Homogenization via formal multiscale asymptotics and volume averaging: How do the two techniques compare?

A wide variety of techniques have been developed to homogenize transport equations in multiscale and multiphase systems. This has yielded a rich and diverse field, but has also resulted in the emergence of isolated scientific communities and disconnected bodies of literature. Here, our goal is to bridge the gap between formal multiscale asymptotics and the volume averaging theory. We illustrate the methodologies via a simple example application describing a parabolic transport problem and, in so doing, compare their respective advantages/disadvantages from a practical point of view. This paper is also intended as a pedagogical guide and may be viewed as a tutorial for graduate students as we provide historical context, detail subtle points with great care, and reference many fundamental works

Homogenization via formal multiscale asymptotics and volume averaging: How do the two techniques compare?

A wide variety of techniques have been developed to homogenize transport equations in multiscale and multiphase systems. This has yielded a rich and diverse field, but has also resulted in the emergence of isolated scientific communities and disconnected bodies of literature. Here, our goal is to bridge the gap between formal multiscale asymptotics and the volume averaging theory. We illustrate the methodologies via a simple example application describing a parabolic transport problem and, in so doing, compare their respective advantages/disadvantages from a practical point of view. This paper is also intended as a pedagogical guide and may be viewed as a tutorial for graduate students as we provide historical context, detail subtle points with great care, and reference many fundamental works

Influence Analysis in Consensus Search - A Multi Criteria Group Decision Making Approach in Environmental Management

The environmental decision problems often are divisive, even in a technical realm, decision makers with strong personalities influence outcomes. The purpose of this study is to define and quantify the factors that affect the conservation objectives of a national natural park located in Colombia, South America adding the judgments of six decision makers with different knowledge (every decision maker is also a stakeholder representative). This paper uses a hybrid multiple criteria group decision making model (MCDM), combining the social network analysis (SNA), analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and similarity measures to solve the consensus and anchoring problem among environmental decision makers. The SNA technique is used to build an influential network relation map among decision makers and to obtain their weights for applying a weighted analytic hierarchy process. Then, the final decision matrices for every decision maker are compared between them in order to identify the consensus level of the problem.Romero Gelvez, JI.; García Melón, M. (2016). Influence Analysis in Consensus Search - A Multi Criteria Group Decision Making Approach in Environmental Management. International Journal of Information Technology and Decision Making. 15(4):791-813. doi:10.1142/S0219622016400034S791813154Regan, H. M., Colyvan, M., & Markovchick-Nicholls, L. (2006). A formal model for consensus and negotiation in environmental management. Journal of Environmental Management, 80(2), 167-176. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2005.09.004Reed, M. S. (2008). Stakeholder participation for environmental management: A literature review. Biological Conservation, 141(10), 2417-2431. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2008.07.014Gomez-Navarro, T., & Garcia-Melon, M. (2011). DESIGN OF AN EFFICIENCY INDEX FOR THE RANK ORDER OF SOIL REMEDIATION TECHNIQUES. Environmental Engineering and Management Journal, 10(5), 603-613. doi:10.30638/eemj.2011.083Aragonés-Beltrán, P., García-Melón, M., & Estruch-Guitart, V. (2015). ANALYSIS OF THE PARTICIPATION OF STAKEHOLDERS IN ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT BASED ON ANP: APPLICATION TO A SPANISH NATURAL PARK. International Journal of the Analytic Hierarchy Process, 7(1). doi:10.13033/ijahp.v7i1.276Belton, V., & Stewart, T. J. (2002). Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis. doi:10.1007/978-1-4615-1495-4Ginevičius, R., & Podvezko, V. (2009). EVALUATING THE CHANGES IN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF LITHUANIAN COUNTIES BY MULTIPLE CRITERIA METHODS. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 15(3), 418-436. doi:10.3846/1392-8619.2009.15.418-436Ramzan, N., Degenkolbe, S., & Witt, W. (2008). Evaluating and improving environmental performance of HC’s recovery system: A case study of distillation unit. Chemical Engineering Journal, 140(1-3), 201-213. doi:10.1016/j.cej.2007.09.042Sólnes, J. (2003). Environmental quality indexing of large industrial development alternatives using AHP. Environmental Impact Assessment Review, 23(3), 283-303. doi:10.1016/s0195-9255(03)00004-0Beccali, M., Cellura, M., & Mistretta, M. (2003). Decision-making in energy planning. Application of the Electre method at regional level for the diffusion of renewable energy technology. Renewable Energy, 28(13), 2063-2087. doi:10.1016/s0960-1481(03)00102-2Varvasovszky, Z. (2000). A stakeholder analysis. Health Policy and Planning, 15(3), 338-345. doi:10.1093/heapol/15.3.338Prell, C., Hubacek, K., & Reed, M. (2009). Stakeholder Analysis and Social Network Analysis in Natural Resource Management. Society & Natural Resources, 22(6), 501-518. doi:10.1080/08941920802199202Charnley, S., & Engelbert, B. (2005). Evaluating public participation in environmental decision-making: EPA’s superfund community involvement program. Journal of Environmental Management, 77(3), 165-182. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2005.04.002Reed, M. S., Graves, A., Dandy, N., Posthumus, H., Hubacek, K., Morris, J., … Stringer, L. C. (2009). Who’s in and why? A typology of stakeholder analysis methods for natural resource management. Journal of Environmental Management, 90(5), 1933-1949. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2009.01.001Bonner, B. L., & Bolinger, A. R. (2013). Separating the confident from the correct: Leveraging member knowledge in groups to improve decision making and performance. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 122(2), 214-221. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.07.005Kirchler, E., & Davis, J. H. (1986). The influence of member status differences and task type on group consensus and member position change. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(1), 83-91. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.1.83Sniezek, J. A., & Henry, R. A. (1989). Accuracy and confidence in group judgment. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 43(1), 1-28. doi:10.1016/0749-5978(89)90055-1Bonner, B. L., Sillito, S. D., & Baumann, M. R. (2007). Collective estimation: Accuracy, expertise, and extroversion as sources of intra-group influence. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103(1), 121-133. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2006.05.001Burgman, M. (2005). Risks and Decisions for Conservation and Environmental Management. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511614279Mitchell, R. K., Agle, B. R., & Wood, D. J. (1997). Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and What Really Counts. Academy of Management Review, 22(4), 853-886. doi:10.5465/amr.1997.9711022105Bryson, J. M. (2004). What to do when Stakeholders matter. Public Management Review, 6(1), 21-53. doi:10.1080/14719030410001675722Biggs, S., & Matsaert, H. (1999). An actor-oriented approach for strengthening research and development capabilities in natural resource systems. Public Administration and Development, 19(3), 231-262. doi:10.1002/(sici)1099-162x(199908)19:33.0.co;2-eWu, J., & Chiclana, F. (2014). A social network analysis trust–consensus based approach to group decision-making problems with interval-valued fuzzy reciprocal preference relations. Knowledge-Based Systems, 59, 97-107. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2014.01.017Sabidussi, G. (1966). The centrality index of a graph. Psychometrika, 31(4), 581-603. doi:10.1007/bf02289527Chiclana, F., Tapia García, J. M., del Moral, M. J., & Herrera-Viedma, E. (2013). A statistical comparative study of different similarity measures of consensus in group decision making. Information Sciences, 221, 110-123. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2012.09.014Wu, J., Chiclana, F., & Herrera-Viedma, E. (2015). Trust based consensus model for social network in an incomplete linguistic information context. Applied Soft Computing, 35, 827-839. doi:10.1016/j.asoc.2015.02.023Xu, J., & Wu, Z. (2011). A discrete consensus support model for multiple attribute group decision making. Knowledge-Based Systems, 24(8), 1196-1202. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2011.05.007Herrera, F., Herrera-Viedma, E., & Verdegay, J. . (1998). Choice processes for non-homogeneous group decision making in linguistic setting. Fuzzy Sets and Systems, 94(3), 287-308. doi:10.1016/s0165-0114(96)00251-5Chiclana, F., Herrera-Viedma, E., Herrera, F., & Alonso, S. (2007). Some induced ordered weighted averaging operators and their use for solving group decision-making problems based on fuzzy preference relations. European Journal of Operational Research, 182(1), 383-399. doi:10.1016/j.ejor.2006.08.032Xu, Z. (2000). On consistency of the weighted geometric mean complex judgement matrix in AHP. European Journal of Operational Research, 126(3), 683-687. doi:10.1016/s0377-2217(99)00082-xRosso, M., Bottero, M., Pomarico, S., La Ferlita, S., & Comino, E. (2014). Integrating multicriteria evaluation and stakeholders analysis for assessing hydropower projects. Energy Policy, 67, 870-881. doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2013.12.00

Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for Information Fusion (Collected Works), Vol. 4

The fourth volume on Advances and Applications of Dezert-Smarandache Theory (DSmT) for information fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics. The contributions (see List of Articles published in this book, at the end of the volume) have been published or presented after disseminating the third volume (2009, http://fs.unm.edu/DSmT-book3.pdf) in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals. First Part of this book presents the theoretical advancement of DSmT, dealing with Belief functions, conditioning and deconditioning, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Decision Making, Multi-Criteria, evidence theory, combination rule, evidence distance, conflicting belief, sources of evidences with different importance and reliabilities, importance of sources, pignistic probability transformation, Qualitative reasoning under uncertainty, Imprecise belief structures, 2-Tuple linguistic label, Electre Tri Method, hierarchical proportional redistribution, basic belief assignment, subjective probability measure, Smarandache codification, neutrosophic logic, Evidence theory, outranking methods, Dempster-Shafer Theory, Bayes fusion rule, frequentist probability, mean square error, controlling factor, optimal assignment solution, data association, Transferable Belief Model, and others. More applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the third book of DSmT 2009. Subsequently, the second part of this volume is about applications of DSmT in correlation with Electronic Support Measures, belief function, sensor networks, Ground Moving Target and Multiple target tracking, Vehicle-Born Improvised Explosive Device, Belief Interacting Multiple Model filter, seismic and acoustic sensor, Support Vector Machines, Alarm classification, ability of human visual system, Uncertainty Representation and Reasoning Evaluation Framework, Threat Assessment, Handwritten Signature Verification, Automatic Aircraft Recognition, Dynamic Data-Driven Application System, adjustment of secure communication trust analysis, and so on. Finally, the third part presents a List of References related with DSmT published or presented along the years since its inception in 2004, chronologically ordered

Data-Driven Key Performance Indicators and Datasets for Building Energy Flexibility: A Review and Perspectives

Energy flexibility, through short-term demand-side management (DSM) and energy storage technologies, is now seen as a major key to balancing the fluctuating supply in different energy grids with the energy demand of buildings. This is especially important when considering the intermittent nature of ever-growing renewable energy production, as well as the increasing dynamics of electricity demand in buildings. This paper provides a holistic review of (1) data-driven energy flexibility key performance indicators (KPIs) for buildings in the operational phase and (2) open datasets that can be used for testing energy flexibility KPIs. The review identifies a total of 81 data-driven KPIs from 91 recent publications. These KPIs were categorized and analyzed according to their type, complexity, scope, key stakeholders, data requirement, baseline requirement, resolution, and popularity. Moreover, 330 building datasets were collected and evaluated. Of those, 16 were deemed adequate to feature building performing demand response or building-to-grid (B2G) services. The DSM strategy, building scope, grid type, control strategy, needed data features, and usability of these selected 16 datasets were analyzed. This review reveals future opportunities to address limitations in the existing literature: (1) developing new data-driven methodologies to specifically evaluate different energy flexibility strategies and B2G services of existing buildings; (2) developing baseline-free KPIs that could be calculated from easily accessible building sensors and meter data; (3) devoting non-engineering efforts to promote building energy flexibility, such as designing utility programs, standardizing energy flexibility quantification and verification processes; and (4) curating datasets with proper description for energy flexibility assessments.Comment: 30 pages, 14 figures, 4 table

Collected Papers (on Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Health Issues, Decision Making, Economics, Statistics), Volume XI

This eleventh volume of Collected Papers includes 90 papers comprising 988 pages on Physics, Artificial Intelligence, Health Issues, Decision Making, Economics, Statistics, written between 2001-2022 by the author alone or in collaboration with the following 84 co-authors (alphabetically ordered) from 19 countries: Abhijit Saha, Abu Sufian, Jack Allen, Shahbaz Ali, Ali Safaa Sadiq, Aliya Fahmi, Atiqa Fakhar, Atiqa Firdous, Sukanto Bhattacharya, Robert N. Boyd, Victor Chang, Victor Christianto, V. Christy, Dao The Son, Debjit Dutta, Azeddine Elhassouny, Fazal Ghani, Fazli Amin, Anirudha Ghosha, Nasruddin Hassan, Hoang Viet Long, Jhulaneswar Baidya, Jin Kim, Jun Ye, Darjan Karabašević, Vasilios N. Katsikis, Ieva Meidutė-Kavaliauskienė, F. Kaymarm, Nour Eldeen M. Khalifa, Madad Khan, Qaisar Khan, M. Khoshnevisan, Kifayat Ullah,, Volodymyr Krasnoholovets, Mukesh Kumar, Le Hoang Son, Luong Thi Hong Lan, Tahir Mahmood, Mahmoud Ismail, Mohamed Abdel-Basset, Siti Nurul Fitriah Mohamad, Mohamed Loey, Mai Mohamed, K. Mohana, Kalyan Mondal, Muhammad Gulfam, Muhammad Khalid Mahmood, Muhammad Jamil, Muhammad Yaqub Khan, Muhammad Riaz, Nguyen Dinh Hoa, Cu Nguyen Giap, Nguyen Tho Thong, Peide Liu, Pham Huy Thong, Gabrijela Popović‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬, Surapati Pramanik, Dmitri Rabounski, Roslan Hasni, Rumi Roy, Tapan Kumar Roy, Said Broumi, Saleem Abdullah, Muzafer Saračević, Ganeshsree Selvachandran, Shariful Alam, Shyamal Dalapati, Housila P. Singh, R. Singh, Rajesh Singh, Predrag S. Stanimirović, Kasan Susilo, Dragiša Stanujkić, Alexandra Şandru, Ovidiu Ilie Şandru, Zenonas Turskis, Yunita Umniyati, Alptekin Ulutaș, Maikel Yelandi Leyva Vázquez, Binyamin Yusoff, Edmundas Kazimieras Zavadskas, Zhao Loon Wang.‬‬‬

Federal Register

Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii

Trust Establishment Mechanisms for Distributed Service Environments

The aim and motivation of this dissertation can be best described in one of the most important application fields, the cloud computing. It has changed entire business model of service-oriented computing environments in the last decade. Cloud computing enables information technology related services in a more dynamic and scalable way than before – more cost-effective than before due to the economy of scale and of sharing resources. These opportunities are too attractive for consumers to ignore in today’s highly competitive service environments. The way to realise these opportunities, however, is not free of obstacles. Services offered in cloud computing environments are often composed of multiple service components, which are hosted in distributed systems across the globe and managed by multiple parties. Potential consumers often feel that they lose the control over their data, due to the lack of transparent service specification and unclear security assurances in such environments. These issues encountered by the consumers boiled down to an unwillingness to depend on the service providers regarding the services they offer in the marketplaces. Therefore, consumers have to be put in a position where they can reliably assess the dependability of a service provider. At the same time, service providers have to be able to truthfully present the service-specific security capabilities. If both of these objectives can be achieved, consumers have a basis to make well-founded decisions about whether or not to depend on a particular service provider out of many alternatives. In this thesis, computational trust mechanisms are leveraged to assess the capabilities and evaluate the dependability of service providers. These mechanisms, in the end, potentially support consumers to establish trust on service providers in distributed service environments, e.g., cloud computing. In such environments, acceptable quality of the services can be maintained if the providers possess required capabilities regarding different service-specific attributes, e.g., security, performance, compliance. As services in these environments are often composed of multiple services, subsystems and components, evaluating trustworthiness of the service providers based on the service-specific attributes is non-trivial. In this vein, novel mechanisms are proposed for assessing and evaluating the trustworthiness of service providers considering the trustworthiness of composite services. The scientific contributions towards those novel mechanisms are summarised as follows: • Firstly, we introduce a list of service-specific attributes, QoS+ [HRM10, HHRM12], based on a systematic and comprehensive analysis of existing literatures in the field of cloud computing security and trust. • Secondly, a formal framework [SVRH11, RHMV11a, RHMV11b] is proposed to analyse the composite services along with their required service-specific attributes considering consumer requirements and represent them in simplified meaningful terms, i.e., Propositional Logic Terms (PLTs). • Thirdly, a novel trust evaluation framework CertainLogic [RHMV11a, RHMV11b, HRHM12a, HRHM12b] is proposed to evaluate the PLTs, i.e., capabilities of service providers. The framework provides computational operators to evaluate the PLTs, considering that uncertain and conflicting information are associated with each of the PLTs and those information can be derived from multiple sources. • Finally, harnessing these technical building blocks we present a novel trust management architecture [HRM11] for cloud computing marketplaces. The architecture is designed to support consumers in assessing and evaluating the trustworthiness of service providers based on the published information about their services. The novel contributions of this thesis are evaluated using proof-of-concept-system, prototype implementations and formal proofs. The proof-of-concept-system [HRMV13, HVM13a, HVM13b] is a realisation of the proposed architecture for trust management in cloud marketplaces. The realisation of the system is implemented based on a self-assessment framework, proposed by the Cloud Security Alliance, where the formal framework and computational operators of CertainLogic are applied. The realisation of the system enables consumers to evaluate the trustworthiness of service providers based on their published datasets in the CSA STAR. A number of experiments are conducted in different cloud computing scenarios leveraging the datasets in order to demonstrate the technical feasibility of the contributions made in this thesis. Additionally, the prototype implementations of CertainLogic framework provide means to demonstrate the characteristics of the computational operators by means of various examples. The formal framework as well as computational operators of CertainLogic are validated against desirable mathematical properties, which are supported by formal algebraic proofs

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers