Towards a next phase of port reform in Africa: an analysis of context, drivers, performance and options

At the Department of Energy's (DOE) Hanford Site in south central Washington State, there are 177 large underground tanks with associated facilities that are used to store radioactive hazardous waste. Some of these tanks have leaked, with the result that there is tank waste in the Site's groundwater. DOE's Office of River Protection (ORP) plans to remediate these storage facilities (WP-13678, ''Integrated Mission Acceleration Plan'') by retrieving waste from the tanks, performing facility stabilization, and implementing soil cleanup. Before such work can be performed, performance analyses of various options must be performed for OW, DOE Headquarters, and the Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology). Because of the large number of performance analyses for each tank and the large number of tanks, performance analyses for the different agencies will be integrated to the maximum extent possible. This document focuses on the requirements for performance analyses used to satisfy Ecology requirements. There are three types of large underground tanks at Hanford: single-shell tanks (SST), double-shell tanks (DST), and miscellaneous underground storage tanks (MUST). The SSTs have a storage capacity ranging from 50,000 to 1,000,000 gallons. Although waste is still present, they do not meet current regulatory requirements for the addition of waste. The DSTs have a storage capacity ranging from 500,000 to 1,160,000 gallons and are expected to meet current regulatory requirements. The SSTs are grouped into twelve tank farms (A, AX, B, BX, BY, C, S, SX, T, TX, TY, and U). For regulatory purposes, the twelve tank farms are grouped into seven waste management areas (WMA) (MAX, BBXIBY, C, S/SX, T, TWTY, and U), although the T and TWTY WMAs are often treated as a unit. The DSTs are grouped only into tank farms (AN, AP, AW, AX, AY, AZ, and SY). MUSTS are smaller tanks (maximum size of 50,000 gallons) that are scattered in various farms. Section 2.0 provides an overview and summary of this document. Section 3.0 describes the requirements of performance analyses. Section 4 provides the contents of the master performance assessment.

Environmental analysis of practical design options for enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) through life-cycle assessment

After comparing and analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of various parametric modeling methods, the Partial Least Squares (PLS) method is used to establish a manufacturing cost estimation model based on the overall engine parameters for a civil high bypass ratio turbofan engine, to estimate the manufacturing cost in support of value engineering and to conduct a trade-off analysis of product performance, weight, and cost design options.

Motivated by the impressive performance of cost-based scheduling for media streaming, we investigate its effectiveness in detail and analyze opportunities for further tunings and enhancements. Guided by this analysis, we propose a highly efficient enhancement technique that optimizes the scheduling decisions to increase the number of requests serviced concurrently and enhance user-perceived quality-of-service. We also analyze the waiting-time predictability achieved by the new technique. The simulation results show that it can achieve significant performance improvements while providing users with highly accurate expected waiting times.

India has about 12 major ports under the aegis of the Indian Government, in its approximately 7,500 km long coastline and competing with another 200 state- government-run ones. Over the last 20 years, the Indian government has implemented several reforms. This article answers two research questions. RQ1: Have port reforms improved port performance? RQ2: Do ports with overlapping hinterlands compete, or does one port’s performance complement the other? The article proposed a composite operational port performance index (PPI) and carried out a breakpoint (segmented) regression analysis to study the impact of port reforms. This article makes three crucial propositions––First, port performance affects its output, that is, the ship calls when competition is high, but the same does not hold if the port enjoys monopoly or oligopoly status or due to other factors such as cargo demand. Second, performance of ports with lower capacity, also referred to as satellite ports, is affected by the performance of its complementing ports with higher capacity. Third, Reforms may lead to competition and cannibalisation of profits and growth of ports in a dynamic environment.

Need for Data security over the IP network is raising day by day. One of the security options i.e. IPSec provides security protocols including cipher and authentication to secure network traffic. Algorithms being used in these protocols are highly CPU intensive. Network equipment providers integrate special cryptographic accelerators in SoCs to offload the IPSec processing from CPU. Various level of hardware support is available for IPSec protocol offload, ranging from independent cipher and authentication processing to handling IPSec protocol features in the hardware. This paper covers the comparative analysis of various hardware offload options. The analysis is supported by IPSec protocol offload based implementation and associated test results on one of the Freescale's QorIQ platforms.

Latency performance analysis of low layers function split for URLLC applications in 5G networks

Design Space Exploration (DSE) analysis techniques represent a data-centric approach to integrating performance analysis in early design phases when there is the greatest potential to cheaply improve the energy efficiency of a building. We focus on a novel extension of DSE called Universal Design Space Exploration (UDSE), which leverages massive databases of pre-simulated analysis that represent all possible outcomes of common analysis workflows. These databases, called Design Spaces, become “universal” when a single pre-simulated design space can be re-applied to future unknown projects. Unlike current simulation methods, which require a design to exist before it can be analyzed and often take minutes or hours to simulate, UDSE leverages pre-simulation to deliver rapid and relevant insight as new designs are conceptualized. The data underpinning UDSE enables advanced statistical and Artificial Intelligence methods, allowing UDSE to deliver a greater understanding of the larger problem being explored, rather than simply delivering analysis of several pre-conceived design options. We believe that UDSE can provide instantaneous, relevant analysis for all building design projects at negligible cost. This paper has two main goals, to develop a relevant Universal Design Space that showcases the potential of UDSE and to release this data freely to industry and academia; thereby lowering the barrier to entry to digital literacy in statistics, ML and AI within the architecture, engineering, construction (AEC) industry.

Historical Analysis of Exotic Options: A General Framework

The Fifth Generation (5G) radio networks are expected to appear first according to so called non-standalone deployment option, which was created as a set of early specifications by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). The non- standalone option has its basis in dual- connectivity technique, which allows the use of legacy network and which aims at reliability of connection, coverage and yet very high throughput. This article conducts a performance analysis of the 5G non-standalone option for a split bearer in the user plane by means of simulations. The analysis focuses on the factors that influence the throughput and latency, as well as the impacted receiver window. The study addresses dual- connectivity options, where a slower connection is serving concurrently with the high performing 5G. Further analysis follows for the impact of improving the packet delay observed over the slower transmission path, the impact of packet data arrival rate, as well as the tolerated amount of data in-flight dependent on the size of the protocol unit Sequence Number.

The paper aims to develop a site selection procedure for solar-diesel hybrid systems using a multi-criteria performance analysis of site options. The site selection process using this multi-criteria approach was carried out on the example of Kungurtug rural settlement (Tyva Republic). The area surrounding this settlement was analyzed, revealing four possible sites for a solar-diesel system. For evaluating the performance of these site options, the following criteria were adopted: ease of installation and maintenance of the solar-diesel hybrid system; surface topography and soil quality; convenience of the photovoltaic cell layout; environmental impact of the solar-diesel hybrid system; opportunities for further expansion of the system; orientation potential of the photovoltaic cell. In order to assess the significance of the concordance coefficient, the distribution quantile was determined, amounting to 16.2. For 5 degrees of freedom and a significance level of 0.05, the table value of the concordance coefficient amounted to 16.2. Since the distribution quantile is greater than the table value, the concordance coefficient can be considered significant (95% confidence level), indicating agreement between expert opinions. Experts ranked the site options to obtain relative performance estimates for the criteria; numeric indicators were converted into the relative estimates using linear transformation formulas. The multi-criteria performance estimates of the possible options were calculated for arithmetic mean and harmonic convolutions. After comparing the site options for the solar-diesel system, the second variant characterized by the highest criterion scores was selected for Kungurtug settlement. As a result, a site selection procedure for the elements of solar-diesel hybrid systems was developed using the theory of multi-criteria optimization and the method of expert evaluations, allowing a set of technical, economic, climatic, and environmental criteria to be taken into account.

With the increasing capabilities of computer modeling and simulation technology, the analysis of options for maximizing gains in energy efficiency for buildings can be realized more efficiently and cost effectively. Conducting building performance simulations allows for the analysis of the environmental impacts of buildings and the economic vitality of green building techniques. Commercial buildings consume nearly one-fifth of all the energy used in the United States, costing more than $200 billion each year. The building envelope plays a key role in determining how much energy is required for the operation of a building. Individual thermal and solar properties of glazing and shading systems only provide information based on static evaluations, but it is very important to assess the efficiency of these systems as a whole assembly under site-specific conditions. This paper presents a case study that was conducted using computer simulation tools to evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of ...

The Skipper-CCDs, a special type of charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor that features sub-electron readout noise levels, was proposed decades ago. However, only in recent years it has been possible to develop large size Skipper-CCDs ensuring stable operation. Their extreme low noise operation makes them suitable for experiments that require low thresholds and high energy resolution, such as dark matter and neutrino interactions detection, and more recently quantum-imaging and astronomy. New experiments are planning to use kilograms of active silicon from Skipper-CCDs as sensitive mass. In this way, they can achieve extremely low detection thresholds and a high probability of particle interaction. However, this approach needs arrays of thousands of Skipper- CCDs operating at the same time imposing challenging requirements. Also, introduction of this technology in astronomy and quantum-imaging applications requires a large number of channels per sensor to speed up the readout. The front-end needs to be redesigned from scratch: it must achieve low noise performance, be simple for easy integration and allow the routing of thousands of channels out of the sensors with minimal connections. This paper presents a detailed analysis of options for the front-end electronics and their noise performance. It describes a novel way of using a dual-slope integrator with minimal components to pile up the charge of consecutive readouts of the same pixel in a concept that we call a multi-slope integrator. This reduces drastically the output bandwidth, simplifying the wiring and the warm electronics. These proposals will allow the generation of new scientific instruments based on Skippers-CCD arrays.