Indirect Determination of the Risk of Transportation Projects

This paper deals with indirect determination of the risk of transportation projects. It focuses on cases when the project has certain characteristics that might lead to conclusions concerning the degree of risk. The author proposes a multi-criterion evaluation of the territory with respect to its time evolution in order to determine the characteristics. The proposed method enables a simple graphical representation of the achievement of the territorial evolution in each time section, and also in the entire period that is under consideration. The method presents an inverse characteristic of the risk of the project.

Percolation and Epidemic Thresholds in Clustered Networks

We develop a theoretical approach to percolation in random clustered networks. We find that, although clustering in scale-free networks can strongly affect some percolation properties, such as the size and the resilience of the giant connected component, it cannot restore a finite percolation threshold. In turn, this implies the absence of an epidemic threshold in this class of networks extending, thus, this result to a wide variety of real scale-free networks which shows a high level of transitivity. Our findings are in good agreement with numerical simulations.Comment: 4 Pages and 3 Figures. Final version to appear in PR

Quantifying Functional Reuse from Object Oriented Requirements Specifications

Software reuse is essential in improving efficiency and productivity in the software development process. This paper analyses reuse within requirements engineering phase by taking and adapting a standard functional size measurement method, COSMIC FFP. Our proposal attempts to quantify reusability from Object Oriented requirements specifications by identifying potential primitives with a high level of reusability and applying a reuse indicator. These requirements are specified using OO-Method, an automatic software production method based on transformation models. We illustrate the application of our proposal in a Car Rental real system

High Energy Neutrinos with a Mediterranean Neutrino Telescope

The high energy neutrino detection by a km^3 Neutrino Telescope placed in the Mediterranean sea provides a unique tool to both determine the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux and the neutrino-nucleon cross section in the extreme kinematical region, which could unveil the presence of new physics. Here is performed a brief analysis of possible NEMO site performances.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of the 30th ICRC 200

Disentangling neutrino-nucleon cross section and high energy neutrino flux with a km^3 neutrino telescope

The energy--zenith angular event distribution in a neutrino telescope provides a unique tool to determine at the same time the neutrino-nucleon cross section at extreme kinematical regions, and the high energy neutrino flux. By using a simple parametrization for fluxes and cross sections, we present a sensitivity analysis for the case of a km^3 neutrino telescope. In particular, we consider the specific case of an under-water Mediterranean telescope placed at the NEMO site, although most of our results also apply to an under-ice detector such as IceCube. We determine the sensitivity to departures from standard values of the cross sections above 1 PeV which can be probed independently from an a-priori knowledge of the normalization and energy dependence of the flux. We also stress that the capability to tag downgoing neutrino showers in the PeV range against the cosmic ray induced background of penetrating muons appears to be a crucial requirement to derive meaningful constraints on the cross section.Comment: 10 pages, 28 figure

Support for Expert Estimations in Transportation Projects

This paper deals with risk analysis as a part of the financial assessment of transportation projects. Two approaches to risk assessment are discussed. A risk can be evaluated either directly in terms of the probabilistic distribution of the assessment criterion; or an indirect determination of the risk can be applied without constructing the probability distribution, but by determining the characteristic features of the project.

A dissemination strategy for immunizing scale-free networks

We consider the problem of distributing a vaccine for immunizing a scale-free network against a given virus or worm. We introduce a new method, based on vaccine dissemination, that seems to reflect more accurately what is expected to occur in real-world networks. Also, since the dissemination is performed using only local information, the method can be easily employed in practice. Using a random-graph framework, we analyze our method both mathematically and by means of simulations. We demonstrate its efficacy regarding the trade-off between the expected number of nodes that receive the vaccine and the network's resulting vulnerability to develop an epidemic as the virus or worm attempts to infect one of its nodes. For some scenarios, the new method is seen to render the network practically invulnerable to attacks while requiring only a small fraction of the nodes to receive the vaccine

Integrating static and dynamic information for routing traffic

The efficiency of traffic routing on complex networks can be reflected by two key measurements i.e. the system capacity and the average data packets travel time. In this paper, we propose a mixing routing strategy by integrating local static and dynamic information for enhancing the efficiency of traffic on scale-free networks. The strategy is governed by a single parameter. Simulation results show that there exists a optimal parameter value by considering both maximizing the network capacity and reducing the packet travel time. Comparing with the strategy by adopting exclusive local static information, the new strategy shows its advantages in improving the efficiency of the system. The detailed analysis of the mixing strategy is provided. This work suggests that how to effectively utilize the larger degree nodes plays the key role in the scale-free traffic systems.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure