Communicating Maritime Spatial Planning: The MSP Challenge approach

The MSP Challenge uses game technology and role-play to support communication and learning for Marine/Maritime Spatial Planning. Since 2011, a role-playing game, a board game and a digital interactive simulation platform have been developed. The MSP Challenge editions have been used in workshops, conferences, education, as well as for real life stakeholder engagement. The authors give an overview of the development of the MSP Challenge and reflect on the value of the approach as an engaging and ‘fun’ tool for building mutual understanding and communicating MSP

Combining ecosystem modeling with serious gaming in support of transboundary maritime spatial planning

The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge simulation platform helps planners and stakeholders understand and manage the complexity of MSP. In the interactive simulation, different data layers covering an entire sea region can be viewed to make an assessment of the current status. Users can create scenarios for future uses of the marine space over a period of several decades. Changes in energy infrastructure, shipping, and the marine environment are then simulated, and the effects are visualized using indicators and heat maps. The platform is built with advanced game technology and uses aspects of role-play to create interactive sessions; it can thus be referred to as serious gaming. To calculate and visualize the effects of planning decisions on the marine ecology, we integrated the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modeling approach into the platform. We demonstrate how EwE was connected to MSP, considering the range of constraints imposed by running scientific software in interactive serious gaming sessions while still providing cascading ecological feedback in response to planning actions. We explored the connection by adapting two published ecological models for use in MSP sessions. We conclude with lessons learned and identify future developments of the simulation platform

Improved Secure Integer Comparison via Homomorphic Encryption

Secure integer comparison has been one of the first problems introduced in cryptography, both for its simplicity to describe and for its applications. The first formulation of the problem was to enable two parties to compare their inputs without revealing the exact value of those inputs, also called the Millionaires\u27 problem. The recent rise of fully homomorphic encryption has given a new formulation to this problem. In this new setting, one party blindly computes an encryption of the boolean $(a<b)$ given only ciphertexts encrypting $a$ and $b$. In this paper, we present new solutions for the problem of secure integer comparison in both of these settings. The underlying idea for both schemes is to avoid decomposing the integers in binary in order to improve the performances. Our fully homomorphic based solution is inspired by Bourse et al, and makes use of the fast bootstrapping techniques recently developpedto obtain scalability for large integers while preserving high efficiency. On the other hand, our solution to the original Millionaires\u27 problem is inspired by the protocol of Carlton et al, based on partially homomorphic encryption. We tweak their protocol in order to minimize the number of interactions required, while preserving the advantage of comparing non-binary integers. Both our techniques provide efficient solutions to the problem of secure integer comparison for large (even a-priori unbounded in our first scenario) integers with minimum interaction

Metingen aan de Galecopperbrug dd april 2010

Civil Engineering and GeosciencesStructural Engineerin

Metingen aan de Galecopperbrug dd april 2010

Civil Engineering and GeosciencesStructural Engineerin

Rekstrookmetingen Boogbrug Beek: Week 31 2010

Civil Engineering and GeosciencesStructural Engineerin

Safety assessment of existing highway bridges and viaducts

The assessment of the structural safety of existing br idges and viaducts becomes increasingly important in many countries owing to an increase in traffic loads. Most existing standards, however, are developed for the design of new structures. For this reason, an assessment method for determining the actual safety level of highway bridges and viaducts has been developed. The method focuses on the determination of the effect of traffic actions and consists of a number of levels. The first level requires the least work from the engineer but is the most conservative. Each of the next levels is less conservative. Some levels require actual measurements at critical parts of the structure. This paper consists of two parts. The first part explains the basis of the safety assessment me thod and the second part shows the step-by-step application of the method to an existing highway bridge in The Netherlands.Structural EngineeringCivil Engineering and Geoscience