Landslide risk management through spatial analysis and stochastic prediction for territorial resilience evaluation

Natural materials, such as soils, are influenced by many factors acting during their formative and evolutionary process: atmospheric agents, erosion and transport phenomena, sedimentation conditions that give soil properties a non-reducible randomness by using sophisticated survey techniques and technologies. This character is reflected not only in spatial variability of properties which differs from point to point, but also in multivariate correlation as a function of reciprocal distance. Cognitive enrichment, offered by the response of soils associated with their intrinsic spatial variability, implies an increase in the evaluative capacity of the contributing causes and potential effects in failure phenomena. Stability analysis of natural slopes is well suited to stochastic treatment of uncertainty which characterized landslide risk. In particular, this study has been applied through a back- analysis procedure to a slope located in Southern Italy that was subject to repeated phenomena of hydrogeological instability (extended for several kilometres in recent years). The back-analysis has been carried out by applying spatial analysis to the controlling factors as well as quantifying the hydrogeological hazard through unbiased estimators. A natural phenomenon, defined as stochastic process characterized by mutually interacting spatial variables, has led to identify the most critical areas, giving reliability to the scenarios and improving the forecasting content. Moreover, the phenomenological characterization allows the optimization of the risk levels to the wide territory involved, supporting decision-making process for intervention priorities as well as the effective allocation of the available resources in social, environmental and economic contexts

Linking healthcare and societal resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic

Coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has highlighted the link between public healthcare and the broader context of operational response to complex crises. Data are needed to support the work of the emergency services and enhance governance. This study develops a Europe-wide analysis of perceptions, needs and priorities of the public affected by the Covid-19 emergency. An online multilingual survey was conducted from mid-May until mid-July 2020. The questionnaire investigates perceptions of public healthcare, emergency management and societal resilience. In total, N = 3029 valid answers were collected. They were analysed both as a whole and focusing on the most represented countries (Italy, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom). Our findings highlight some perceived weaknesses in emergency management that are associated with the underlying vulnerability of the global interconnected society and public healthcare systems. The spreading of the epidemic in Italy represented a ‘tipping point’ for perceiving Covid-19 as an ‘emergency’ in the surveyed countries. The respondents uniformly suggested a preference for gradually restarting activities. We observed a tendency to ignore the cascading effects of Covid-19 and possible concurrence of threats. Our study highlights the need for practices designed to address the next phases of the Covid-19 crisis and prepare for future systemic shocks. Cascading effects that could compromise operational capacity need to be considered more carefully. We make the case for the reinforcement of cross-border coordination of public health initiatives, for standardization in business continuity management, and for dealing with the recovery at the European level

Hardware prototyping and validation of a W-ΔDOR digital signal processor

Microwave tracking, usually performed by on ground processing of the signals coming from a spacecraft, represents a crucial aspect in every deep-space mission. Various noise sources, including receiver noise, affect these signals, limiting the accuracy of the radiometric measurements obtained from the radio link. There are several methods used for spacecraft tracking, including the Delta-Differential One-Way Ranging (ΔDOR) technique. In the past years, European Space Agency (ESA) missions relied on a narrowband ΔDOR system for navigation in the cruise phase. To limit the adverse effect of nonlinearities in the receiving chain, an innovative wideband approach to ΔDOR measurements has recently been proposed. This work presents the hardware implementation of a new version of the ESA X/Ka Deep Space Transponder based on the new tracking technique named Wideband ΔDOR (W-ΔDOR). The architecture of the new transponder guarantees backward compatibility with narrowband ΔDOR

High performance bit-stream decompressor for partial reconfigurable FPGAs

In Digital Signal Processing (DSP), Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming ubiquitous for their capability to process massive amount of data in parallel maintaining the flexibility of the software approach. FPGA chips of major vendors also support partial dynamic programming, namely the ability to change the functionality of portions of FPGA while the rest of the functionalities remain active. In this way, partial reconfiguration of the FPGA requires a fast reload of a partial bitstream. To this purpose, an improvement of the reconfiguration speed (with the contemporary reduction of the memory occupancy) is obtained by compressing the bitstreams. High performance on board decompressors are required to speed-up the reconfiguration operation. In this paper a new hardware oriented technique for the bitstream compression and decompression is proposed. This technique maintains good compression factors and correspond to a very simple and fast hardware architecture for the compressor block