Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2014, nr 4

kwartalni

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2012, nr 1

kwartalni

The synergistic effect of operational research and big data analytics in greening container terminal operations: a review and future directions

Container Terminals (CTs) are continuously presented with highly interrelated, complex, and uncertain planning tasks. The ever-increasing intensity of operations at CTs in recent years has also resulted in increasing environmental concerns, and they are experiencing an unprecedented pressure to lower their emissions. Operational Research (OR), as a key player in the optimisation of the complex decision problems that arise from the quay and land side operations at CTs, has been therefore presented with new challenges and opportunities to incorporate environmental considerations into decision making and better utilise the ‘big data’ that is continuously generated from the never-stopping operations at CTs. The state-of-the-art literature on OR's incorporation of environmental considerations and its interplay with Big Data Analytics (BDA) is, however, still very much underdeveloped, fragmented, and divergent, and a guiding framework is completely missing. This paper presents a review of the most relevant developments in the field and sheds light on promising research opportunities for the better exploitation of the synergistic effect of the two disciplines in addressing CT operational problems, while incorporating uncertainty and environmental concerns efficiently. The paper finds that while OR has thus far contributed to improving the environmental performance of CTs (rather implicitly), this can be much further stepped up with more explicit incorporation of environmental considerations and better exploitation of BDA predictive modelling capabilities. New interdisciplinary research at the intersection of conventional CT optimisation problems, energy management and sizing, and net-zero technology and energy vectors adoption is also presented as a prominent line of future research

Development and analysis of a homogeneous long-term precipitation network (1850-2015) and assessment of historic droughts for the island of Ireland

Long-term precipitation series are critical for understanding emerging changes to the hydrological cycle. Given the paucity of long-term quality assured precipitation records in Ireland this thesis expands the existing catalogue of long-term monthly precipitation records for the Island by recovering and digitising archived data. Following bridging and updating, 25 stations are quality assured and homogenised using state-of-the-art methods and scrutiny of station metadata. Assessment of variability and change in the homogenised and extended precipitation records for the period 1850-2010 reveals positive (winter) and negative (summer) trends. Trends in records covering the typical period of digitisation (1941 onwards) are not always representative of longer records. Using this quality assured network of precipitation stations together with proxy rainfall reconstructions a 250-year historic drought catalogue is established using the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI). Documentary sources, particularly newspaper archives, spanning the last 250 years are used to (i) add confidence to the quantitative detection of drought episodes and (ii) gain insight to the socio-economic impacts of historic droughts. During the years 1850-2015 seven major drought rich periods with an island wide fingerprint are identified in 1854-1860, 1884-1896, 1904-1912, 1921-1924, 1932-1935, 1952-1954 and 1969-1977. These events exhibit substantial diversity in terms of drought development, severity and spatial occurrence. Results show that Ireland is drought prone but recent decades are unrepresentative of the longer-term drought climatology. Finally, long-term homogenous precipitation records are further utilised to reconstruct river flows at twelve study catchments to 1850. Reconstructed flows are analysed to identify periods of hydrological drought and the potential of different SPI accumulations to forecast severe drought are explored. Results demonstrate the importance of catchment characteristics in moderating the effects of meteorological drought and highlight the potential for drought forecasting in groundwater dominated catchments. The body of work presented considerably advances understanding of the long-term hydro-climatology of a sentinel location in Europe and provides datasets and tools for more resilient water management

Development and analysis of a homogeneous long-term precipitation network (1850-2015) and assessment of historic droughts for the island of Ireland

Long-term precipitation series are critical for understanding emerging changes to the hydrological cycle. Given the paucity of long-term quality assured precipitation records in Ireland this thesis expands the existing catalogue of long-term monthly precipitation records for the Island by recovering and digitising archived data. Following bridging and updating, 25 stations are quality assured and homogenised using state-of-the-art methods and scrutiny of station metadata. Assessment of variability and change in the homogenised and extended precipitation records for the period 1850-2010 reveals positive (winter) and negative (summer) trends. Trends in records covering the typical period of digitisation (1941 onwards) are not always representative of longer records. Using this quality assured network of precipitation stations together with proxy rainfall reconstructions a 250-year historic drought catalogue is established using the Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI). Documentary sources, particularly newspaper archives, spanning the last 250 years are used to (i) add confidence to the quantitative detection of drought episodes and (ii) gain insight to the socio-economic impacts of historic droughts. During the years 1850-2015 seven major drought rich periods with an island wide fingerprint are identified in 1854-1860, 1884-1896, 1904-1912, 1921-1924, 1932-1935, 1952-1954 and 1969-1977. These events exhibit substantial diversity in terms of drought development, severity and spatial occurrence. Results show that Ireland is drought prone but recent decades are unrepresentative of the longer-term drought climatology. Finally, long-term homogenous precipitation records are further utilised to reconstruct river flows at twelve study catchments to 1850. Reconstructed flows are analysed to identify periods of hydrological drought and the potential of different SPI accumulations to forecast severe drought are explored. Results demonstrate the importance of catchment characteristics in moderating the effects of meteorological drought and highlight the potential for drought forecasting in groundwater dominated catchments. The body of work presented considerably advances understanding of the long-term hydro-climatology of a sentinel location in Europe and provides datasets and tools for more resilient water management

The Fifth Workshop on HPC Best Practices: File Systems and Archives

The workshop on High Performance Computing (HPC) Best Practices on File Systems and Archives was the fifth in a series sponsored jointly by the Department Of Energy (DOE) Office of Science and DOE National Nuclear Security Administration. The workshop gathered technical and management experts for operations of HPC file systems and archives from around the world. Attendees identified and discussed best practices in use at their facilities, and documented findings for the DOE and HPC community in this report

An investigation into applying ontologies to the UK railway industry

The uptake of ontologies in the Semantic Web and Linked Data has proven their excellence in managing mass data. Referring to the movements of Linked Data, ontologies are applied to large complex systems to facilitate better data management. Some industries, e.g., oil and gas, have at-tempted to use ontologies to manage its internal data structure and man-agement. Researchers have dedicated to designing ontologies for the rail system, and they have discussed the potential benefits thereof. However, despite successful establishment in some industries and effort made from some research, plus the interest from major UK rail operation participants, there has not been evidence showing that rail ontologies are applied to the UK rail system. This thesis will analyse factors that hinder the application of rail ontolo-gies to the UK rail system. Based on concluded factors, the rest of the the-sis will present corresponding solutions. The demonstrations show how ontologies can fit in a particular task with improvements, aiming to pro-vide inspiration and insights for the future research into the application of ontology-based system in the UK rail system

Perceptions of Teams in Providing Safe Handoffs

Background: Pediatric hematology/oncology patients are highly complex and providing care to these patients requires effective communication and coordination. Purpose: This project explored the perceptions of handoffs and transitions of team, at a quaternary pediatric health care system, with a descriptive, cross-sectional, non-experimental survey using convenient sampling. The goal was to identify the three top themes of team member perceptions to drive improvement efforts. Sample: 411 team members were invited to participate in survey; 124 completed the survey, a 29% participation rate. Methodology: The project employed quantitative methodology using quantitative data collection with a Likert-style survey to rank handoff experiences within the service line. Sixteen questions were divided into four domains, information, responsibility, accountability, and teamwork. The survey tool was validated by a 10 member panel of subject-matter experts. The tool exceeded Lawshe’s Content Validity Index (\u3e0.70- 0.80) with the score 0.9375. Two open-ended questions probed barriers to handoffs, and ideal characteristics of handoffs. Data Analysis: Descriptive findings considered role, focus of work, location of work, and years of work. Nonparametric testing in SPSS used Kendall’s tau (τ), Friedman’s (χ²) ANOVA, and Cronbach’s alpha for analysis. Findings: Two strengths were identified: 1. Team members frequently consider risk to patients of harm during transitions and 2. Team members demonstrate a personal accountability to get the information in handoffs. Shared goals and shared plan of care were identified as low performers. Conflict resolution and role understanding emerged as needs from open-ended comments. Recommendation: These findings support three themes for future work to improve handoffs. The data supports developing a shared mental model of how goals and plan of care moves with the patient across the service line, and care continuum, along with clear contact information for clarification needs. Handoffs are not just about the transfer of information, there are many correlating factors that influence this process. Attending to the relationships and the team dynamics will be an important focus of this project