Towards an integrated perspective on fleet asset management: engineering and governance considerations

The traditional engineering perspective on asset management concentrates on the operational performance the assets. This perspective aims at managing assets through their life-cycle, from technical specification, to acquisition, operation including maintenance, and disposal. However, the engineering perspective often takes for granted organizational-level factors. For example, a focus on performance at the asset level may lead to ignore performance measures at the business unit level. The governance perspective on asset management usually concentrates on organizational factors, and measures performance in financial terms. In doing so, the governance perspective tends to ignore the engineering considerations required for optimal asset performance. These two perspectives often take each other for granted. However experience demonstrates that an exclusive focus on one or the other may lead to sub-optimal performance. For example, the two perspectives have different time frames: engineering considers the long term asset life-cycle whereas the organizational time frame is based on a yearly financial calendar. Asset fleets provide a relevant and important context to investigate the interaction between engineering and governance views on asset management as fleets have distributed system characteristics. In this project we investigate how engineering and governance perspectives can be reconciled and integrated to enable optimal asset and organizational performance in the context of asset fleets

Privacy, security, and trust issues in smart environments

Recent advances in networking, handheld computing and sensor technologies have driven forward research towards the realisation of Mark Weiser's dream of calm and ubiquitous computing (variously called pervasive computing, ambient computing, active spaces, the disappearing computer or context-aware computing). In turn, this has led to the emergence of smart environments as one significant facet of research in this domain. A smart environment, or space, is a region of the real world that is extensively equipped with sensors, actuators and computing components [1]. In effect the smart space becomes a part of a larger information system: with all actions within the space potentially affecting the underlying computer applications, which may themselves affect the space through the actuators. Such smart environments have tremendous potential within many application areas to improve the utility of a space. Consider the potential offered by a smart environment that prolongs the time an elderly or infirm person can live an independent life or the potential offered by a smart environment that supports vicarious learning

A dynamic modelling environment for the evaluation of wide area protection systems

This paper introduces the concept of dynamic modelling for wide area and adaptive power system protection. Although not limited to these types of protection schemes, these were chosen due to their potential role in solving a multitude of protection challenges facing future power systems. The dynamic modelling will be implemented using a bespoke simulation environment. This tool allows for a fully integrated testing methodology which enables the validation of protection solutions prior to their operational deployment. Furthermore the paper suggests a distributed protection architecture, which when applied to existing and future protection schemes, has the potential to enhance their functionality and avoid mal-operation given that safety and reliability of power systems are paramount. This architecture also provides a means to better understand the underlying dynamics of the aforementioned protection schemes and will be rigorously validated using the modelling environment

Distributed simulation of city inundation by coupled surface and subsurface porous flow for urban flood decision support system

We present a decision support system for flood early warning and disaster management. It includes the models for data-driven meteorological predictions, for simulation of atmospheric pressure, wind, long sea waves and seiches; a module for optimization of flood barrier gates operation; models for stability assessment of levees and embankments, for simulation of city inundation dynamics and citizens evacuation scenarios. The novelty of this paper is a coupled distributed simulation of surface and subsurface flows that can predict inundation of low-lying inland zones far from the submerged waterfront areas, as observed in St. Petersburg city during the floods. All the models are wrapped as software services in the CLAVIRE platform for urgent computing, which provides workflow management and resource orchestration.Comment: Pre-print submitted to the 2013 International Conference on Computational Scienc

The SECURE collaboration model

The SECURE project has shown how trust can be made computationally tractable while retaining a reasonable connection with human and social notions of trust. SECURE has produced a well-founded theory of trust that has been tested and refined through use in real software such as collaborative spam filtering and electronic purse. The software comprises the SECURE kernel with extensions for policy specification by application developers. It has yet to be applied to large-scale, multi-domain distributed systems taking different application contexts into account. The project has not considered privacy in evidence distribution, a crucial issue for many application domains, including public services such as healthcare and police. The SECURE collaboration model has similarities with the trust domain concept, embodying the interaction set of a principal, but SECURE is primarily concerned with pseudonymous entities rather than domain-structured systems

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Architecture of Environmental Risk Modelling: for a faster and more robust response to natural disasters

Demands on the disaster response capacity of the European Union are likely to increase, as the impacts of disasters continue to grow both in size and frequency. This has resulted in intensive research on issues concerning spatially-explicit information and modelling and their multiple sources of uncertainty. Geospatial support is one of the forms of assistance frequently required by emergency response centres along with hazard forecast and event management assessment. Robust modelling of natural hazards requires dynamic simulations under an array of multiple inputs from different sources. Uncertainty is associated with meteorological forecast and calibration of the model parameters. Software uncertainty also derives from the data transformation models (D-TM) needed for predicting hazard behaviour and its consequences. On the other hand, social contributions have recently been recognized as valuable in raw-data collection and mapping efforts traditionally dominated by professional organizations. Here an architecture overview is proposed for adaptive and robust modelling of natural hazards, following the Semantic Array Programming paradigm to also include the distributed array of social contributors called Citizen Sensor in a semantically-enhanced strategy for D-TM modelling. The modelling architecture proposes a multicriteria approach for assessing the array of potential impacts with qualitative rapid assessment methods based on a Partial Open Loop Feedback Control (POLFC) schema and complementing more traditional and accurate a-posteriori assessment. We discuss the computational aspect of environmental risk modelling using array-based parallel paradigms on High Performance Computing (HPC) platforms, in order for the implications of urgency to be introduced into the systems (Urgent-HPC).Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, 1 text box, presented at the 3rd Conference of Computational Interdisciplinary Sciences (CCIS 2014), Asuncion, Paragua