest and usability.This work is part of a research project supported by grant of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR) through the Research project of national interest PRIN2012 (D.M. 28 December 2012 n. 957/Ric – Prot. 2012PTZAMC) entitled “Energy consumption and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in the wastewater treatment plants: a decision support system for planning and management – http://ghgfromwwtp.unipa.it” in which the first author is the Principal Investigator. In addition, some coauthors acknowledge the partial support of the Industrial Doctorate Programme (2017-DI-006) and the Research Consolidated Groups/Centres Grant (2017 SGR 574) from the Catalan Agency of University and Research Grants Management (AGAUR), from Catalan Government.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

CARBON, TRADE POLICY, AND CARBON FREE TRADE AREAS

This paper discusses both the potential contribution that trade policy initiatives can make towards the achievement of significant global carbon emissions reduction and the potential impacts of proposals now circulating for carbon reduction motivated geographical trade arrangements, including carbon free trade areas. We first suggest that trade policy is likely to be a relatively minor consideration in climate change containment. The dominant influence on carbon emissions globally for next several decades will be growth more so than trade and its composition, and in turn, the size of trade seemingly matters more than its composition given differences in emission intensity between tradables and nontradables. We also note that differences in emissions intensity across countries are larger than across products or sectors and so issues of country discrimination in trade policy (and violations of MFN) arises. We next discuss both unilateral and regional carbon motivated trade policy arrangements, including three potential variants of carbon emission reduction based free trade area arrangements. One is regional trade agreements with varying types of trade preferences towards low carbon intensive products, low carbon new technologies and inputs to low carbon processes. A second is the use of joint border measures against third parties to counteract anti-competitive effects from groups of countries taking on deeper emission reduction commitments. A third is third country trade barriers along with free trade or other regional trade agreements as penalty mechanisms to pressure other countries to join emission reducing environmental agreements. We differentiate among the objectives, forms and possible impacts of each variant. We also speculate as to how the world trading system may evolve in the next few decades as trade policy potentially becomes increasingly dominated by environmental concerns. We suggest that the future evolution of the trading system will likely be with environmentally motivated arrangements acting as an overlay on prevailing trade and financial arrangements in the WTO and IMF, and eventually movement to linked global trade and environmental policy bargaining.carbon, trade policy, WTO, Regional Trade Agreements, trade barriers, anti-competitive effects

Customer lifetime value in insurance

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsThroughout the years, companies from several business sectors have strived to strengthen their client portfolio by acquiring and retaining the most profitable. For this to happen, current and potential clients must be clearly classified based on their past and future interactions with a company throughout the lifetime of their relationship. This report presents how the previous scenario was implemented using Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) in one of the biggest bancassurance companies in Portugal, during a 9-month internship. Before delving into the detailed set of this project phases, the concept of CLV was reviewed, as well as the characteristics which define its several approaches, followed by the alignment of the chosen approach to the company reality. This CLV model was limited to a 12-month future horizon, covered 7 company dimensions (one global, plus 1 per lines of business) and took into consideration as main future client interactions churn, cross-sell, upsell and risk of claiming. These previous components were modeled with the help of SAS Enterprise Miner or estimated using SAS Enterprise Guide and analyzing historical events. Besides a purely monetary CLV, it was also generated an ordinal output using a set of business rules and a ranking data discretization method. Finally, a back-test validation procedure was executed to evaluate the reliability of both types of outputs in each of the considered dimensions and its results were analyzed.Ao longo dos anos, empresas de diversos setores têm-se esforçado para fortalecer o seu portfolio de clientes, adquirindo e retendo os mais lucrativos. Para que isto acontecer, os clientes atuais e potenciais têm de ser devidamente categorizados com base nas suas interações passadas e futuras com uma determinada empresa, ao longo do ciclo de vida da sua relação com a mesma. Este relatório vez por sua vez apresentar como o cenário anterior foi implementado durante um estágio de 9 meses numa das maiores empresas de bancassurance em Portugal, recorrendo ao Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Antes de aprofundar o conjunto de fases deste projeto, foi feita uma revisão do conceito de CLV, assim como das principais características que definem as diversas abordagens, seguido do alinhamento da abordagem escolhida com a realidade da companhia. Este modelo foi limitado a um horizonte futuro de 12 meses, compreendeu 7 dimensões (uma global e uma por cada linha de negócio) e integrou como principais interações futuras do cliente o churn, cross-sell, upsell e risco de sinistralidade. Estes componentes foram modelados com a ajuda da ferramenta SAS Enterprise Miner, ou estimados utilizando o SAS Enterprise Guide para analisar eventos passados. Além de um CLV puramente monetário, também foi criado um output ordinal recorrendo a um conjunto de regras de negócio e um método de ranking data discretization. No fim, foi executado um procedimento de validação back-test com o intuito de avaliar a credibilidade dos dois tipos de outputs ao longo das várias dimensões e foi feita uma análise dos resultados finais

The SIMPSONS project: An integrated Mars transportation system

In response to the Request for Proposal (RFP) for an integrated transportation system network for an advanced Martian base, Frontier Transportation Systems (FTS) presents the results of the SIMPSONS project (Systems Integration for Mars Planetary Surface Operations Networks). The following topics are included: the project background, vehicle design, future work, conclusions, management status, and cost breakdown. The project focuses solely on the surface-to-surface transportation at an advanced Martian base

EXPERT SYSTEM BASED APPROACH FOR MATERIAL SELECTION OF AUTOMOBILE BODY-IN-WHITE STRUCTURAL PANELS USING NUMERICAL RANKING AND SUSTAINABILITY INDICES

The goal of this work is to establish a set of quantifiable measures for design for sustainability (DFS) that can be applied to automotive applications in terms of environmental, social, economic and technical aspects. In this study, a comprehensive analysis was made in order to develop a methodology that can evaluate different body-in-white designs in terms of major sustainability aspects. Besides the complete life cycle analysis, environmental impacts and cost factors will be analyzed over vehicle\u27s entire life-cycle (fuel extraction and refining, Pre-manufacturing, Manufacturing, Use, and Post-use stages). The considered material options include: conventional steel, high strength steel, aluminum, magnesium, titanium and composites that are currently used in body-in-white (BIW) structures and exterior body panels. Sustainability scoring method was developed and used to decide on how using lighter materials in auto body applications is beneficial or not. The proposed major sustainable factors are categorized into four major groups: environmental, economical, social and technical groups. Also, each group has corresponding factors which were chosen by extensive search and screening, so only important sustainability aspects for auto body design have been selected in this study. Then the dissertation proceeds to show some sustainability scoring methods in order to get better understanding as well as relative ranking for different materials from sustainability point of view. Moreover, this work discusses the role and application of some multi-criteria decision making methods in materials selection, namely quality function deployment (QFD) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP). However, multi-criteria decision making methods are efficient tools to choose alternative from large set of alternatives, especially when two or more conflicting goals are present. Besides that, knowledge based system (KBS) was established for eco-material selection for auto-body structural panels. The goal behind using KBS is to help designers in material selection process which usually needs experience, time and effort

Influence of the composition on the environmental impact of a casting magnesium alloy

The influence of the composition of magnesium alloys on their environmental impact was analyzed. In order to perform a more accurate environmental impact calculation, life cycle assessment (LCA) with the ReCiPe 2016 Endpoint and IPCC 2013 GWP (100 y) methodology was used, taking the EcoInvent AZ91 magnesium alloy dataset as reference. This dataset has been updated with the material composition range of several alloys included in the European standard EN 1753:2019. The balanced, maximum, and minimum environmental impact values were obtained. In general, the overall impact of the studied magnesium alloys varied from 3.046 Pt/kg to 4.853 Pt/kg and from 43.439 kg CO2 eq./kg to 55.427 kg CO2 eq./kg, depending on the composition. In the analysis of maximum and minimum environmental impacts, the alloy that had the highest uncertainty was 3.5251, with a range of ±7.20%. The element that contributed the most to increase its impact was silver. The AZ91 alloy, provided by the EcoInvent dataset, had a lower environmental impact than all the magnesium alloys studied in this work. The content of critical raw materials (CRMs) was also assessed, showing a high content in CRMs, between 89.72% and 98.22%