Multi-level governance of natural resources: tools and processes for water and biodiversity governance in Europe - a European research and training network

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Multi-level processes of integration and disintegration. Proceedings of the Third Green Week Scientific Conference

CONTENTS: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... I; ABOUT THE MACE PROJECT... III; PLENARY PRESENTATION ... 1; Landscape agroecology: Managing interactions between agriculture, nature and socio-economy... 3, Tommy Dalgaard; DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES IN RURAL AREAS ... 13; Patterns of rural development in mountainous areas of the Mediterranean: Between innovation and tradition ... 15, Angela Guarino; Agro ecology: Hypothesis for a sustainable local development?... 22, Silvia Doneddu; The farmers' early retirement scheme as an instrument of structural changes in the rural areas after Poland's accession to the EU ... 29, Michal Dudek; FOOD MARKETS AND AGRICULTURAL MARKETING... 37; G/Local brand challenges in the Austrian agricultural food market ... 39, Bernadette Frech, Ana Azevedo, Hildegard Liebl; Willingness of food industry companies to co-finance collective agricultural marketing actions... 48, Anikó Tóth, Csaba Forgács; MULTIFUNCTIONAL AGRICULTURE ... 57; The role of multifunctional agriculture for rural development in Bulgaria... 59, Violeta Dirimanova; A methodological review of multifunctional agriculture ... 66, Concettina Guarino, Francesco Di Iacovo; A spatially explicit decision-making support tool for integral rural development ... 75, Catherine Pfeifer, Jetse Stoorvogel; AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION AND NETWORKS IN RURAL AREAS... 89; Feasibility and implementation strategies of dairy extension in Ulaanbaatar/Mongolia... 91, Baast Erdenebolor, Volker Hoffmann; The relevance of social networks for the implementation of the LEADER programme in Romania ... 99, Doris Marquardt, Gertrud Buchenrieder, Judith Möllers; Quality assessment problems of agricultural advisory centres' services... 113, Gunta Grinberga; INTEGRATION PROCESSES INTO INTERNATIONAL MARKETS... 125; Competition or market power in the Ukrainian meat supply chain? ... 127, Andriy Matyukha, Oleksandr Perekhozhuk; Integration of the Hungarian cereal market into EU 15 markets ... 138, Attila Jambor; Regional specialisation of agriculture and competitive advantages of East-European countries... 146, Oleksandr Zhemoyda, Stephan J. Goetz; GOVERNANCE AND USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES ... 155; An analysis of biodiversity governance in the Kiskunság National Park according to the GoverNat Framework... 157, Cordula Mertens, Eszter Kelemen, György Pataki; Hierarchical network modelling and multicriteria analysis for agri-environmental measures in Poland ... 168, Jadwiga Ziolkowska; Assessing rural livelihood development strategies combining socioeconomic and spatial methodologies ... 179, K.C. Krishna Bahadur; SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL LAND USE... 189; Linking economic and energy modelling with environmental assessment when modelling the on-farm implementation of Anaerobic Digestion ... 191, Andreas Muskolus, Andrew M. Salter, Philip J. Jones; Phytoremediation of a heavy metal-contaminated agricultural area combined with energy production. Multifunctional use of energy maize, rapeseed and short rotation crops in the Campine (BE)... 200, Nele Witters, Stijn Van Slycken, Erik Meers, Kristin Adriaensen, Linda Meiresonne, Filip Tack, Theo Thewys, Jaco Vangronsveld --

Advances in Methodology and Applications of Decision Support Systems

These Proceedings are composed of a selection of papers of the Workshop on Advances in Methodology and Applications of Decision Support Systems, organized by the System and Decision Sciences (SDS) Program of IIASA and the Japan Institute of Systems Research (JISR). The workshop was held at IIASA on August 20-22, 1990. The Methodology of Decision Analysis (MDA) Project of the SDS Program focuses on a system-analytical approach to decision support and is devoted to developing methodology, software and applications of decision support systems concentrated primarily around interactive systems for data analysis, interpretation and multiobjective decisionmaking, including uncertainty analysis and group decision making situations in both their cooperative and noncooperative aspects. The objectives of the research on decision support systems (DSS) performed in cooperation with the MDA Project are to: compare various approaches to decision support systems; advance theory and methodology of decision support; convert existing theories and methodologies into usable (simple to use, user-friendly and robust) tools that could easily be used in solving real-life problems. A principal characteristic of decision support systems is that they must be tuned to specific decision situations, to complex real-life characteristics of every application. Even if the theory and methodology of decision support is quite advanced, every application might provide impulses for further theoretical and methodological advances. Therefore the principle underlying this project is that theoretical and methodological research should be strongly connected to the implementation and applications of its results to sufficiently complicated, real-life examples. This approach results in obtaining really applicable working tools for decision support. The papers for this Proceedings have been selected according to the above summarized framework of the research activities. Therefore, the papers deal both with theoretical and methodological problems and with real-life applications

Telecommunications Networks

This book guides readers through the basics of rapidly emerging networks to more advanced concepts and future expectations of Telecommunications Networks. It identifies and examines the most pressing research issues in Telecommunications and it contains chapters written by leading researchers, academics and industry professionals. Telecommunications Networks - Current Status and Future Trends covers surveys of recent publications that investigate key areas of interest such as: IMS, eTOM, 3G/4G, optimization problems, modeling, simulation, quality of service, etc. This book, that is suitable for both PhD and master students, is organized into six sections: New Generation Networks, Quality of Services, Sensor Networks, Telecommunications, Traffic Engineering and Routing

Enhancing Job Scheduling of an Atmospheric Intensive Data Application

Nowadays, e-Science applications involve great deal of data to have more accurate analysis. One of its application domains is the Radio Occultation which manages satellite data. Grid Processing Management is a physical infrastructure geographically distributed based on Grid Computing, that is implemented for the overall processing Radio Occultation analysis. After a brief description of algorithms adopted to characterize atmospheric profiles, the paper presents an improvement of job scheduling in order to decrease processing time and optimize resource utilization. Extension of grid computing capacity is implemented by virtual machines in existing physical Grid in order to satisfy temporary job requests. Also scheduling plays an important role in the infrastructure that is handled by a couple of schedulers which are developed to manage data automaticall

EmC-ICDSST 2019: 5th International Conference on Decision Support System Technology - ICDSST 2019 & EURO Mini Conference 2019 on "Decision Support Systems: Main Developments & Future Trends"

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Practical design of optimal wireless metropolitan area networks: model and algorithms for OFDMA networks

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D.This thesis contributes to the study of the planning and optimisation of wireless metropolitan area networks, in particular to the access network design of OFDMAbased systems, where different parameters like base station position, antenna tilt and azimuth need to be configured during the early stages of the network life. A practical view for the solution of this problem is presented by means of the development of a novel design framework and the use of multicriteria optimisation. A further consideration of relaying and cooperative communications in the context of the design of this kind of networks is done, an area little researched. With the emergence of new technologies and services, it is very important to accurately identify the factors that affect the design of the wireless access network and define how to take them into account to achieve optimally performing and cost-efficient networks. The new features and flexibility of OFDMA networks seem particularly suited to the provision of different broadband services to metropolitan areas. However, until now, most existing efforts have been focused on the basic access capability networks. This thesis presents a way to deal with the trade-offs generated during the OFDMA access network design, and presents a service-oriented optimization framework that offers a new perspective for this process with consideration of the technical and economic factors. The introduction of relay stations in wireless metropolitan area networks will bring numerous advantages such as coverage extension and capacity enhancement due to the deployment of new cells and the reduction of distance between transmitter and receiver. However, the network designers will also face new challenges with the use of relay stations, since they involve a new source of interference and a complicated air interface; and this need to be carefully evaluated during the network design process. Contrary to the well known procedure of cellular network design over regular or hexagonal scenarios, the wireless network planning and optimization process aims to deal with the non-uniform characteristics of realistic scenarios, where the existence of hotspots, different channel characteristics for the users, or different service requirements will determine the final design of the wireless network. This thesis is structured in three main blocks covering important gaps in the existing literature in planning (efficient simulation) and optimisation. The formulation and ideas proposed in the former case can still be evaluated over regular scenarios, for the sake of simplicity, while the study of latter case needs to be done over specific scenarios that will be described when appropriate. Nevertheless, comments and conclusions are extrapolated to more general cases throughout this work. After an introduction and a description of the related work, this thesis first focuses on the study of models and algorithms for classical point-to-multipoint networks on Chapter 3, where the optimisation framework is proposed. Based on the framework, this work: - Identifies the technology-specific physical factors that affect most importantly the network system level simulation, planning and optimization process. - It demonstrates how to simplify the problem and translate it into a formal optimization routine with consideration of economic factors. - It provides the network provider, a detailed and clear description of different scenarios during the design process so that the most suitable solution can be found. Existing works on this area do not provide such a comprehensive framework. In Chapter 4: - The impact of the relay configuration on the network planning process is analysed. - A new simple and flexible scheme to integrate multihop communications in the Mobile WiMAX frame structure is proposed and evaluated. - Efficient capacity calculations that allow intensive system level simulations in a multihop environment are introduced. In Chapter 5: - An analysis of the optimisation procedure with the addition of relay stations and the derived higher complexity of the process is done. - A frequency plan procedure not found in the existing literature is proposed, which combines it with the use of the necessary frame fragmentation of in-band relay communications and cooperative procedures. - A novel joint two-step process for network planning and optimisation is proposed. Finally, conclusions and open issues are exposed

Efficient access of mobile flows to heterogeneous networks under flash crowds

Future wireless networks need to offer orders of magnitude more capacity to address the predicted growth in mobile traffic demand. Operators to enhance the capacity of cellular networks are increasingly using WiFi to offload traffic from their core networks. This paper deals with the efficient and flexible management of a heterogeneous networking environment offering wireless access to multimode terminals. This wireless access is evaluated under disruptive usage scenarios, such as flash crowds, which can mean unwanted severe congestion on a specific operator network whilst the remaining available capacity from other access technologies is not being used. To address these issues, we propose a scalable network assisted distributed solution that is administered by centralized policies, and an embedded reputation system, by which initially selfish operators are encouraged to cooperate under the threat of churn. Our solution after detecting a congested technology, including within its wired backhaul, automatically offloads and balances the flows amongst the access resources from all the existing technologies, following some quality metrics. Our results show that the smart integration of access networks can yield an additional wireless quality for mobile flows up to thirty eight percent beyond that feasible from the best effort standalone operation of each wireless access technology. It is also evidenced that backhaul constraints are conveniently reflected on the way the flow access to wireless media is granted. Finally, we have analyzed the sensitivity of the handover decision algorithm running in each terminal agent to consecutive flash crowds, as well as its centralized feature that controls the connection quality offered by a heterogeneous access infrastructure owned by distinct operators