Building the Policy Ecosystem in Europe for Cultivation and Use of Perennial Biomass Crops

Perennial biomass crops (PBCs) can potentially contribute to all ten Common Agricultural Policy (2023-27) objectives and up to eleven of the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals. This paper discusses interlinked issues that must be considered in the expansion of PBC production: i) available land; ii) yield potential; iii) integration into farming systems; iv) research and development requirements; v) utilisation options; and vi) market systems and the socio-economic environment. The challenge to create development pathways that are acceptable for all actors, relies on measurement, reporting and verification of greenhouse gas emissions reduction in combination with other environmental, economic and social aspects. This paper makes the following policy recommendations to enable greater PBC deployment: 1) incentivise farmers and land managers through specific policy measures, including carbon pricing, to allocate their less productive and less profitable land for uses which deliver demonstrable greenhouse gas reductions; 2) enable greenhouse gas mitigation markets to develop and offer secure contracts for commercial developers of verifiable low carbon bioenergy and bio-products; 3) support innovation in biomass utilisation value chains; and 4) continue long-term, strategic research and development and education for positive environmental, economic and social sustainability impacts. © 2023 ETA-Florence Renewable Energies

On Connectivity Limits in Ad Hoc Networks with Beamforming Antennas

Abstract Multihop wireless networks will play an important role in future communication networks. Beamforming antennas have shown great potential to improve the connectivity in these networks; however only heuristic approaches exist to assess the benefits of this technology. Using the popular "keyhole" antenna model, we formulate a Mixed Integer Program (MIP) capable of acquiring optimal antenna configurations for path probability with various auxiliary constraints, node degree, and k-connectivity. We employ a problem-specific large-scale optimization approach named "column generation" to be able to cope with realistic scenario sizes without sacrificing optimality. In a case study, we show the feasibility of our optimization approach and demonstrate that "smarter" beamforming heuristics would still have plenty of room to improve the connectivity of such a network.</p

Optimal Routing with Single Backup Path Protection

Today's information society relies increasingly on advanced communication networks. This has lead to massive investments in increased communication network capacity. In order to utilize these investments the network operators perform traffic engineering, i.e., route communication in order to maximize the utilization of the capital invested in the communication network. Here we will consider traffic engineering of circuit switched networks where protection against single link failures is required