The European Air Transport Command: A Viable Model for Promoting European Military Cooperation? EU Diplomacy Paper 08/2016

This paper begins with the observation that the top-down model of defence cooperation adopted for the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) of the European Union seems to be in a crisis. It then asks if there are alternative models available, arguing that one is represented by smaller, bottom-up initiatives such as the European Air Transport Command (EATC). By looking at the EATC, this paper shows that this type of initiatives provide a positive impact on the CSDP because they improve the overall level of European defence capabilities and because they show that it is possible for European countries to develop defence cooperation initiatives that are both efficient and effective. The EATC’s small-scale sectoral cooperation presents several advantages, the main ones being an easier decision-making process and a higher possible level of ambition, but on the other hand such a model restricts both the number of countries and the size of the impact that it can have. By identifying the key characteristics of the EATC model, this paper tries to determine the areas where the EATC could expand, and those where its business model could be successfully replicated. It argues that the best candidates are domains that combine constancy of use and low political sensibility, such as training or surveillance

Anisotropic Electrostatic Interactions in Coarse-Grained Water Models to Enhance the Accuracy and Speed-Up Factor of Mesoscopic Simulations

Water models with realistic physical-chemical properties are essential to study a variety of biomedical processes or engineering technologies involving molecules or nanomaterials. Atomistic models of water are constrained by the feasible computational capacity, but calibrated coarse-grained (CG) ones can go beyond these limits. Here, we compare three popular atomistic water models with their corresponding CG model built using finite-size particles such as ellipsoids. Differently from previous approaches, short-range interactions are accounted for with the generalized Gay-Berne potential, while electrostatic and long-range interactions are computed from virtual charges inside the ellipsoids. Such an approach leads to a quantitative agreement between the original atomistic models and their CG counterparts. Results show that a timestep of up to 10 fs can be achieved to integrate the equations of motion without significant degradation of the physical observables extracted from the computed trajectories, thus unlocking a significant acceleration of water-based mesoscopic simulations at a given accuracy

AoI-based Multicast Routing over Voronoi Overlays with Minimal Overhead

The increasing pervasive and ubiquitous presence of devices at the edge of the Internet is creating new scenarios for the emergence of novel services and applications. This is particularly true for location- and context-aware services. These services call for new decentralized, self-organizing communication schemes that are able to face issues related to demanding resource consumption constraints, while ensuring efficient locality-based information dissemination and querying. Voronoi-based communication techniques are among the most widely used solutions in this field. However, when used for forwarding messages inside closed areas of the network (called Areas of Interest, AoIs), these solutions generally require a significant overhead in terms of redundant and/or unnecessary communications. This fact negatively impacts both the devices' resource consumption levels, as well as the network bandwidth usage. In order to eliminate all unnecessary communications, in this paper we present the MABRAVO (Multicast Algorithm for Broadcast and Routing over AoIs in Voronoi Overlays) protocol suite. MABRAVO allows to forward information within an AoI in a Voronoi network using only local information, reaching all the devices in the area, and using the lowest possible number of messages, i.e., just one message for each node included in the AoI. The paper presents the mathematical and algorithmic descriptions of MABRAVO, as well as experimental findings of its performance, showing its ability to reduce communication costs to the strictly minimum required.Comment: Submitted to: IEEE Access; CodeOcean: DOI:10.24433/CO.1722184.v1; code: https://github.com/michelealbano/mabrav

Palliative care and covid-19 pandemic between hospital-centric based approach and decentralisation of health services: a valuable opportunity to turn the corner?

Italy was the first Western EU country to have dealt with the severe effects of the widespread Covid-19 virus since the pandemic began. Many healthcare services were negatively affected, and the delivery of palliative care has been no exception. The Italian healthcare system has suffered more than others due to public spending cuts. The hospital-based approach has not allowed all patients to receive appropriate care. This situation was brought about not only by the pandemic emergency but mainly by pre-existing shortages due to the cut in financial resources before the Covid-19 pandemic. For countries similar to Italy, it is necessary to develop territorialised health care, decongestion hospitals, and strengthen the Third Sector, particularly the voluntary sector

Modelling Sorption and Transport of Gases in Polymeric Membranes across Different Scales: A Review

Professor Giulio C. Sarti has provided outstanding contributions to the modelling of fluid sorption and transport in polymeric materials, with a special eye on industrial applications such as membrane separation, due to his Chemical Engineering background. He was the co-creator of innovative theories such as the Non-Equilibrium Theory for Glassy Polymers (NET-GP), a flexible tool to estimate the solubility of pure and mixed fluids in a wide range of polymers, and of the Standard Transport Model (STM) for estimating membrane permeability and selectivity. In this review, inspired by his rigorous and original approach to representing membrane fundamentals, we provide an overview of the most significant and up-to-date modeling tools available to estimate the main properties governing polymeric membranes in fluid separation, namely solubility and diffusivity. The paper is not meant to be comprehensive, but it focuses on those contributions that are most relevant or that show the potential to be relevant in the future. We do not restrict our view to the field of macroscopic modelling, which was the main playground of professor Sarti, but also devote our attention to Molecular and Multiscale Hierarchical Modeling. This work proposes a critical evaluation of the different approaches considered, along with their limitations and potentiality

Mesogen polarity effects on biaxial nematics. Centrally located dipoles

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Modelling Sorption and Transport of Gases in Polymeric Membranes across Different Scales: A Review

Professor Giulio C. Sarti has provided outstanding contributions to the modelling of fluid sorption and transport in polymeric materials, with a special eye on industrial applications such as membrane separation, due to his Chemical Engineering background. He was the co-creator of innovative theories such as the Non-Equilibrium Theory for Glassy Polymers (NET-GP), a flexible tool to estimate the solubility of pure and mixed fluids in a wide range of polymers, and of the Standard Transport Model (STM) for estimating membrane permeability and selectivity. In this review, inspired by his rigorous and original approach to representing membrane fundamentals, we provide an overview of the most significant and up-to-date modeling tools available to estimate the main properties governing polymeric membranes in fluid separation, namely solubility and diffusivity. The paper is not meant to be comprehensive, but it focuses on those contributions that are most relevant or that show the potential to be relevant in the future. We do not restrict our view to the field of macroscopic modelling, which was the main playground of professor Sarti, but also devote our attention to Molecular and Multiscale Hierarchical Modeling. This work proposes a critical evaluation of the different approaches considered, along with their limitations and potentiality