The Call of the Pandemic: Rethinking Global Value Chains

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on global value chains has been pervasive. An all-time-high demand for ventilators, personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns, medicines, and other essential health supplies collided with supply shortages. Stringent lockdowns enforced by different countries at different times led to severe consequences for industrial supply chains. As the pandemic spread, few countries have been resilient enough to cope well with the pace of transformed supply and demand requirements. This policy brief explains how firms and countries need to critically evaluate their upstream supply chains and how public policy should support creating domestic core manufacturing capabilities that can help mitigate the effects of disasters

Real-time Photorealistic Visualisation of Large-scaleMultiresolution Terrain Models

Height field terrain rendering is an important aspect of GIS, outdoor virtual reality applicationssuch as flight simulation, 3-D games, etc. A polygonal model of very large terrain data requiresa large number of triangles. So, even most high-performance graphics workstations have greatdifficulty to display even moderately sized height fields at interactive frame rates. To bringphotorealism in visualisation, it is required to drape corresponding high-resolution satellite oraerial phototexture over 3-D digital terrain and also to place multiple collections of point-location-based static objects such as buildings, trees, etc and to overlay polyline vector objects suchas roads on top of the terrain surface. It further complicates the requirement of interactive framerates while navigation over the terrain. This paper describes a novel approach for objects andterrain visualisation by combination of two algorithms, one for terrain data and the other forobjects. The terrain rendering is accomplished by an efficient dynamic multiresolution view-dependent level-of-detail mesh simplification algorithm. It is augmented with out-of-corevisualisation of large-height geometry and phototexture terrain data populated with 3-D/2-Dstatic objects as well as vector overlays without extensive memory load. The proposedmethodology provides interactive frame rates on a general-purpose desktop PC with OpenGL-enabled graphics hardware. The software TREND has been successfully tested on different real-world height maps and satellite phototextures of sizes up to 16K*16K coupled with thousandsof static objects and polyline vector overlays

Empowering Women and Combating Harassment: The Women Powerline Initiative in Uttar Pradesh, India

In this policy brief, the author discusses how, amidst the persistent societal and cultural hurdles faced by women in India, a pioneering social program known as Women Powerline 1090 (WPL) has emerged in the state of Uttar Pradesh to create a safer environment and combat atrocities against women, using technology as a tool

Move Table: An Intelligent Software Tool for OptimalPath Finding and Halt Schedule Generation

This study aims to help army officials in taking decisions before war to decide the optimalpath for army troops moving between two points in a real world digital terrain, consideringfactors like traveled distance, terrain type, terrain slope, and road network. There can optionallybe one or more enemies (obstacles) located on the terrain which should be avoided. A tile-basedA* search strategy with diagonal distance and tie-breaker heuristics is proposed for finding theoptimal path between source and destination nodes across a real-world  3-D  terrain. A performancecomparison (time analysis, search space analysis, and accuracy) has been made between themultiresolution A* search and the proposed tile-based A* search for large-scale digital terrainmaps. Different heuristics, which are used by the algorithms to guide these to the goal node,are presented and compared to overcome some of the computational constraints associated withpath finding on large digital terrains. Finally, a halt schedule is generated using the optimal path,weather condition, moving time, priority and type of a column, so that the senior military plannerscan strategically decide in advance the time and locations where the troops have to halt orovertake other troops depending on their priority and also the time of reaching the destination

Towards Identifying Contribution of Wake Turbulence to Inflow Noise from Wind Turbines

Downstream turbines in a wind farm often operate under the influence of wakes from upstream turbines. Aerodynamic losses and aeromechanical issues (stochastic loads) associated with such wake-turbine interactions have been investigated before. However, the role such interactions play in the generation of aerodynamic noise has not been evaluated. This paper presents a two-step approach for predicting noise due to wake-turbine interaction. The first step involves an aerodynamic analysis of a wind farm using large eddy simulations. Time accurate data and turbulence statistics in the turbine wakes are obtained from this simulation just ahead of the downstream wind turbines. The second step uses the turbulence information with aeroacoustic models to predict radiated noise in the far field. Simulation results of two simplified model problems corresponding to these two steps are presented in this paper

Modelling and Analysis of Emitter Geolocation using Satellite Tool Kit

This paper considers geolocation of a stationary radio frequency emitter which is being steered by multiple antennas installed on a geostationary satellite using received signal strength metric. The difference in the signal strengths is measured by the antennas and subsequently plotted as lines of position on the surface of the earth. Intersection of these two or more lines of position indicates the location of the terrestrial radio frequency transmitters. This problem is appropriately modelled using a satellite tool kit that simulates the space environment involving satellites, antennas, emitters, etc in a realistic and integrated manner. Accuracy and size of the geolocation area depend on the distance between emitters and the receiver and also on the contour widths geometry. Results of geolocation accuracy are compared by installing the radio frequency emitter at increasing latitudes and at varying contour widths. It is observed that the emitters placed at lower latitudes and having smaller contour widths provided higher accuracy in geolocation that validates the proposed formulation