ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE MANAGEMENT.A CASE STUDY: ROMANIAN BORDER POLICE - 10 YEARS OF TRANSFORMATION (1999-2009)

In past 10 years Romanian Border Police is one of the Romanian public institutions that underwent a profound transformation and adaptation process that could be summarized as follows: optimization of the working procedures; law Euro-conformity; enhancement and modernization of management; institutional reorganization; optimization of human resources management; internal and external inter-institutional cooperation; development of the technical-operative capacity. Romanian Border Police has constantly pursued to set up a functional, modern institution, compatible with the similar structures from the E.U. Member States and capable to efficiently counter the cross-border crime phenomena.organizational development, change management, institutional transformation, institutional building, Romanian Border Police, Phare

Approaching Dynamic PSA within CANDU 6 NPP

The outline of this dissertation is going to present the applications that are the subject of the work and also the lay down of work content. Chapter 1 reviews the conventional PSA main concepts, summarizes a short introduction history of Dynamic PSA (DPSA) and presents a non-exhaustive DPSA state-of-the-art with the recent and future developments. Chapter 2 presents the first application of the thesis, which is actually an introduction in the context of the Integrated Dynamic Decision Analysis (IDDA) code, that represents the main tool used in the attempt of approaching the Dynamic PSA. Starting from a description that reflects the level of knowledge about the system, IDDA code is able to develop all the scenarios of events compatible with the description received, from both points of view: either logical construction, or probabilistic coherence. By describing the system configuration and operation in a logically consistent manner, all the information is worked out by the code and is made available to the analyst as results in terms of system unavailability, minimal cut sets, uncertainty associated. The code allows also the association of different consequences that could be of interest for the analyst. The consequences could be of any type, such as economical, equipment outage time, etc.; for instance it can be considered an outage time for certain components of the system and then is calculated the “expected risk”. The association of consequences provides the inputs for a good decision making process. Chapter 3 represents the core applications of the present work. The applications purpose is the coupling between the logic probabilistics of the system or plant and associated phenomenology of primary heat transport system of a generic CANDU 6 NPP. First application is the coupling between the logic-probabilistic model of EWS system and associated phenomenology of primary heat transport system of CANDU 6 NPP. The considered plant transient is the total Loss of Main Feed-water with or without the coincident failure of the Emergency Water Supply System. The second application is considering the CANDU 6 Station Blackout as plant transient-consequential condition, moreover the loss of all AC power sources existing on the site. The transient scenarios development consider the possibility to recover the offsite grid and the use of mobile diesel generators in order to mitigate the accident consequences. The purpose is to challenge the plant design and response and to check if the plant conditions of a severe accident are reached. The plant response is challenged for short and long periods of time. The IDDA code allows interfacing the logic-probabilistic model of the system with the plant response in time, therefore with the evolution in time of the plant process variables. This allows raising sequences of possible events related in cause-consequence reasoning, each one giving place to a scenario with its development and its consequences. Therefore this allows acquiring the knowledge not only of which sequences of events are taking place, but also of the real environment in which they are taking place. Associating the system sequences that lead to system unavailability on demand with the resulting phenomenology proves to be a useful tool for the decision making process, both in the design phase and for the entire power plant life time. Chapter 4 presents future possible applications that could be developed with the present Dynamic PSA approach. A particular application could be the optimization or development of robust plant emergency operating procedures. In fact it consists in the coupling between the logic-probabilistics of the plant configurations corresponding to the Emergency Operating Procedure (EOP) and the associated phenomenology of the primary heat transport systems with the consideration for the plant safety systems. The application could highlight those situations where the plant fails either because of hardware failures or system dynamics and furthermore to reveal those situations where changing of the hardware states brings the process variables of the system state out of the system domain. A timeline course should be created for the process variables characterizing the plant state and that should reveal the time windows that operators have at disposition for intervention, in order to avoid potentially catastrophic conditions. Some week points in the EOP could be identified and then resolutions to be provided for their improvement, on the basis of sensitivity analyses. Chapter 5 presents the conclusions and the insights of the work and outlines possible improvements in terms of the present methodology proposed

Distribution of the Object Oriented Databases. A Viewpoint of the MVDB Model's Methodology and Architecture

In databases, much work has been done towards extending models with advanced tools such as view technology, schema evolution support, multiple classification, role modeling and viewpoints. Over the past years, most of the research dealing with the object multiple representation and evolution has proposed to enrich the monolithic vision of the classical object approach in which an object belongs to one hierarchy class. In particular, the integration of the viewpoint mechanism to the conventional object-oriented data model gives it flexibility and allows one to improve the modeling power of objects. The viewpoint paradigm refers to the multiple descriptions, the distribution, and the evolution of object. Also, it can be an undeniable contribution for a distributed design of complex databases. The motivation of this paper is to define an object data model integrating viewpoints in databases and to present a federated database architecture integrating multiple viewpoint sources following a local-as-extended-view data integration approach.object-oriented data model, OQL language, LAEV data integration approach, MVDB model, federated databases, Local-As-View Strategy.

Results from the Farm Behaviour Component of the Integrated Economic-Hydrologic Model for the Watershed Evaluation of Beneficial Management Practices Program

This report summarizes preliminary results from the Farm Behavior component of the South Tobacco Creek Integrated Modeling Project (STC Project) which is being undertaken as part of the Watershed Evaluation of BMPs (WEBs) Program. WEBS is a partnership between Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) and Ducks Unlimited Canada (DUC) established to evaluate the economic and environmental performance of BMPs for water quality at the watershed scale. Water draining from South Tobacco Creek eventually enters to Lake Winnipeg which is degraded from the cumulative effects of nutrient loading, particularly phosphorous. Many jurisdictions across the world, including Canada, use payments programs to encourage land owners to change land management practices in order to reduce non-point source pollution. BMP incentive programs in Canada, such as Greencover, rely on fixed payment schemes which pay producers a set amount for BMPs, regardless of costs or benefits. In order to improve the performance of payment programs many jurisdictions have instituted auction type mechanisms. The purpose of the Farm Behavior component of the STC project is to examine the performance of various types of payment programs for BMPs relative to reducing phosphorous loads from STC. Theoretical and empirical evidence from conservation auctions suggest that the performance of auctions depends on several factors which affect the bidding behavior of producers during the auction, and therefore the cost-effectiveness of auctions over other types of payment programs. In particular, some producers actually benefit from BMPs, however under certain auction rules these producers would be paid the same amount as high cost producers; alternatively, producers with low costs of adopting BMPs may not always provide the greatest benefits in terms of pollution abatement depending on their location in the watershed, and physical features of their land. We assessed the relative performance of different payment programs by developing producer response functions for adoption of Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs). Producer adoption responses under different incentive schemes were tested using experiments with student subjects and limited trials with producers. We examined four BMPs: construction of holding ponds, riparian management, forage conversion, and conservation till. The results of the adoption response experiments conducted under WEBS were used to draw preliminary observations on BMP policy design and form the basis for recommendations for further research. The farm behavior project focuses on addressing the following two questions: 1. Does BMP adoption at a given farm make the individual farm household better or worse off from an economic perspective? 2. How much will it cost the government to get farms to adopt BMPs under different payment programs? Since producer heterogeneity is key to understanding the performance of conservation auctions, we examined the costs and benefits of BMPs at the individual farm level and developed on-farm costs for each BMP for each producer in the watershed. The basic components of the model are described below, however the details including underlying assumptions regarding baseline farm behavior, are outlined within the body of the report. We used the on-farm cost model to generate aggregate cost functions for BMPs for the watershed and to parameterize the policy experiments related to conservation auctions. Preliminary estimates of environmental benefits of individual BMP adoption were provided by Dr. Wanhong Yang using results from a SWAT model developed under a separate component of the South Tobacco Creek WEBS project. Based on this information, we were able to evaluate the performance of various auction formats in terms of cost effectiveness, distribution of payments amongst producers, and environmental benefit. The results from the Farm behavior component of the South Tobacco Creek project are preliminary, and are currently being refined. Therefore it is difficult to draw generalized conclusions at this point. Further experiments are being conducted to complete the data collection during FY 08-09 through Interim WEBS funding. Nonetheless main findings to date are summarized below: 1. The four BMPs assessed differ in terms of their cost as well as their ability to deliver environmental benefits. Unfortunately, there is no BMP that dominates across farms at all abatement levels. Farms have heterogeneous costs in terms of BMPs, and some farms are cost effective at supplying abatement using one BMP, but not another. 2. This suggests that if water quality benefits (e.g. phosphorous reduction) can be quantified through modeling by BMP and by farm, then water quality should be the contracting unit for the auction rather than the BMP. This would allow producers to select the most cost effective BMP for supplying water quality benefits, and then decision makers could allocate contracts based on ranking the costs of abatement. 3. At the next stage of the research we will test for synergies between farms – ie., whether the joint production function for water quality between farms differs from the sum of individual production functions. This will have implications for how the payment scheme should be designed. 4. Incorporating „fairness‟ types of allocation rules for conservation dollars, such as maximum participation in conservation programs is inefficient in terms of cost and environmental benefits. If fairness, or using conservation payments as a form of extension to learn about on farm costs of BMPs is the goal of the auction, then fixed payment programs which are open to everyone may be more desirable. 5. The performance of the auction depends on the shape of the cost function for BMPs and/or pollution abatement, as well as whether uniform (pay everyone the highest bid) or discriminatory pricing (pay everyone their own bid) rules are applied. In future research we will be investigating to what extent we can generalize results about the performance of uniform versus discriminatory pricing rules in this context. In conclusion, this research has allowed us to investigate individually the performance of incentive payments for individual BMPs. The results of the analysis provide us with a baseline of information by which we can begin to assess more complex conservation program issues, such as how to optimally select multiple BMPs within the watershed, and whether/how to spatially target BMPs.watersheds, South Tobacco Creek, water quality, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, Q12,Q52,D44,

About Analysis of Emissions from a Switched Mode Power Supply

The paper is dedicated to the analysis in the frequency domain of the currents (in common mode and differential mode) which generate conducted emissions in the supplying cable of the equipment containing a switch mode power supply (SMPS). The performed simulation considers the standard CISPR 16-1-2 which refers to specifications, methods, and test apparatus for the measurements of disturbances and immunity to conducted emissions. One proposes solutions to limit and control the conducted emissions generated by the SMPS within the supplying cable that result into noise currents and high frequency currents within the range 150 kHz – 30 MHz that might interfere with other electric equipment. Various ways to limit the mentioned emissions are simulated and analyzed. The influence of the duty-cycle over the frequency spectrum from the conducted emissions range is considered and the worst case is determined. The conclusion is that the optimum filtering solution involves the use of an EMI filter, the results being compared to the CISPR 22 standard

A regime switching on Covid19 analysis and prediction in Romania

In this paper we propose a regime separation for the analysis of Covid19 on Romania combined with mathematical models of SIR and SIRD. The main regimes we study are, the free spread of the virus, the quarantine and partial relaxation and the last one is the relaxation regime. The main model we use is SIR which is a classical model, but because we can not fully trust the numbers of infected or recovered we base our analysis on the number of deceased people which is more reliable. To actually deal with this we introduce a simple modification of the SIR model to account for the deceased separately. This in turn will be our base for fitting the parameters. The estimation of the parameters is done in two steps. The first one consists in training a neural network based on SIR models to detect the regime changes. Once this is done we fit the main parameters of the SIRD model using a grid search. At the end, we make some predictions on what the evolution will be in a timeframe of a month with the fitted parameters