Tunnel stradali - L’analisi costi-benefici come strumento per l’adeguamento

TRA I CRITERI GUIDA NELL’ASSUMERE DECISIONI NELLA GESTIONE DEL RISCHIO, NEI CASI DI ADEGUAMENTO DELLE GALLERIE STRADALI, IL DECRETO LEGISLATIVO 264/2006 INDICA ANCHE L’ANALISI COSTI-BENEFICI. DI SEGUITO UN APPROFONDIMENTO DELLA QUESTIONE SVILUPPATA CONFRONTANDO IL DETTATO NORMATIVO CON LE RECENTI “LINEE GUIDA PER LA VALUTAZIONE DEGLI INVESTIMENTI IN OPERE PUBBLICHE” NEI SETTORI DI COMPETENZA DEL MINISTERO DELLE INFRASTRUTTURE E DEI TRASPORTI DEL 1° GIUGNO 2017

Cross-border critical transportation infrastructure: a multi-level index for resilience assessment

Today, more than ever before, our society depends on interdependent infrastructure systems, such as transportation, energy, water, and telecommunications networks. These systems are often considered critical because they are necessary for the organization, functionality, and stability of a modern industrialized country. However, these infrastructures are vulnerable to accidents, malicious failures, and disruptions that could generate consequences impacting on the economy, health, safety, and welfare of the citizens of a country or of several neighboring countries. The disruption of critical cross-border transportation infrastructure, road or rail, as a result of a major event can affect the area where the event occurs and a wider area. Depending on the type and duration of an event, which can be natural or anthropogenic in origin, it is possible to estimate the impacts on the mobility of people and goods in terms of delays (alternative routes), increased traffic (congestion), and a potential increase in accidents. For instance, in 2019 there was an accident in Rastatt (Germany) that affected rail traffic on the Karlsruhe-Basel line of the Rhine-Alpine corridor in Europe. The rail line was disrupted for more than 50 days, causing disservices and about 2 billion Euro in economic losses in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. The extended disruption of road and rail sections can have consequences (impacts) not only on the transport system but also on the socio-economic system in a macro-regional context. The research is part of the SICt project - Resilience of Critical Cross-Border Infrastructure developed in the Interreg VA Italy-Switzerland Programme 2014-2020. The work aims to define a RI - Resilience Index for the road and rail transport network falling within the study area. The RI index describes the capability of each network element (i-th link) to cope with a relevant event. The formulation of the index involves the calculation of three independent indicators: i) RIRM - Rescue Management related to the resources that can be activated and used to cope with an event; ii) RIPP - Plans & Management related to the speed with which the necessary resources can be activated and in fact, considers management aspects such as the presence of plans and procedures; iii) RIRN - Network & Traffic related to the robustness of the elements of the transport network. This work aims to present the proposed model and its application to the project area that includes the Lombardy Region (Italy) and the Canton Ticino (Switzerland) within the SICt Project

Leakage and spillover effects of forest management on carbon storage: theoretical insights from a simple model.

Leakage (spillover) refers to the unintended negative (positive) consequences of forest carbon (C) management in one area on C storage elsewhere. For example, the local C storage benefit of less intensive harvesting in one area may be offset, partly or completely, by intensified harvesting elsewhere in order to meet global timber demand. We present the results of a theoretical study aimed at identifying the key factors determining leakage and spillover, as a prerequisite for more realistic numerical studies.We use a simple model of C storage in managed forest ecosystems and their wood products to derive approximate analytical expressions for the leakage induced by decreasing the harvesting frequency of existing forest, and the spillover induced by establishing new plantations, assuming a fixed total wood production from local and remote (non-local) forests combined.We find that leakage and spillover depend crucially on the growth rates, wood product lifetimes and woody litter decomposition rates of local and remote forests. In particular, our results reveal critical thresholds for leakage and spillover, beyond which effects of forest management on remote C storage exceed local effects. Order of magnitude estimates of leakage indicate its potential importance at global scales

Improving Knowledge of Risk in Dangerous Goods Transport

In order to increase safety as far as dangerous goods transport is concerned, the DESTINATION project has been developed since 2010 in the framework of the Italy/Switzerland Operational Program for Transfrontier Co-operation 2007-2013. The project was born to satisfy the increasing needs of public bodies to share data on hazardous material land transportation and to develop instruments and methodologies to ensure territorial and environmental protection. The project aims to reach this purpose through the increased knowledge of the vulnerable subjects, people and environment, and of the transport activity itself, by using and defining an architecture of data acquisition based on “On Ground Units” (OGU) and “On Board Units” (OBU). These data will be used as an input for a new information system called GIIS (Global Integrated Information System), which manages a risk analysis model of the land transportation of hazardous materials to assess human and environmental vulnerabilities. The GIIS will provide a more effective management of land planning by providing authorities with the possibility of implementing a rational restriction to vehicles transporting dangerous goods within specific areas

An ADMM approach for day-ahead scheduling of a local energy community

The paper deals with the day-ahead operational planning of a grid-connected local energy community (LEC) consisting of several prosumers each equipped with generating units, loads and battery energy storage units. The prosumers are connected to the same low-voltage distribution network. In order to preserve, as much as possible, the confidentiality of the features and forecast of prosumers' equipment, the problem is addressed by designing a specific distributed procedure based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The distributed procedure provides the scheduling of the batteries to limit the balancing action of the external grid. Results obtained for various case studies are compared with those obtained by a centralized approach. The values of the objective function, the profiles of the power exchanged with the utility grid and the profile of the energy stored in the batteries provided by the distributed approach are in close agreement with those calculated by the centralized one

Preliminary evaluation of infrastructure and mobility services in mega-event: the Italian case study

Mega-events play an important role in the urban agenda of contemporary metropolises. This importance lies in the fact that such events are seen as possible catalysts for the urban development of a metropolis and more generally of a territory, and an opportunity to establish them as global cities. The planning and programming of a mega-event can be a country's showcase on the international landscape, and the mobility sector plays a significant role in defining its success or failure. Transport infrastructure generally requires high resources for both construction and maintenance even after the event. Therefore, in order to ensure a good outcome, it needs to be planned strategically at multiple levels; this condition brings a benefit to both the host city and the community. The main purpose of this study is to analyze a mega event like the Olympic Games by highlighting the relationship between existing mobility solutions and sustainable solutions considering also the surrounding area. This is to enable the creation of new intelligent transportation options. The Olympic Games, in fact, can represent a valuable opportunity to modernize the existing infrastructure of a country by improving the level of service and quality. The study considers, on the one hand, the expected demand for transport during the event and, on the other, the specific features of the different solutions that can be adopted to meet mobility needs

Facing drought in a Mediterranean post-fire community: tissue water relations in species with different life traits.

Bulk shoot water potential, the osmotic component and the bulk modulus of elasticity were measured throughout one growing season in four species co-occurring in a post-fire Mediterranean community in southern Italy: Pinus halepensis, Phillyrea latifolia, Cistus salvifolius and Rosmarinus officinalis. A severe drought occurred throughout the measurement period. Large seasonal fluctuations have been observed for both predawn and afternoon water potential in all species. Although minimum values down to –4 MPa have been measured, plant water potential always recovered to less negative values after drought. Daily amplitude of water potential decreased with increasing plant water stress in all species. In Cistus and Rosmarinus less ability for short-term control of plant water status has been assessed. Osmotic potential at full turgor did not display clear seasonal patterns, with no consistent ranking of species by their osmotic values. In most cases, no osmotic adjustment (lowering of osmotic potentials) and no change in tissue elastic properties were observed in response to increasing summer drought and intensity of water stress

Chance-constrained Calculation of the Reserve Service Provided by EV Charging Station Clusters in Energy Communities

The concept of energy community is currently under investigation as it is considered central into the energy transition process. One of the main aspects of the successful implementation of community lays in the energy management system that coordinates exchanges among prosumers. This paper deals with the optimal energy management of a local energy community of dc microgrids with electric vehicle charging stations, considering local reserve provided by storage units and vehicle batteries. A two-stage optimal procedure is proposed to assess the optimal scheduling of resources for each community participant. Additionally, the optimal up and down reserve levels able to cover random fluctuations in photovoltaic generation within each EV-based microgrid are determined by a set of specific chance constraints

Cross-border Digital Platform for Transport Critical Infrastructure Resilience: Functionalities and Use-case

The resilience of increasingly interdependent Critical Infrastructure (CI) systems hugely depends on the stakeholder organizations’ ability to exchange information and coordinate, while CI’s cross-border dimension further increases the complexity and challenges. This paper presents the progress in the Lombardy Region (Italy) and Canton Ticino (Switzerland) on the joint capacity to manage disruptive events involving transportation CI between the two countries. We present a cross-border digital platform (Critical Infrastructure Platform – PIC) and its main functionalities for improved cross-border risk and resilience management of CI. A use case, based on a scenario of an intense snowfall along the transboundary motorway impacting both countries, demonstrates how PIC advances the exchange of information, its visualization and analysis in real-time. The use case also shows the practical value of the digital platform and its potential to support the management of cross-border events (and their cascading events) that require the cooperation of Italian and Swiss actors

Comparison between Multistage Stochastic Optimization Programming and Monte Carlo Simulations for the Operation of Local Energy Systems

The paper deals with the day-ahead optimization of the operation of a local energy system consisting of photovoltaic units, energy storage systems and loads aimed to minimize the electricity procurement cost. The local energy system may refer either to a small industrial site or to a residential neighborhood. Two mixed integer linear programming models are adopted, each for a different representation of the battery: A simple energy balance constraint and the Kinetic Battery Model. The paper describes the generation of the scenarios, the construction of the scenario tree and the intraday decision-making procedure based on the solution of the multistage stochastic programming. Moreover, the daily energy procurement costs calculated by using the stochastic programming approach are compared with those calculated by using the Monte Carlo method. The comparison is repeated for two different sizes of the battery and for two load profiles