Proposal for a Performance Dashboard for the Monitoringof Water and Sewage Service Companies (WaSCs)

The water and sewage industry provides an essential service to the community, but it is characterized by natural monopoly tendencies of service suppliers. In this framework, it is very important to assist regulators with a small set of critical indicators (performance dashboard) for the evaluation and monitoring of the service provided by Water and Sewage Companies (WaSCs). The paper originates from the analysis of situation of Piemonte (Italy), where each regional and local body adopts a proprietary Performance Measurement System (PMS). In order to improve the coordination of information flow and to support the definition of common service standards, a methodology to merge existing PMSs and define a unique shared reference system is proposed. The Kaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is adopted as the reference model of this approach. BSC is widely recognized to be an exhaustive and balanced framework in describing the performances of an organization and ensures that all the operational aspects of WaSCs are adequately monitored. The output of the proposed procedure is a general performance dashboard for the monitoring of WaSCs. The dashboard is shown and some remarks about indicators properties are developed. In particular, this analysis highlights some common pitfalls originated by a ‘rushed' aggregation of several performance indicators. Description is supported by several example

Publication and patent analysis of European researchers in the field of production technology and manufacturing systems

This paper develops a structured comparison among a sample of European researchers in the field of Production Technology and Manufacturing Systems, on the basis of scientific publications and patents. Researchers are evaluated and compared by a variegated set of indicators concerning (1) the output of individual researchers and (2) that of groups of researchers from the same country. While not claiming to be exhaustive, the results of this preliminary study provide a rough indication of the publishing and patenting activity of researchers in the field of interest, identifying (dis)similarities between different countries. Of particular interest is a proposal for aggregating analysis results by means of maps based on publication and patent indicators. A large amount of empirical data are presented and discusse

A Joint Evaluation Methodology for Service Quality and User Privacy in Location Based Systems

Pervasive and ubiquitous applications provide novel and exciting services leveraging on a multitude of data obtained from people's devices, adapting the computation to the context in which the user currently is. This improves the service quality of these applications, which can provide a more tailored configuration of the application itself depending on the user context and needs. In these scenarios privacy is of paramount importance, since users must be also be protected against the misuse of their personal data. Analyzing ubiquitous systems in terms of service quality and privacy issues is however a challenging task, due to the heterogeneity of the possible attacks, which makes it difficult to compare two applications. In this paper we propose a novel methodology to jointly evaluate the service quality and the privacy issues in ubiquitous applications in an extensible and comparable way, building on the data available in each part of the system to be analyzed, and defining service qualities and privacy issues so that they can be easily re-used in other analyses. Our evaluation on a candidate application highlights the benefits of our proposal, showing the dependency between privacy levels and service quality, and paving the way for a novel methodology for the definition of these scenarios

Duality for a boundary driven asymmetric model of energy transport

We study the asymmetric brownian energy, a model of heat conduction defined on the one-dimensional finite lattice with open boundaries. The system is shown to be dual to the symmetric inclusion process with absorbing boundaries. The proof relies on a non-local map transformation procedure relating the model to its symmetric version. As an application, we show how the duality relation can be used to analytically compute suitable exponential moments with respect to the stationary measure

Extragalactic Source Counts and Contributions to the Anisotropies of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Predictions for the Planck Surveyor mission

We present predictions for the counts of extragalactic sources, the contributions to fluctuations and their spatial power spectrum in each channel foreseen for the Planck Surveyor (formerly COBRAS/SAMBA) mission. The contribution to fluctuations due to clustering of both radio and far--IR sources is found to be generally small in comparison with the Poisson term; however the relative importance of the clustering contribution increases and may eventually become dominant if sources are identified and subtracted down to faint flux limits. The central Planck frequency bands are expected to be ``clean'': at high galactic latitude (|b|>20), where the reduced galactic noise does not prevent the detection of the extragalactic signal, only a tiny fraction of pixels is found to be contaminated by discrete extragalactic sources. Moreover, removal of contaminating signals is eased by the substantial difference between their power spectrum and that of primordial fluctuations.Comment: 10 pages, Latex, mn.sty, 8 figures included, MNRAS, in the press. Minor changes in the text. Sections 3.1 and 3.2 have been expanded. Source counts in Table 2 have been slightly changed. Figure 1,2,7 and 8 have been replaced by new version

Asymptotic defectiveness of manufacturing plants: an estimate based on process learning curves

The paper describes a method for a preliminary estimation of asymptotic defectiveness of a manufacturing plant based on the prediction of its learning curve estimated during a p-chart setting up. The proposed approach provides process managers with the possibility of estimating the asymptotic variability of the process and the period of revision of p-chart control limits. An application of the method is also provided