Economic-ecological information systems: a proposal

SIGLEAvailable from Bibliothek des Instituts fuer Weltwirtschaft, ZBW, Duesternbrook Weg 120, D-24105 Kiel W 189 (93.406) / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman

National Material Balances as a Tool of Ecological Resources Policy

It is a basic understanding of the current discussion on sustainable development that the high consumption level of non-renewable resources in industrial societies ought to be reduced in absolute figures and that the use of renewable resources should not go beyond the carrying capacities of ecological systems. It is evident that sustainable development will not be attained without regular (annual) information on dimension, structure and development of the physical exchanges between society and nature. National material balances therefore are to be regarded as one important requirement for achieving sustainable development. As a basic requirement of ecological restructuring of economies, the production and consumption of selected materials should be registered in an accounting form. Other material flow accounts describe the total material throughput of an economy. Austria, Germany and Japan were among the first countries to provide material flow accounting data for the whole economy. In Germany, material flow balances are already a firm part of integrated environmental and economic accounting. The physical accounting of material and substance flows on a regional and national scale is a rapidly growing field of current research on sustainability. Therefore the coordination of ongoing projects on an international level is an important prerequisite for providing a coherent framework of material and substance flow accounting methodology. Estimations for Austria show an average resource consumption of 29 tons per capita and year (1990). 83 percent of the yearly total material demand (water and air excluded) is taken from domestic resources, 17 percent is imported (materials, goods). About 10 percent of the domestic material throughput is exported. More than a third of total material throughput is turned back to nature in the form of emissions and waste. About one half of annual demand remains in the system and leads to a net increase in long-term stocks (above all in the form of buildings and infrastructure). The main cause for the high increase in the total material throughput of the Austrian economy over the last twenty years is the demand for construction materials. The value added per material or energy throughput unit, the total resource productivity, has increased by about 30 percent during that period. Nevertheless, absolute figures for resource consumption increased by approximately the same amount.Nationale Materialbilanzen als Instrument einer ökologischen Ressourcenpolitik; National Material Balances as a Tool of Ecological Resources Policy

Programmable Temporal Isolation through Variable-Bandwidth Servers

We introduce variable-bandwidth servers (VBS) for scheduling and executing processes under programmable temporal isolation. A VBS is an extension of a constant-bandwidth server where throughput and latency of process execution can not only be controlled to remain constant across different competing workloads but also to vary in time as long as the resulting bandwidth stays below a given bandwidth cap. We have designed and implemented a VBS-based EDF-style constant-time scheduling algorithm, a constant-time admission test, and four alternative queue management plugins which influence the scheduling algorithm’s overall temporal and spatial complexity. Experiments confirm the theoretical bounds in a number of microbenchmarks and demonstrate that the scheduler can effectively manage in constant time any number of processes up to available memory while maintaining response times of individual processes within a bounded range. We have also developed a small-footprint, bare-metal virtual machine that uses VBS for temporal isolation of multiple, concurrently running processes executing real code