Accelerated Adaptability in Pursuit of Future Alternative Systems

The Federal Aviation Adrainistration (FAA) is developing a method to determine whether future air traffic control systems will provide the benefits to the National Airspace System (NAS) that were proposed when they were conceived. The purpose of this project was to develop a set of objective measures to characterize the productivity of an individual air traffic controller. Software was developed to compute measures of airspace characteristics, controller activities, and air traffic situational characteristics. This software, the Performance and Objective Workload Evaluation Research (POWER) program, computes a set of numerical measures based on routinely collected air traffic control data. The POWER program was written to interface with the Situation Assessment Through Re-creation of Incidents (SATORI) system, originally developed to re-create operational incidents (Rodgers & Duke, 1993). An engineering validation was conducted and a psychometric assessment is underway to evaluate the reliability, validity, and utility of the measures and a subset will be chosen to characterize controller taskload and performance. POWER will then be used to measure controller performance and taskload on ATC sectors to be transitioned to future systems. These baseline taskload and performance measures will be compared to taskload and performance measures obtained from future ATC systems after system implementation. POWER will also be used to evaluate alternative future systems display configurations at the Civil Aeromedical Institute (CAMI) Air Traffic Control Future Systems Simulation Laboratory.

Performance of different cropping systems across precipitation gradient in North China Plain

In order to analyze the N mineralization process under shifting cultivation in northern Thailand, labile pools of soil organic matter were studied, which were considered to be the factors contributing to the N mineralization process. Organic C, (organic + NH4 +)-N, and hexose-C were extracted from fresh soils in the surface 0–5 cm layers with a 0.5 M K2S0. solution at 110°C in an autoclave (fraction A) or at room temperature with a reciprocal shaker (fraction B), and analyzed as labile pools of organic matter. In the traditional shifting cultivation system, the content of organic C in fraction A in the fallow fields for 8 to 15 y was 3,710 mg kg-1 while that in the fallow fields for 1 y and 3 to 5 y was 2,640 and 2,600 mg kg-1, respectively. A high correlation was observed between the contents of the labile pool in fraction A and total soil organic matter. The ratio of the pool in fraction A to total soil organic matter apparently remained constant through the input-output balance in the pool. The content of the labile pool in fraction B was the highest among the fields cultivated for 1 y after the slash and burn practice and it decreased in the course of the fallow period. The content of organic C was 548 mg kg-1 in the fields cultivated for 1 y and 235 mg kg-1 in the fallow fields for 8-15 y, respectively. There was a reverse relation between the contents of the pool in fraction B and microbial biomass. Therefore, the origin of the pool in fraction B was attributed to the microbial debris associated mainly with a decrease in the soil moisture content in the dry season. On the other hand, in the relatively intensive cultivation system, there was no significant difference in the contents of the labile pools both in fractions A and B among the land use stages, suggesting that the preservation mechanism of these pools, which was observed in the traditional cultivation system, did not operate well in the intensive system. In alternative farming systems in future, it will be essential to apply organic materials to soils to supply organic matter and to maintain the microbial biomass.

Modeling uncertainty of induced technological change

The Aerospace Corporation was asked to perform, for the Review of U.S. Human Spaceflight (HSF) Plans Committee, also known as the Augustine Committee, the task of identification and independent evaluation of existing and proposed launch vehicles which alone or in combination could satisfy future NASA mission requirements. There were 14 various launch systems to compare based upon presentations made to the HSF Committee. This paper presents the methodology used in performing this assessment and summarizes the primary findings. This Launch Vehicle Assessment focused on the alternative launch systems presented to the HSF Committee with the objective of providing a mostly qualitative, comparative evaluation on as level a playing field as possible. The assessment methodology was kept simple and straight forward, consistent with the time allowed for the study and the anticipated level of detail. The process consisted of data collection about the concepts under consideration, establishment of metrics (as well as lower level supporting metrics) and the assessment of each vehicle system. The assessment also included the degree of uncertainty associated with each system. Evaluation metrics were defined to be both meaningful and comprehensive in terms of all the various concerns that decision makers and stakeholders might have in the evaluation of the future space transportation systems for human spaceflight. The assessment did not attempt to define winners or losers, but sought to prepare information that would inform the HSF Committee and act as a guide in its processes of integrating future launch systems into future mission scenarios.

<p>There are three ‘pillars’ that define the performance or usefulness of a navigation technologies – cost, accuracy, and continuity. Navigation is a field that has been fascinating humankind for thousands of years and these pillars have been evolving with new technological advancements.  The current market in positioning and navigation is clearly dominated by GNSS. Besides being globally available, it meets two important pillars: accuracy and cost by providing the whole range of navigation accuracies at very low cost. It is also highly portable, has low power consumption, and is well suited for integration with other sensors, communication links, and databases.</p> <p>At this point in the development of navigation technology, the need for alternative positioning systems only arises because GNSS does meet the continuity pillar as it does not work in all environments. Furthermore, there has been a constant market push to develop navigation systems that are accurate, continuous and easy to afford. Needless to say, that cost, and space constraints are currently driving manufacturers of cars, portable devices (e.g. smartphones), and autonomous systems (e.g. self-driving, drones and agriculture machine systems) systems to investigate and develop next generation of low cost and small size navigation systems to meet the fast-growing autonomous vehicles and location services market demands. This presentation will provide a state of the art and future trends of sensors used for navigation of autonomous vehicles: possibilities, limitations and various design approaches.  Emphasis will be on sensors and technologies that can navigate autonomous vehicles everywhere and at any time independent of weather and light conditions. Some of the current developed and possible future system’s accuracy performance will be demonstrated through different implementations/applications using Propound Positioning Inc technologies.</p>

Measuring performance-critical characteristics of application workloads is important both for developers, who must understand and optimize the performance of codes, as well as designers and integrators of HPC systems, who must ensure that compute architectures are suitable for the intended workloads. However, if these workload characteristics are tied to architectural features that are specific to a particular system, they may not generalize well to alternative or future systems. An architecture-independent method ensures an accurate characterization of inherent program behaviour, without bias due to architecture-dependent features that vary widely between different types of accelerators. This work presents the first architecture-independent workload characterization framework for heterogeneous compute platforms, proposing a set of metrics determining the suitability and performance of an application on any parallel HPC architecture. The tool, AIWC, is a plugin for the open-source Oclgrind simulator. It supports parallel workloads and is capable of characterizing OpenCL codes currently in use in the supercomputing setting. AIWC simulates an OpenCL device by directly interpreting LLVM instructions, and the resulting metrics may be used for performance prediction and developer feedback to guide device-specific optimizations. An evaluation of the metrics collected over a subset of the Extended OpenDwarfs Benchmark Suite is also presented.

This exhaustive study, in assessing the roles of nuclear and alternative energy systems in the nation's energy future, focuses on the period between 1985 and 2010. Its intent is to illuminate the kinds of options the nation may wish to keep open in the future and to describe the actions, policies, and R and D programs that may be required to do so. The timing and the context of these decisions depend not only on the technical, social, and economic features of energy-supply technologies, but also on assumptions about future demand for energy and the possibilities for energy conservation through changes in consumption patterns and improved efficiency of the supply and end-use systems. The committee developed a three-tiered functional structure for the project. The first tier was CONAES itself, whose report embodies the ultimate findings, conclusions, and judgments of the study. To provide scientific and engineering data and economic analyses for the committee, a second tier of four panels was appointed by the committee to examine (1) energy demand and conservation, (2) energy supply and delivery systems, (3) risks and impacts of energy supply and use, and (4) various models of possible future energy systems and decision making. Each panel in turn established a number of resource groups - some two dozen in all - to address in detail an array of more particular matters. Briefly stated, recommended strategies are: (1) increased energy conservation; (2) expansion of the nation's balanced coal and nuclear electrical generation base; (3) retention of the breeder option; (4) stimulation of fluid energy development; and (5) immediate increase in research and development of new energy options to ensure availability over the long term.

The sanitary system is the most important supply system in a society. A central problem today is the provision of a future urban system which meets the requirements clearly borne out in environmental documents and action plans at local and global levels. The conventional water and wastewater systems have been questioned whether they can be considered as sustainable or not. Other small, decentralized systems have been implemented and a short description of different systems is shown. The attitudes, at different administrative levels in the society, to traditional and alternative sanitary systems are discussed. The general conclusion is that there is a strong driving force and an interest in changing the systems. However, the evaluation of the systems implemented so far shows that it is important to have time for careful and thorough investigations of new but also of existing systems in the light of the criteria for sustainability.

With the growing need for Australian cities to augment their water supplies, the community has displayed increasing interest in alternative water sources. Public attitudes have ranged from enthusiasm to concern, and in some cases have resulted in the rejection of potential new water supplies. To date, there has been little research that has attempted to examine and understand the basis of community acceptance of a new water supply system. This paper outlines a research program that aimed to develop a model of community acceptance that was consistent over different scales, source-points, end-uses and users of current and future water supply systems. It describes the development of an hypothesised model of community acceptance which incorporated a range of psycho-sociological variables. This then went through a preliminary assessment, followed by testing of the model, and finally a confirmatory stage of research. The program resulted in a robust model that can assist planners and developers in understanding and gaining community acceptance of alternative water supply systems at a range of spatial and temporal scales.

Attitudes to traditional and alternative sustainable sanitary systems

This document is the second of a two-part report. Part 1 reviewed several demonstrations of transactive control and compared them in terms of their payoff functions, control decisions, information privacy, and mathematical solution concepts. It was suggested in Part 1 that these four listed components should be adopted for meaningful comparison and design of future transactive systems. Part 2 proposes qualitative and quantitative metrics that will be needed to compare alternative transactive systems. It then uses the analysis and design principles from Part 1 while conducting more in-depth analysis of two transactive demonstrations: the American Electric Power (AEP) gridSMART Demonstration, which used a double –auction market mechanism, and a consensus method like that used in the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration. Ultimately, metrics must be devised and used to meaningfully compare alternative transactive systems. One significant contribution of this report is an observation that the decision function used for thermostat control in the AEP gridSMART Demonstration has superior performance if its decision function is recast to more accurately reflect the power that will be used under for thermostatic control under alternative market outcomes.

An ever-increasing emphasis on providing quality transportation service and meeting the customer expectations requires that a systems approach to the design of the freight truck be adopted. To meet these increasing requirements for better service, the car body and truck need to be treated as a single system and the freight truck has to be designed as an integral part of this system. Further, the freight car/truck design has to be pursued for dynamic performance level required to provide the ride quality demanded for safe transportation of a given commodity. The ride quality requirements should include vertical, lateral, and longitudinal ride quality levels. As an example, the automobile manufacturers expect that the railroad industry provide a completely damage-free environment for the transportation of automobiles. This paper discusses the current practice of freight truck design for conventional autorack cars and describes the ride quality provided by today's autorack cars. The paper proposes ride quality targets for future alternative systems for transporting automobiles. This target can be used also for current conventional autorack cars. The alternative systems, besides addressing ride quality, would address other associated requirements such as in-transit security, ease of loading/unloading, reduced transit time, reduced handling etc. All the necessary requirements for a Truck Specification are outlined including truck inspection, maintenance, repair, life cycle costs, etc. Specific quantitative requirements for these performance parameters must be set relative to the performance of today's equipment. >

For improving the sustainability and resilience of EU farming systems, it is important to assess their likely responses to future challenges under future scenarios. In the SURE-Farm project, a five-steps framework was developed to assess the resilience of farming systems. The steps are the following: 1) characterizing the farming system (resilience of what?), 2) identifying the challenges (resilience to what?), 3) identifying the desired functions (resilience for which purpose?), 4) assessing resilience capacities, and 5) assessing resilience attributes. For assessing the resilience of future farming systems, we took the same approach as for current farming systems, with the addition that future challenges were placed in the context of a set of possible future scenarios, (i.e., Eur-Agri-SSP scenarios). We evaluated future resilience in 11 case studies across the EU, using a soft coupling of different qualitative and quantitative approaches. The qualitative approach was FoPIA-SUREFarm 2, a participatory approach in which stakeholders identified critical thresholds for current systems, evaluated expected system performance when these thresholds would be exceeded, envisaged alternative future states of the systems (and their impact on indicators and resilience attributes), as well as strategies to get there. Quantitative approaches included models simulating the behavior of the systems under some specific challenges and scenarios. The models differed in assumptions and aspects of the farming systems described: Ecosystem Service modelling focused on the biophysical level (considering land cover and nitrogen fluxes), AgriPoliS considered, with an agent-based approach, socio-economic processes and interactions within the farming system, and System Dynamics, taking a holistic approach, explored some of the feedback loops mechanisms influencing the systems resilience from both a qualitative and quantitative approach. Each method highlighted different aspects of the farming systems. For each case study, results coming from different methods were discussed and compared. The FoPIA-SURE-Farm 2 assessment highlighted that most farming systems are close to critical thresholds, primarily for system challenges, but also for system indicators and resilience attributes. System indicators related to food production and economic viability were often considered to be close to critical thresholds. The alternative systems proposed by stakeholders are mostly adaptations of the current system and not transformations. In most case studies, both the current and alternative systems are moderately compatible with 'Eur-Agri-SSP1 – Agriculture on sustainable paths’, but little with other Eur-Agri-SSPs’. From the point of view of ecosystem services and nitrogen fluxes, the more resilient case studies are those able to provide multiple services at the same time (e.g., hazelnut cultivations in Italy and vegetable and fruit cultivation in Poland, able to provide good levels of both food production and carbon storage) and those well connected with other neighbouring farming systems (e.g., the Dutch case study receiving manure by the livestock sectors). The System Dynamic simulation (applied quantitatively for the Dutch and French case study) highlighted the need to develop resources that can increase farmers’ flexibility (e.g., access to cheap credit, local research and development, and local market). It also showed that innovation, networks, and cooperation contribute to building resilience against economic disturbances while highlighting the challenges for building resilience to environmental threats. From the application of AgriPoliS to the German case study it was concluded that changes in direct payment schemes not only affect the farm size structure, but also the functions of the farming system itself and therefore its resilience. The report showed complementarity between different methods and, above all, between quantitative and qualitative approaches. Qualitative approaches are needed for interaction with stakeholders, understand perceptions of stakeholders, consider available knowledge on all aspects of the farming system, including social dimensions, and perform a good basis for developing and parameterizing quantitative models. Quantitative methods allow quantifying the consequences of mental models, operationalizing the impact of stresses and strategies to tackle them and help to unveil unintended consequences, but are limited in their reach. Both are needed to assess resilience of farming systems and suggest strategies for improvement and to help stakeholders to wider their views regarding potential challenges and ways to tackle them.

Design and operational aspect of LOX/LH2 propulsion system of reusable vehicle testing (RVT)