Unravelling decision making about the future developments of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol

The time that airports were merely infrastructural works for supporting air transportation is no more. Over the years, especially the major airports have developed from airfields into multi-modal transportation nodes and cities of their own. Amsterdam Airport Schiphol is a perfect example of this. The airport has developed into an attractive pool for urban and economic development, known as an AirportCity. Airports like Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, took up their newfound position in the emerging network society and implemented new business strategies to cope with the increasing volatility of future transport volumes. The search for additional finances has lead to further commercialization of the airport and gave rise to Airport-city like concepts. However, this evolving form of airports did not find its way into Dutch national planning policy. An analysis of Dutch national spatial strategies shows an increased interest for Amsterdam Airport Schiphol as being of major importance for the national economy, but the emphasis is still mainly on the airport as an important piece of physical infrastructure. With fierce competition of cities like Barcelona and Dublin in mind, the Amsterdam region needs a strong, widely supported, development strategy to maintain and strengthen its concurrence position. A strategy that acknowledges the new airport day-to-day realities and that goes beyond the narrow definition of the airport as merely infrastructural. Such a widely accepted strategy does not exist at this moment, which causes serious problems if policies are willing to strengthen the role of Schiphol for the national economy in the future. This paper explores the newfound position of airports in the network society. It links this position to an analysis of the processes of policy making to identify reasons why there is currently no strong development strategy for Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (region). A comparison is made between the policy development process in the late 80’s and early 90’s, which did result in a widely accepted development policy for the airport, and the policy development process that currently takes place. Interviews with primary stakeholders and analyses of policy documents shed light on the success factors that made the reach of an agreement possible in the early 90’s as well as the reasons for not being able to reach such agreement today.

A Novel Energy Efficient Adsorption Drying with Zeolite For Food Quality Product: A Case Study in Paddy and Corn Drying

Nowadays, the importance of powdered food products as for example soups, sauces, dried yeasts, and herbal medicine is increasing for consumer convenience. Mostly, these products have been produced with drying process either, direct sunlight, conventional, or modern dryer. The direct sunlight dryer depends on the daily weather extremely both in the product drought and process continuity. Meanwhile,conventional dryer results high energy consumption as well as low product quality due to the introduction of hot air. In addition, modern dryer process can improve the product quality, but the energy efficiency was fair. This paper discusses the design and application of adsorption dryer with zeolite for food. Here, the air as drying medium was dehumidified by zeolite to enhance the driving force. Thus, the drying can be well conducted in low or medium temperature. The dryer was designed in single and multi stage system. Result showed that energy efficiency of single stage dryer was 70 - 72% (10% higher than that of conventional dryer). While in multi stage, the energy efficiency can reach 80% (for two stage) and 90% (for three stage). In corn and paddy drying, the dryer with zeolite can speed up drying time and retain the nutrition and physical quality

Control vector parameterization with sensitivity based refinement applied to baking optimization

In bakery production, product quality attributes as crispness, brownness, crumb and water content are developed by the transformations that occur during baking and which are initiated by heating. A quality driven procedure requires process optimization to improve bakery production and to find operational procedures for new products. Control vector parameterization (CVP) is an effective method for the optimization procedure. However, for accurate optimization with a large number of parameters CVP optimization takes a long computation time. In this work, an improved method for direct dynamic optimization using CVP is presented. The method uses a sensitivity based step size refinement for the selection of control input parameters. The optimization starts with a coarse discretization level for the control input in time. In successive iterations the step size was refined for the parameters for which the performance index has a sensitivity value above a threshold value.With this selection, optimization is continued for a selected group of input parameters while the other nonsensitive parameters (below threshold) are kept constant. Increasing the threshold value lowers the computation time, however the obtained performance index becomes less. A threshold value in the range of 10–20% of the mean sensitivity satisfies well. The method gives a better solution for a lower computation effort than single run optimization with a large number of parameters or refinement procedures without selection