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

Multiobjective Problems of Mathematical Programming; Proceedings of an International Conference, Yalta, USSR, October 26 - November 2, 1988

IIASA's approach to research in Multiple Objective Decision Support, Multiple Criteria Optimization (MCO) and related topics assumes a high level of synergy between three main components: methodological and theoretical backgrounds, computer implementation and decision support systems and real life applications. This synergy is reflected in the subjects of papers presented at the Conference as well as in the structure of the Proceedings which is divided into three main sections. In the first section, "Theory and Methodology of Multiple Criteria Optimization," 21 papers discussing new theoretical developments in MCO are presented. The second section, "Applications of Multiple Criteria Optimization, " contains nine papers dealing with real-life applications of MCO. Five papers on the application of MCO in the development of Decision Support Systems are included in the final section, "Multiple Criteria Decision Support." Among the important outcomes of this Conference were conclusions regarding further directions of research for Multiple Criteria Optimization, in particular, in the context of cooperation between scientists from Eastern and Western countries

Uncertainty management for coastal defence systems.

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

Public Systems Modeling

This is an open access book discusses readers to various methods of modeling plans and policies that address public sector issues and problems. Written for public policy and social sciences students at the upper undergraduate and graduate level, as well as public sector decision-makers, it demonstrates and compares the development and use of various deterministic and probabilistic optimization and simulation modeling methods for analyzing planning and management issues. These modeling tools offer a means of identifying and evaluating alternative plans and policies based on their physical, economic, environmental, and social impacts. Learning how to develop and use the mathematical modeling tools introduced in this book will give students useful skills when in positions of having to make informed public policy recommendations or decisions

Interactive optimization for supporting multicriteria decisions in urban and energy system planning

Climate change and growing urban populations are increasingly putting pressure on cities to reduce their carbon emissions and transition towards efficient and renewable energy systems. This challenges in particular urban planners, who are expected to integrate technical energy aspects and balance them with the conflicting and often elusive needs of other urban actors. This thesis explores how multicriteria decision analysis, and in particular multiobjective optimization techniques, can support this task. While multiobjective optimization is particularly suited for generating efficient and original alternatives, it presents two shortcomings when targeted at large, intractable problems. First, the problem size prevents a complete identification of all solutions. Second, the preferences required to narrow the problem size are difficult to know and formulate precisely before seeing the possible alternatives. Interactive optimization addresses both of these gaps by involving the human decision-maker in the calculation process, incorporating their preferences at the same time as the generated alternatives enrich their understanding of acceptable tradeoffs and important criteria. For interactive optimization methods to be adopted in practice, computational frameworks are required, which can handle and visualize many objectives simultaneously, provide optimal solutions quickly and representatively, all while remaining simple and intuitive to use and understand by practitioners. Accordingly, the main objective of this thesis is: To develop a decision support methodology which enables the integration of energy issues in the early stages of urban planning. The proposed response and main contribution is SAGESSE (Systematic Analysis, Generation, Exploration, Steering and Synthesis Experience), an interactive multiobjective optimization decision support methodology, which addresses the practical and technical shortcomings above. Its innovative aspect resides in the combination of (i) parallel coordinates as a means to simultaneously explore and steer the alternative-generation process, (ii) a quasi-random sampling technique to efficiently explore the solution space in areas specified by the decision maker, and (iii) the integration of multiattribute decision analysis, cluster analysis and linked data visualization techniques to facilitate the interpretation of the Pareto front in real-time. Developed in collaboration with urban and energy planning practitioners, the methodology was applied to two Swiss urban planning case-studies: one greenfield project, in which all buildings and energy technologies are conceived ex nihilo, and one brownfield project, in which an existing urban neighborhood is redeveloped. These applications led to the progressive development of computational methods based on mathematical programming and data modeling (in the context of another thesis) which, applied with SAGESSE, form the planning support system URBio. Results indicate that the methodology is effective in exploring hundreds of plans and revealing tradeoffs and synergies between multiple objectives. The concrete outcomes of the calculations provide inputs for specifying political targets and deriving urban master plans

Processes of International Negotiations

Negotiations are essential mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of disputes and for maintaining stability in international relations. Negotiations can and should contribute to predictability, equity, and security among states. In achieving these goals, negotiations become important confidence-building measures. The increasing role of negotiations and of international organizations for managing the system of international order and for pursuing/achieving states' interests/policies through peaceful means has produced a fundamental evolution in the agenda, functions, and intensity of international negotiations. In the view of both researchers and negotiators over the recent past, the negotiations process that is organized along traditional lines is becoming more complex, difficult, and less effective. The processes of negotiations are in general taking more and more time and lagging behind the evolution of the international environment. Not only are the issues themselves more complex, but also, in the implementation of any agreements reached, the resolution of the issues involved will need to take place over a longer time and therefore to be managed jointly or multilaterally. Because of the increasing complexity of issues and the fast pace of changes affecting both national and international interests, it has become essential for international agreements to contain sufficient flexibility in certain of their provisions to permit dealing with uncertainty and the needs of the parties to adapt to new and changing circumstances. In this sense, international negotiations and agreements must be not only reactive but also anticipatory. These considerations indicate that a much-needed approach is one which is concerned specifically with bringing about a multinational, multicultural, and multidisciplinary understanding of and perspective on international negotiations and which also bridges the gap between practitioners and researchers. A specific objective and unique aspect of the IIASA Project on the Processes of International Negotiations (PIN Project), which started in April 1986 and was funded by the Carnegie Corporation, is the international, multidisciplinary approach brought to bear on all of the Project's activities. This was especially evident at the IIASA Conference on the Processes of International Negotiations, held in May 1987. The PIN networks in IIASA's member countries played an essential role in this Conference. To keep the focus of the work on substantive issues and on relevant applications-oriented results, while taking into account the importance and impact of different cultural and political systems in the various national approaches to negotiations, both practitioners and researchers involved in the processes of negotiations made presentations at the PIN Conference and took part in the panel discussions. These presentations form the basis for the chapters of this book. The goals of the Conference were to foster increased communication and understanding between practitioners and researchers and among various research disciplines, to present and discuss research results, and to identify possible future research activities. The participation and interaction of both high-level negotiations practitioners and researchers were considered especially valuable and unique aspects of the Conference. All of the subjects dealt with at the Conference have direct and obvious relevance to improving negotiations outcomes on, and the ability to deal effectively with, such issues as the transboundary effects (environmental, economic, etc.) of technological risk, security and confidence-building measures, and international economic cooperation -- all of which are high on the negotiations agenda of many countries

Parameter Sensitivity Measures for Single Objective, Multi-Objective, and Feasibility Robust Design Optimization

Uncontrollable variations are unavoidable in engineering design. If ignored, such variations can seriously deteriorate performance of an optimum design. Robust optimization is an approach that optimizes performance of a design and at the same time reduces its sensitivity to variations. The literature reports on numerous robust optimization techniques. In general, these techniques have three main shortcomings: (i) they presume probability distributions for parameter variations, which might be invalid, (ii) they limit parameter variations to a small (linear) range, and (iii) they use gradient information of objective/constraint functions. These shortcomings severely restrict applications of the techniques reported in the literature. The objective of this dissertation is to present a robust optimization method that addresses all of the above-mentioned shortcomings. In addition to being efficient, the robust optimization method of this dissertation is applicable to both single and multi-objective optimization problems. There are two steps in our robust optimization method. In the first step, the method measures robustness for a design alternative. The robustness measure is developed based on a concept that associated with each design alternative there is a sensitivity region in parameter variation space that determines how much variation a design alternative can absorb. The larger the size of this region, the more robust the design. The size of the sensitivity region is estimated by a hyper-sphere, using a worst-case approach. The radius of this hyper-sphere is obtained by solving an inner optimization problem. By comparing this radius to an actual range of parameter variations, it is determined whether or not a design alternative is robust. This comparison is added, in the second step, as an additional constraint to the original optimization problem. An optimization technique is then used to solve this problem and find a robust optimum design solution. As a demonstration, the robust optimization method is applied to numerous numerical and engineering examples. The results obtained are numerically analyzed and compared to nominal optimum designs, and to optimum designs obtained by a few well-known methods from the literature. The comparison study verifies that the solutions obtained by our method are indeed robust, and that the method is efficient