On-going and future research at the Sulcis site in Sardinia, Italy. Characterization and experimentation at a possible future CCS pilot

National Italian funding has recently been allocated for the construction of a 350 MWe coal-fired power plant / CCS demonstration plant in the Sulcis area of SW Sardinia, Italy. In addition, the recently approved EC-funded ENOS project (ENabling Onshore CO2 Storage in Europe) will use the Sulcis site as one of its main field research laboratories. Site characterization is already ongoing, and work has begun to design gas injection experiments at 100-200 m depth in a fault. This article gives an overview of results to date and plans for the future from the Sapienza University of Rome research group

PicNIc - Pi-calculus Non-Interference checker

PICNIC is a tool for verifying security properties of systems, namely non-interference properties of processes expressed as terms of the pi-calculus with two security levels and declassification primitives. More precisely, it checks whether inserting a process into two different high contexts no information leakage to the low level observers occurs. These properties are decidable over finite control processes, but decidability can be extended by compositionality also to some infinite state processes. Notably, PICNIC has been developed in Fresh OpsilaCaML, a dialect of CaML with native support for binders and fresh/local names; thus, this work can be seen also as a non-trivial case study about the applicability of these new programming languages

on discrete time reversibility modulo state renaming and its applications

Time reversibility plays an important role in the analysis of continuous and discrete time Markov chains (DTMCs). Specifically, the computation of the stationary distribution of a reversible Markov chain has been proved to be very efficient and does not require the solution of the system of global balance equations. A DTMC is reversible when the processes at forward and reversed time are probabilistically indistinguishable. In this paper we introduce the concept of ρ-reversibility, i.e., a notion of reversibility modulo a renaming of the states, and we contrast it with the previous definition of dynamic reversibility especially with respect to the assumptions on the state renaming function. We discuss the applications of discrete time reversibility in the embedded and uniformized chains of continuous time processes

Dynamic Control of the Join-Queue Lengths in Saturated Fork-Join Stations

The analysis of fork-join queueing systems has played an important role for the performance evaluation of distributed systems where parallel computations associated with the same job are carried out and a job is considered served only when all the parallel tasks it consists of are served and then joined. The fork-join nodes that we consider consist of K >= 2 parallel servers each of which is equipped with two FCFS queues, namely the service-queue and the join-queue. The former stores the tasks waiting for being served while the latter stores the served tasks waiting for being joined. When the queueing station is saturated, i.e., the service-queues are never empty, we observe that the join-queue sizes tend to grow infinitely even if the expected service times at the servers are the same. In fact, this is due to the variance of the service time distribution. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple service-rate control mechanism, and show that under the exponential assumption on the service times, we can analytically study a set of relevant performance indices. We show that by selectively reducing the speed of some servers, significant energy saving can be achieved

Priority-based bandwidth allocation in wireless sensor networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) a set of motes monitors the environment by measuring some physical phenomena such as humidity, light, temperature, vibrations. The coexistence of different data types arises the problem of assigning the network resources in a fair way by taking into account possible different priorities among the traffic streams. In this paper we propose an allocation control scheme which is easy to implement, meets the limited resources of sensor nodes, and does not require extra control traffic in the WSN. Our scheme is based on the idea that the motes maintain a window with the classes of the latest transmissions. We propose an analytical model and provide an algorithm to study the performance of this allocation scheme with respect to the throughput and the fairness achieved. The model is a continuous time Markov chain which is proved to be dynamically reversible (although not reversible) and admits a product-form equilibrium distribution

Large solutions to an anisotropic quasilinear elliptic problem

In this paper we consider existence, asymptotic behavior near the boundary and uniqueness of positive solutions to the problem: divx(|∇xu| p−2∇xu)(x, y) + divy(|∇yu| q−2∇yu)(x, y) = u r (x, y) in a bounded domain Ω⊂RN×RMΩ⊂RN×RM together with the boundary condition u (x, y) = ∞ on ∂Ω. We prove that the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a solution u∈W1,p,qloc(Ω)u∈Wloc1,p,q(Ω) to this problem is r > max{p−1, q−1}. Assuming that r > q−1 ≥ p−1 > 0 we will show that the exponent q controls the blow-up rates near the boundary in the sense that all points of ∂Ω share the same profile, that depends on q and r but not on p, with the sole exception of the vertical points (where the exponent p plays a role).Fil: García Melián, Jorge. Universidad de la Laguna; EspañaFil: Rossi, Julio Daniel. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Matemática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Sabina de Lis, José C.. Universidad de la Laguna; Españ

Persistent Stochastic Non-Interference

In this paper we present an information flow security property for stochastic, cooperating, processes expressed as terms of the Performance Evaluation Process Algebra (PEPA). We introduce the notion of Persistent Stochastic Non-Interference (PSNI) based on the idea that every state reachable by a process satisfies a basic Stochastic Non-Interference (SNI) property. The structural operational semantics of PEPA allows us to give two characterizations of PSNI: the first involves a single bisimulation-like equivalence check, while the second is formulated in terms of unwinding conditions. The observation equivalence at the base of our definition relies on the notion of lumpability and ensures that, for a secure process P, the steady state probability of observing the system being in a specific state P' is independent from its possible high level interactions.Comment: In Proceedings EXPRESS/SOS 2018, arXiv:1808.0807

prospective study of clinical neurophysiological and urodynamic findings in multiple sclerosis patients undergoing percutaneous transluminal venous angioplasty

Abstract Objective Verify whether Percutaneous Transluminal Angioplasty (PTA) may affect neural conduction properties in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients, thereby modifying patients' disability, with prospective neurophysiological, urodynamic, clinical and subjective well-being evaluations. Methods In 55 out of 72 consecutively screened MS patients, the following procedures were carried out before (T0), at 2–6 months (T1) and at 6–15 months (T2) after a diagnostic phlebography, eventually followed by the PTA intervention if chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) was diagnosed: clinical/objective evaluation (Expanded Disability Status Scale, EDSS), ratings of subjective well-being, evaluation of urodynamic functions and multimodal EPs (visual, acoustic, upper and lower limbs somatosensory and motor evoked potentials). Results The number of dropouts was relatively high, and a complete set of neurophysiological and clinical data remained available for 37 patients (19 for urological investigations). The subjective well-being score significantly increased at T1 and returned close to basal values at T2, but their degree of objective disability did not change. Nevertheless, global EP-scores (indexing the impairment in conductivity of central pathways in multiple functional domains) significantly increased from T0 (7.9 ± 6.0) to T1 (9.2 ± 6.3) and from T0 to T2 (9.8 ± 6.3), but not from T1 and T2 (p > 0.05). Neurogenic urological lower tract dysfunctions slightly increased throughout the study. Conclusions The PTA intervention did not induce significant changes in disability in the present cohort of MS patients, in line with recent evidence of clinical inefficacy of this procedure. Significance Absence of multimodal neurophysiological and functional testing changes in the first 15 months following PTA suggests that conduction properties of neural pathways are unaffected by PTA. Current findings suggest that the short-lived (2–6 months), post-PTA, beneficial effect on subjective well-being measures experienced by MS patients is likely related to a placebo effect