Discussion of the enabling environments for decentralised water systems

Decentralised water supply systems are becoming increasingly affordable and commonplace in Australia and have the potential to alleviate urban water shortages and reduce pollution into natural receiving marine and freshwater streams. Learning processes are necessary to support the efficient implementation of decentralised systems. These processes reveal the complex socio-technical and institutional factors to be considered when developing an enabling environment supporting decentralised water and wastewater servicing solutions. Critical to the technological transition towards established decentralised systems is the ability to create strategic and adaptive capacity to promote learning and dialogue. Learning processes require institutional mechanisms to ensure the lessons are incorporated into the formulation of policy and regulation, through constructive involvement of key government institutions. Engagement of stakeholders is essential to the enabling environment. Collaborative learning environments using systems analysis with communities (social learning) and adaptive management techniques are useful in refining and applying scientists' and managers' knowledge (knowledge management).     

Delineating Boundaries for Imprecise Regions

In geographic information retrieval, queries often name geographic regions that do not have a well-defined boundary, such as “Southern France.” We provide two algorithmic approaches to the problem of computing reasonable boundaries of such regions based on data points that have evidence indicating that they lie either inside or outside the region. Our problem formulation leads to a number of subproblems related to red-blue point separation and minimum-perimeter polygons, many of which we solve algorithmically. We give experimental results from our implementation and a comparison of the two approaches. This research is supported by the EU-IST Project No. IST-2001-35047 (SPIRIT) and by grant WO 758/4-2 of the German Research Foundation (DFG).     

Patienten — Daten — Schutz

Patientinnen und Patienten vertrauen sich heutzutage nicht mehr nur ihrem Haus- oder Facharzt, sondern immer h?ufiger auch einer Gro?klinik („Krankenhausmaschine“) an. Schon dort entsteht die Frage, wie die ?rztliche Schweigepflicht oder besser: das Patientengeheimnis, noch aufrechterhalten werden kann. Weitere Risiken drohen dem Patientengeheimnis in der zunehmend vernetzten Verarbeitung von medizinischen Befunden z.B. in Praxisnetzen und auch in der Online-Welt, die zweifellos gro?e Vorteile für die behandlungsbedürftigen Menschen bringen. Sie werfen aber auch die Frage nach der Verantwortung für die Sicherheit, Richtigkeit und Verfügbarkeit dieser Daten auf, die nicht selten lebenswichtig sein k?nnen.     

Stability analysis for multi-agent systems using the incidence matrix: Quantized communication and formation control

The spectral properties of the incidence matrix of the communication graph are exploited to provide solutions to two multi-agent control problems. In particular, we consider the problem of state agreement with quantized communication and the problem of distance-based formation control. In both cases, stabilizing control laws are provided when the communication graph is a tree. It is shown how the relation between tree graphs and the null space of the corresponding incidence matrix encode fundamental properties for these two multi-agent control problems.     

Smooth velocity approximation for constrained systems in real-time simulation

The rapidly increasing complexity of multi-body system models in applications like vehicle dynamics, robotics and bio-mechanics requires qualitative new solution methods to slash computing times for the dynamical simulation.     

Structural sensitivity analysis of flexible multibody systems modeled with the floating frame of reference approach using the adjoint variable method

For the efficient analysis and optimization of flexible multibody systems, gradient information is often required. Next to simple and easy-to-implement finite difference approaches, analytical methods, such as the adjoint variable method, have been developed and are now well established for the sensitivity analysis in multibody dynamics. They allow the computation of exact gradients and require normally less computational effort for large-scale problems. In the current work, we apply the adjoint variable method to flexible multibody systems with kinematic loops, which are modeled using the floating frame of reference formulation. Thereby, in order to solve ordinary differential equations only, the equations of motion are brought into minimal form using coordinate partitioning, and the constraint equations at position and velocity level are incorporated in the adjoint dynamics. For testing and illustrative purposes, the procedure is applied to compute the structural gradient for a flexible piston rod of a slider–crank mechanism.     

Broadband dielectric microwave microscopy on micron length scales

We demonstrate that a near-field microwave microscope based on a transmission line resonator allows imaging in a substantially wide range of frequencies, so that the microscope properties approach those of a spatially resolved impedance analyzer. In the case of an electric probe, the broadband imaging can be used in a direct fashion to separate contributions from capacitive and resistive properties of a sample at length scales on the order of one micron. Using a microwave near-field microscope based on a transmission line resonator we imaged the local dielectric properties of a focused ion beam milled structure on a high-dielectric-constant Ba(0.6)Sr(0.4)TiO(3) thin film in the frequency range from 1.3 to 17.4 GHz. The electrostatic approximation breaks down already at frequencies above approximately 10 GHz for the probe geometry used, and a full-wave analysis is necessary to obtain qualitative information from the images.     

Towards a Mobile Code Management Environment for Complex,Real-Time,Distributed Systems

We present a novel mobile code management environment,currently under design and development. Our design employs anopen architecture, suitable for ``plug-and-play' with COTS andother groups' tools. While we have studied new algorithms, costand objective functions, and other fundamental issues, the maincontribution of this experimental research work is in the environmentitself. It should be noted that networked platforms, such asthe World Wide Web, are inherently not suitable for traditional,predictable real-time applications. Thus, real-time concernsnecessarily need to be blended with others concerns, and thetarget applications, making use of our environment, will toobe a blend of partially hard real-time and partially (or mostly)soft-real- time ones. The prototype environment will thereforesupport performance-based analysis and management focusing notonly on predictability but also on compilation, efficiency, safetyand other tradeoffs. We have selected the Java language and itsbytecode format as a representation for mobile code as well asa language for our implementation.     

An accurate approximation for the highly efficient sampling of polar scattering angle of electron elastic single-scattering events

In single-event Monte Carlo electron transport simulations, elastic scattering events dominate the changes in electron trajectories due to collisions. Classically, the polar scattering angle due to an elastic collision can be sampled efficiently from the screened Rutherford cross section. However, the screened Rutherford cross section fails for both high Z materials and when the incident electron energy becomes too low. Alternatively, improved simulation accuracy for electrons in all energy ranges and through all materials may be obtained by sampling directly from differential data derived from partial-wave-expansion method (PWEM) calculations based on theoretical atomic potential models. While sampling directly from wave calculations will yield simulation results to the best known physical accuracy, it comes at the cost of simulation time. This is due to a sampling process that is typically more involved when compared with using the screened Rutherford cross section. In this work we present a relationship capable of reproducing the moments of the differential cross section derived from PWEM calculations, resulting in good preservation of forward and backscattering peaks. The relationship is directly invertible and is as easily sampled as the Rutherford cross section. Most important, the data presented in this paper in combination with this relationship produce Monte Carlo simulation results which are comparable with those using the exact differential cross section from PWEM calculations for elements Z = 1 to 96 and for incident electron energies from 300,000 down to 50 eV.