State-of-the-Art Report on Systems Analysis Methods for Resolution of Conflicts in Water Resources Management

Water is an important factor in conflicts among stakeholders at the local, regional, and even international level. Water conflicts have taken many forms, but they almost always arise from the fact that the freshwater resources of the world are not partitioned to match the political borders, nor are they evenly distributed in space and time. Two or more countries share the watersheds of 261 major rivers and nearly half of the land area of the wo rld is in international river basins. Water has been used as a military and political goal. Water has been a weapon of war. Water systems have been targets during the war. A role of systems approach has been investigated in this report as an approach for resolution of conflicts over water. A review of systems approach provides some basic knowledge of tools and techniques as they apply to water management and conflict resolution. Report provides a classification and description of water conflicts by addressing issues of scale, integrated water management and the role of stakeholders. Four large-scale examples are selected to illustrate the application of systems approach to water conflicts: (a) hydropower development in Canada; (b) multipurpose use of Danube river in Europe; (c) international water conflict between USA and Canada; and (d) Aral See in Asia. Water conflict resolution process involves various sources of uncertainty. One section of the report provides some examples of systems tools that can be used to address objective and subjective uncertainties with special emphasis on the utility of the fuzzy set theory. Systems analysis is known to be driven by the development of computer technology. Last section of the report provides one view of the future and systems tools that will be used for water resources management. Role of the virtual databases, computer and communication networks is investigated in the context of water conflicts and their resolution.https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/wrrr/1005/thumbnail.jp

The elastic use of 'some': a comparative study between l1 and l2 speakers in educational settings

This study explored some using a refreshing approach: focusing on its elasticity. It was a comparative study of L1 (American) and L2 (Chinese and Vietnamese) speakers and found that L2 speakers are vaguer than L1 speakers, and that the elasticity of some is manifested through the fluid, stretchable and strategic features of some’s pragmatic meanings and functions. The implication is that an understanding of its elastic nature may be integrated into the curriculum of English language teaching

A holistic approach to assessment of value of information (VOI) with fuzzy data and decision criteria.

The research presented in this thesis integrates theories and techniques from statistical analysis and artificial intelligence, to develop a more coherent, robust and complete methodology for assessing the value of acquiring new information in the context of the oil and gas industry. The classical methodology for value of information assessment has been used in the oil and gas industry since the 1960s, even though it is only recently that more applications have been published. It is commonly acknowledged that, due to the large number of data acquisition actions and the capital investment associated with it, the oil and gas industry is an ideal domain for developing and applying value of information assessments. In this research, three main gaps in the classical methodology for value of information are identified and addressed by integrating three existing techniques from other domains. Firstly, the research identifies that the technique design of experiments can be used in value of information for providing a holistic assessment of the complete set of uncertain parameters, selecting the ones that have the most impact on the value of the project and supporting the selection of the data acquisition actions for evaluation. Secondly, the fuzziness of the data is captured through membership functions and the expected utility value of each financial parameter is estimated using the probability of the states conditioned to the membership functions - in the classical methodology, this is conditioned to crisp values of the data. Thirdly, a fuzzy inference system is developed for making the value of information assessment, capturing the decision-making human logic into the assessment process and integrating several financial parameters into one. The proposed methodology is applied to a case study describing a value of information assessment in an oil field, where two alternatives for data acquisition are discussed. The case study shows how the three techniques can be integrated within the previous methodology, resulting in a more complete theory. It is observed that the technique or design of experiments provides a full identification of the input parameters affecting the value of the project, and allows a proper selection of the data acquisition actions. In the case study, it is concluded that, when the fuzziness of the data is included in the assessment, the value of the data decreases in comparison with the case where data are assumed to be crisp. This result means that the decision concerning the value of acquiring new data depends on whether the fuzzy nature of the data is included in the assessment, and on the difference between the project value with and without data acquisition. The fuzzy inference system developed for this case study successfully follows the logic of the decision maker and results in a straightforward system to aggregate decision criteria. Sensitivity analysis of the parameters of two different membership functions is made, reaching consistent results in both cases

NEGOTIATION-BASED RISK MANAGEMENT FOR PPP-BOT INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Reconciliation, Restoration and Reconstruction of a Conflict Ridden Country

Conflict has sadly been a constant part of history. Winning a conflict and making a lasting peace are often not the same thing. While a peace treaty ends a conflict and often dictates terms from the winners’ perspective, it may not create a lasting peace. Short of unconditional surrender, modern conflict ends with a negotiated cessation of hostilities. Such accords may have some initial reconstruction agreements, but Reconciliation, Restoration and Reconstruction (RRR) is a long term process. This study maintains that to achieve a lasting peace: 1) The culture and beliefs of the conflict nation must be continuously considered and 2) RRR is a long term effort which will occur over years not just in the immediate wake of signing a treaty or agreement. To assure the inclusion of all stakeholders and gain the best results in dealing with this “wicked problem”, an array of Operations Research techniques can be used to support the long term planning and execution of a RRR effort. The final decisions will always be political, but the analysis provided by an OR support team will guide the decision makers to better execute consensus decisions that consider all stakeholder needs. The development of the value hierarchy framework in this dissertation is a keystone of building a rational OR supported long term plan for a successful RRR. The primary aim of the research is to propose a framework and associated set of guidelines derived from appropriate techniques of OR, Decision Analysis and Project Management (right from development of a consensus based value hierarchy to its implementation, feedback and steering corrections) that may be applied to help RRR efforts in any conflict ridden country across the globe. The framework is applicable to any conflict ridden country after incorporating changes particular to any country witnessing a prolonged conflict

Uncertainty management for coastal defence systems.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN029923 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

B

Fuzzy expert systems in civil engineering

Imperial Users onl

Supply Chain

Traditionally supply chain management has meant factories, assembly lines, warehouses, transportation vehicles, and time sheets. Modern supply chain management is a highly complex, multidimensional problem set with virtually endless number of variables for optimization. An Internet enabled supply chain may have just-in-time delivery, precise inventory visibility, and up-to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities. Technology advances have enabled supply chains to become strategic weapons that can help avoid disasters, lower costs, and make money. From internal enterprise processes to external business transactions with suppliers, transporters, channels and end-users marks the wide range of challenges researchers have to handle. The aim of this book is at revealing and illustrating this diversity in terms of scientific and theoretical fundamentals, prevailing concepts as well as current practical applications

Paradigm Shift from Vague Legal Contracts to Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts

In this dissertation, we address the problem of vagueness in traditional legal contracts by presenting novel methodologies that aid in the paradigm shift from traditional legal contracts to smart contracts. We discuss key enabling technologies that assist in converting the traditional natural language legal contract, which is full of vague words, phrases, and sentences to the blockchain-based precise smart contract, including metrics evaluation during our conversion experiment. To address the challenge of this contract-transformation process, we propose four novel proof-of-concept approaches that take vagueness and different possible interpretations into significant consideration, where we experiment with popular vendors' existing vague legal contracts. We show through experiments that our proposed methodologies are able to study the degree of vagueness in every interpretation and demonstrate which vendor's translated-smart contract can be more accurate, optimized, and have a lesser degree of vagueness. We also incorporated the method of fuzzy logic inside the blockchain-based smart contract, to successfully model the semantics of linguistic expressions. Our experiments and results show that the smart contract with the higher degrees of truth can be very complex technically but more accurate at the same time. By using fuzzy logic inside a smart contract, it becomes easier to solve the problem of contractual ambiguities as well as expedite the process of claiming compensation when implemented in a blockchain-based smart contract