Marketization in Space: Local and Regional Effects on Marketization in Denmark

New public economics has emphasized the importance of using market solutions in the public sector. Public-private partnerships and marketization through tender calls have been among the instruments of this policy trend. The regional and local effects of such policies are highly relevant for Denmark, as about 66 percent of the public budget in 2003 is delegated to municipalities and counties. The total public expenditures represent 55 percent of GDP in 2003 and are therefore a vital element in overall economic activity. These instruments from the new public economics thereby become active vehicles to local and regional development, which has to a high extent been delegated to local and regional authorities. They arguably constitute the most pronounced policy area within regional and local policies in Denmark. The hypothesis tested here is that marketization is a potent policy instrument for local and regional development in Denmark and that it is therefore important to plan for the operational areas to be subject to marketization. Using panel data on the use of tender calls by Danish municipalities for the period 1993-2004, the paper tests the extent to which the use of marketization influences the local and regional growth potentials, controlling for a number of local and regional characteristics. These growth potentials are measured through a number of indicators such as income growth, job growth and formation of new firms in different sectors. The findings indicate that marketization is most important policy tool in regional planning and development. Not only is it effective, but it is to a large extent also in the hands of local politicians. The slack in use of marketization among Danish municipalities and counties may therefore be a threat to overall growth at the local, regional and national level in Denmark.

Exploiting Adaptive and Collaborative AUV Autonomy for Detection and Characterization of Internal Waves

Advances in the fields of autonomy software and environmental sampling techniques for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have recently allowed for the merging of oceanographic data collection with the testing of emerging marine technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems (LAMSS) group conducted an Internal Wave Detection Experiment in August 2010 with these advances in mind. The goal was to have multiple AUVs collaborate autonomously through onboard autonomy software and real-time underwater acoustic communication to monitor for the presence of internal waves by adapting to changes in the environment (specifically the temperature variations near the thermocline/pycnocline depth). The experimental setup, implementation, data, deployment results, and internal wave detection and quantification results are presented in this paper.United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-08-1-0013)United States. Dept. of DefenseUnited States. Air Force Office of Scientific ResearchAmerican Society for Engineering Education. National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (32 CFR 168a

A State Observation Technique for Highly Compressed Source Coding of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Position

In this paper, a novel technique is presented for using state observers in conjunction with an entropy source encoder to enable highly compressed telemetry of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) position vectors. In this work, both the sending vehicle and receiving vehicle or human operator are equipped with a shared real-time simulation of the sender's state based on the prior transmitted positions. Thus, only the innovation between the sender's actual state and the shared state need be sent over the link, such as a very low throughput acoustic modem. The distribution of this innovation can be modeled a priori or assembled adaptively. This distribution is then paired with an arithmetic entropy encoder, producing a very low cost representation of the vehicle's position vector. This system was analyzed on experimental data from the GLINT10 and AGAVE07 expeditions involving two different classes of AUVs performing a diverse number of maneuvers, and implemented on a fielded vehicle in the MBAT12 experiment. Using an adaptive probability distribution in combination with either of two state observer models, greater than 90% compression, relative to a 32-b integer baseline, was achieved.United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-08-1-0011)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-11-1-0097

Inclusive Growth – an Agenda for Germany Five action areas for a new growth strategy. Bertelsmann Stiftung Inclusive Growth for Germany|20

Germany is entering a new legislative period with a strong economic position. Across the board, current figures and forecasts for the near future are encouraging. But both the private sector and society are confronted with major challenges – globalization, digitalization and demographic shifts are transforming the demands made on our economy. Current economic policy in Germany must pave the way for tomorrow’s prosperity. This involves making a priority out of promoting growth that provides everyone an opportunity to participate in and thereby benefit from this growth. We need an Agenda for Inclusive Growth

Model-Based Adaptive Behavior Framework for Optimal Acoustic Communication and Sensing by Marine Robots

In this paper, a hybrid data- and model-based autonomous environmental adaptation framework is presented which allows autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with acoustic sensors to follow a path which optimizes their ability to maintain connectivity with an acoustic contact for optimal sensing or communication. The adaptation framework is implemented within the behavior-based mission-oriented operating suite-interval programming (MOOS-IvP) marine autonomy architecture and uses a new embedded high-fidelity acoustic modeling infrastructure, the generic robotic acoustic model (GRAM), to provide real-time estimates of the acoustic environment under changing environmental and situational scenarios. A set of behaviors that combine adaptation to the current acoustic environment with strategies that extend the decision horizon beyond that of typical behavior-based systems have been developed, implemented, and demonstrated in a series of field experiments and virtual experiments in a MOOS-IvP simulation.United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-08-1-0011)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-08-1-0013)NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC

Goby-Acomms version 2: extensible marshalling, queuing, and link layer interfacing for acoustic telemetry

We present the Goby-Acomms project version 2 (Goby2) which provides software for communication amongst autonomous marine vehicles over extremely bandwidth-constrained links. Goby2's modular design provides four discrete yet interoperable components: 1) physics- oriented marshalling via the Dynamic Compact Control Language (DCCL); 2) dynamic priority queuing; 3) time division multiple access (TDMA) medium access control (MAC); 4) and an extensible link-layer interface (ModemDriver). Keywords: Communication protocols; autonomous vehicles; marine systems; telemetry; source codin

Multistatic acoustic characterization of seabed targets

Author Posting. © Acoustical Society of America, 2017. This article is posted here by permission of Acoustical Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 142 (2017): 1587–1596, doi:10.1121/1.5002887.One application for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is detecting and classifying hazardous objects on the seabed. An acoustic approach to this problem has been studied in which an acoustic source insonifies seabed target while receiving AUVs with passive sensing payloads discriminate targets based on features of the three dimensional scattered fields. The OASES-SCATT simulator was used to study how scattering data collected by mobile receivers around targets insonified by mobile sources might be used for sphere and cylinder target characterization in terms of shape, composition, and size. The impact of target geometry on these multistatic scattering fields is explored, and a discrimination approach developed in which the source and receiver circle the target with the same radial speed. The frequency components of the multistatic scattering data at different bistatic angles are used to form models for target characteristics. Data are then classified using these models. Classification accuracies were greater than 98% for shape and composition. Regression for target volume showed potential, with 90% chance of errors less than 15%. The significance of this approach is to make classification using low-cost vehicles plausible from scattering amplitudes and the relative angles between the target, source, and receiver vehicles.This work was supported by Battelle

Autonomous assessment of seabed ripple geometry from bistatic acoustic scattering data

One of the greatest sources of interference in the acoustic scattered fields from seabed targets is bottom scattering. Directional sand ripples in particular produce three-dimensional scattering radiation patterns when insonified that distort measured scattering fields from aspect-dependent targets. These bistatic scattered fields are impacted by the topography of the ripple field, such as anisotropic angle relative to the acoustic source and ripple geometry. This paper describes a method for estimation of sand ripple field parameters with data from Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) sampling of the bistatic scattered acoustic field that results from insonification of the seabed with a fixed acoustic source. Background on sand ripple scattering is first reviewed and simulation results are shown illustrating differences in scattered field results based on various parameters. The Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression methodology used for parameter estimation is then presented. Finally, the results for estimation of anisotropy angle, height and major correlation length are described based on simulation and the conclusions and suggestions for future work are stated

Unified command and control for heterogeneous marine sensing networks

Successful command and control (C2) of autonomous vehicles poses challenges that are unique to the marine environment, primarily highly restrictive acoustic communications throughput. To address this, the Unified C2 architecture presented here uses a highly compressed short message encoding scheme (Dynamic Compact Control Language or DCCL) to transfer commands and receive vehicle status. DCCL is readily reconfigurable to provide the flexibility needed to change commands on short notice. Furthermore, operation of multiple types of vehicles requires a C2 architecture that is both scalable and flexible to differences among platform hardware and abilities. The Unified C2 architecture uses the MOOS-IvP autonomy system to act as a “backseat driver” of the vehicle. This provides a uniform interface to the control system on all the vehicles. Also, a hierarchical configuration system is used to allow single changes in configuration to propagate to all vehicles in operation. Status data from all vehicles are displayed visually using Google Earth, which also allows a rapid meshing of data from other sources (sensors, automatic identification system, radar, satellites) from within, as well as outside of, the MOOS-IvP architecture. Results are presented throughout from the CCLNET08, SQUINT08, GLINT08, GLINT09, SWAMSI09, and DURIP09 experiments involving robotic marine autonomous surface craft (ASCs) and Bluefin, OceanServer, and NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-1-08-1-0013)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-1-08-1-0011