The approach of the European court of human rights to environmental protection

The thesis aims to analyse the protection of environmental interests through the cases decided by the European Convention of Human Rights. The Convention does not include a right to a healthy environment. However, in recent years the European Court of Human Rights has given a number of innovative judgments acknowledging applicants' causes of action in environmental cases. The new jurisprudence poses crucial questions on the interpretation of the Convention and admissibility requirements to bring a case to the Court. The paper will seek to offer an overview of these developments. The first chapter gives a general outline on the conceptual and legal linkage between human rights and environmental protection, giving an account of the Council of Europe’s position on the matter. The analysis then proceeds to a detailed review of the Court’s jurisprudence in connection with each of the provisions that have found application in environmental cases, namely the right to respect for one's home, private and family life; the right to life; the right to a fair trial and the right to a remedy. The conclusions summarize the features of the Court's jurisprudence, commenting on its role in the protection of environmental interests within the Member States of the Council of Europ

Least costly energy management for series hybrid electric vehicles

Energy management of plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEVs) has different challenges from non-plug-in HEVs, due to bigger batteries and grid recharging. Instead of tackling it to pursue energetic efficiency, an approach minimizing the driving cost incurred by the user - the combined costs of fuel, grid energy and battery degradation - is here proposed. A real-time approximation of the resulting optimal policy is then provided, as well as some analytic insight into its dependence on the system parameters. The advantages of the proposed formulation and the effectiveness of the real-time strategy are shown by means of a thorough simulation campaign

Data-driven control design for neuroprotheses: a virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT) approach

This paper deals with design of feedback controllers for knee joint movement of paraplegics using functional electrical stimulation (FES) of the paralyzed quadriceps muscle group. The controller design approach, virtual reference feedback tuning (VRFT), is directly based on open loop measured data and fits the controller in such a way that the closed-loop meets a model reference objective. The use of this strategy, avoiding the modeling step, significantly reduces the time required for controller design and considerably simplifies the rehabilitation protocols. Linear and nonlinear controllers have been designed and experimentally tested, preliminarily on a healthy subject and finally on a paraplegic patient. Linear controller is effective when applied on small range of knee joint angle. The design of a nonlinear controller allows better performances. It is also shown that the control design is effective in tracking assigned knee angle trajectories and rejecting disturbances