Infrastructure reporting by New South Wales local government authorities

Infrastructure assets are very important for the functioning of a society or community. In Australia, local government authorities (LGAs) have responsibility for the provision and maintenance of their community public assets such as public buildings, local roads, bridges, footpaths, recreation facilities, parks, water and sewerage assets. As at the end of financial year 2012, LGAs in New South Wales (NSW) are the custodians of approximately $81 billion in net value of infrastructure assets. The Australian accounting profession has encouraged local governments to account for and report on infrastructure using written-down current cost in order to provide stakeholders with relevant information. While the accounting standards have been focusing on asset valuation, the NSW Government has gone further by promulgating reporting requirements anchored in the NSW Local Government Act 1993 and Local Government Amendment (Planning and Reporting) Act 2009. The former requires LGAs to disclose information about asset condition, calculate the projected amount of money to bring the assets to a satisfactory condition and calculate the amount of annual cost to maintain assets at that condition, while the latter requires LGAs to follow the new Integrated Planning and Reporting Framework (IPRF) when planning for and reporting on infrastructure assets. NSW LGAs have recently reported on infrastructure assets in compliance with local government statutes. However, such compliance does not resolve some uncertainties and anomalies in the concept of satisfactory condition, does not affect the poor quality of councils‟ infrastructure reports and does not prescribe a standard format for infrastructure asset disclosure. Accordingly, annual asset reporting continues to be problematic. The purpose of this thesis in its first part is to provide evidence on the quantity and quality of infrastructure asset disclosure under the new IPRF recently introduced by the NSW Government. In the second part, the thesis is aimed at proposing a definition of ‘satisfactory condition’ of infrastructure and examining the different factors influencing the contents of asset reporting. It then evaluates the adequacy and effectiveness of current asset disclosure in serving the information needs of local communities and proposes a list of the most important criteria for infrastructure asset disclosure in councils’ annual reports. Finally, the thesis discusses and presents a proposed model of infrastructure maintenance for NSW local governments

Cybersecurity Logging & Monitoring Security Program

With ubiquitous computing becoming pervasive in every aspect of societies around the world and the exponential rise in cyber-based attacks, cybersecurity teams within global organizations are spending a massive amount of human and financial capital on their logging and monitoring security programs. As a critical part of global organizational security risk management processes, it is important that log information is aggregated in a timely, accurate, and relevant manner. It is also important that global organizational security operations centers are properly monitoring and investigating the security use-case alerting based on their log data. In this paper, the author proposes a model for security logging and monitoring which details the inception, implementation, and operations of the program. This entails providing an overview of the logging and monitoring program, its purpose, and structure

Nonlinear static and transient isogeometric analysis of functionally graded microplates based on the modified strain gradient theory

The objective of this study is to develop an effective numerical model within the framework of an isogeometric analysis (IGA) to investigate the geometrically nonlinear responses of functionally graded (FG) microplates subjected to static and dynamic loadings. The size effect is captured based on the modified strain gradient theory with three length scale parameters. The third-order shear deformation plate theory is adopted to represent the kinematics of plates, while the geometric nonlinearity is accounted based on the von Kármán assumption. Moreover, the variations of material phrases through the plate thickness follow the rule of mixture. By using Hamilton’s principle, the governing equation of motion is derived and then discretized based on the IGA technique, which tailors the non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) basis functions as interpolation functions to fulfil the C2-continuity requirement. The nonlinear equations are solved by the Newmark’s time integration scheme with Newton-Raphson iterative procedure. Various examples are also presented to study the influences of size effect, material variations, boundary conditions and shear deformation on the nonlinear behaviour of FG microplates

An analysis of solutions to fractional neutral differential equations with delay

This paper discusses some properties of solutions to fractional neutral delay differential equations. By combining a new weighted norm, the Banach fixed point theorem and an elegant technique for extending solutions, results on existence, uniqueness, and growth rate of global solutions under a mild Lipschitz continuous condition of the vector field are first established. Be means of the Laplace transform the solution of some delay fractional neutral differential equations are derived in terms of three-parameter Mittag–Leffler functions; their stability properties are hence studied by using use Rouché’s theorem to describe the position of poles of the characteristic polynomials and the final value theorem to detect the asymptotic behavior. By means of numerical simulations the theoretical findings on the asymptotic behavior are verified