Protection of Non-Trade Values in WTO Appellate Body Jurisprudence: Exceptions, Economic Arguments, and Eluding Questions

The article suggests that the constitutional scope of the WTO leaves a wide space for the Appellate Body to protect non-trade values. That has, to some extent, materialized in Appellate Body practice; human health and environment are attaining general protection across the WTO treaties. They are recognized as vital and important values and protected through the exceptions in the WTO treaties. However, the Appellate Body has also found ways to protect those values without resorting to the exceptions. Instead, they are part of an economic argument in national treatment analyses and they are part of economic externality assessments in subsidy determinations. It is, however, still unsettled how other vital values, like those which can fall under peremptory norms, can be protected by the Appellate Body and whether its current approach provides the necessary tools for their protection

Boolean Expression Diagrams

This paper presents a new data structure called Boolean Expression Diagrams (BEDs) for representing and manipulating Boolean functions. BEDs are a generalization of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) which can represent any Boolean circuit in linear space and still maintain many of the desirable properties of BDDs. Two algorithms are described for transforming a BED into a reduced ordered BDD. One is a generalized version of the BDD apply-operator while the other can exploit the structural information of the Boolean expression. This ability is demonstrated by verifying that two di erent circuit implementations of a 16-bit multiplier implement the same Boolean function. Using BEDs, this veri cation problem is solved in less than a second, while using standard BDD techniques this problem is infeasible. Generally, BEDs are useful in applications, for example tautology checking, where the end-result as a reduced ordered BDD is small

Calculating Valid Domains for BDD-Based Interactive Configuration

In these notes we formally describe the functionality of Calculating Valid Domains from the BDD representing the solution space of valid configurations. The formalization is largely based on the CLab configuration framework

A novel bidding method for combined heat and power units in district heating systems

We propose a bidding method for the participation of combined heat and power (CHP) units in the day-ahead electricity market. More specifically, we consider a district heating system where heat can be produced by CHP units or heat-only units, e.g., gas or wood chip boilers. We use a mixed-integer linear program to determine the optimal operation of the portfolio of production units and storages on a daily basis. Based on the optimal production of subsets of units, we can derive the bidding prices and amounts of electricity offered by the CHP units for the day-ahead market. The novelty about our approach is that the prices are derived by iteratively replacing the production of heat-only units through CHP production. This results in an algorithm with a robust bidding strategy that does not increase the system costs even if the bids are not won. We analyze our method on a small realistic test case to illustrate our method and compare it with other bidding strategies from literature, which consider CHP units individually. The analysis shows that considering a portfolio of units in a district heating system and determining bids based on replacement of heat production of other units leads to better results