Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Complex Decision Environments

In the future, many decisions will either be fully automated or supported by autonomous system. Consequently, it is of high importance that we understand how to integrate human preferences correctly. This dissertation dives into the research field of multi-criteria decision making and investigates the satellite image acquisition scheduling problem and the unmanned aerial vehicle routing problem to further the research on a priori preference integration frameworks. The work will aid in the transition towards autonomous decision making in complex decision environments. A discussion on the future of pairwise and setwise preference articulation methods is also undertaken. "Simply put, a direct consequence of the improved decision-making methods is,that bad decisions more clearly will stand out as what they are - bad decisions.

Unlocking Rural and Remote Coverage with Small Cells and Satellite

According to the Global System for Mobile Alliance (GSMA), in 2017, there were around 3.3 billion people connected to the mobile Internet. This represented an upward surge in global coverage compared to previous years. However, more than one billion people are still not covered by mobile broadband networks, representing what is termed “the coverage gap”. Uncovered populations typically live in rural locations with low population densities, low per-capita income levels and weak or non-existent enabling infrastructure, and thus, closing the mobile coverage gap seems to be more of an economic challenge, than a pure technical one. This paper presents an overview of the need for rural and remote coverage, both from an operator and consumer as well as government perspective. It then presents the major challenges, and necessary actions to be taken by industry, Government and other stake-holders to drive rural and remote coverage by significantly lowering the cost of network roll-out and increase incentives for such deployments. The paper therefore, presents a technical and business case for the use of “Small Cells” in conjunction with satellites with a view to opening up huge markets via collaboration between the mobile operators and satellite system owners, while offering significant improvements in the coverage and capacity needs of remote, rural or underserved end-users in a cost-effective and scalable manner. Detailed insights to these two technologies are presented, including the innovations to overcome technical and regulatory challenges. Lastly, some real-life deployments are given and the paper concludes with some recommendations for Government and network operators presente

An Energy Aware and Secure MAC Protocol for Tackling Denial of Sleep Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks which form part of the core for the Internet of Things consist of resource constrained sensors that are usually powered by batteries. Therefore, careful energy awareness is essential when working with these devices. Indeed,the introduction of security techniques such as authentication and encryption, to ensure confidentiality and integrity of data, can place higher energy load on the sensors. However, the absence of security protection c ould give room for energy drain attacks such as denial of sleep attacks which have a higher negative impact on the life span ( of the sensors than the presence of security features. This thesis, therefore, focuses on tackling denial of sleep attacks from two perspectives A security perspective and an energy efficiency perspective. The security perspective involves evaluating and ranking a number of security based techniques to curbing denial of sleep attacks. The energy efficiency perspective, on the other hand, involves exploring duty cycling and simulating three Media Access Control ( protocols Sensor MAC, Timeout MAC andTunableMAC under different network sizes and measuring different parameters such as the Received Signal Strength RSSI) and Link Quality Indicator ( Transmit power, throughput and energy efficiency Duty cycling happens to be one of the major techniques for conserving energy in wireless sensor networks and this research aims to answer questions with regards to the effect of duty cycles on the energy efficiency as well as the throughput of three duty cycle protocols Sensor MAC ( Timeout MAC ( and TunableMAC in addition to creating a novel MAC protocol that is also more resilient to denial of sleep a ttacks than existing protocols. The main contributions to knowledge from this thesis are the developed framework used for evaluation of existing denial of sleep attack solutions and the algorithms which fuel the other contribution to knowledge a newly developed protocol tested on the Castalia Simulator on the OMNET++ platform. The new protocol has been compared with existing protocols and has been found to have significant improvement in energy efficiency and also better resilience to denial of sleep at tacks Part of this research has been published Two conference publications in IEEE Explore and one workshop paper

Global production networks in the passenger aviation industry

The idea behind the paper, as well as the empirical data presented in the paper, originate from the research project on the aviation industry in Central and Eastern Europe that was carried out in 2015. The project was funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust (grant no. SG132857). A partial contribution under the same grant code was also made by the Sir Ernest Cassel Educational Trust Fund. The author is grateful to the funding bodies for supporting his research endeavour. The author would also like to thank Dr Nick Spedding from the University of Aberdeen for proofreading the first draft of the paper and providing valuable comments on its contents and the three anonymous reviewers for offering a number of useful suggestions on how to improve the paper.Peer reviewedPostprin

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Bridging the digital divide for e-learning students through adaptive VLEs

Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) are required to be highly effective and easy to use as they serve as the primary institutional portal between students and academics. There are currently a number of challenges that are caused due to the modernized digital divide, with a significant limitation being the inability of information systems to adapt to the users' technological platform, broadband quality and device in use to access the online system. This paper focuses on the limitations that students encounter when accessing VLEs within Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs). This research aims to primarily review and provide critical analysis of current VLE frameworks, as well as assess restrictions based on several demographics including content adaptation and technical aspects. An algorithmic system is developed to analyze students' individualistic needs, undertake adaption and personalization of the VLE, and hence ensure consistent and efficient access to academic web resources and functionalitie