Title of Document: IMPROVING RESILIENCE OF RAIL-BASED INTERMODAL FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS Xiaodong Zhang, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed By: Professor Elise Miller-Hooks, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering With the increasing natural and human-made disasters, the risk of an event with potential to cause major disruption to our transportation systems and their components ...

My research focuses on understanding the interactions and dynamics between crop systems and soil microbiomes in both natural and engineered systems. My overarching goal is to bridge the gap between biotechnology, agriculture, and engineering in order to understand how rhizospheres are affected by both soil chemistry and exposure to emerging contaminants of concern, with the ultimate goal of man...

Originally designed to improve the efficiency of packets forwarding, MPLS provides support for Traffic Engineering and network resilience. Constrained-based path computation is a key building block for Traffic Engineering in MPLS networks, since it allows to set-up LSPs along paths that satisfy QoS constraints. This paper deals with two distinct categories of path computation algorithms: on-lin...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America E and lawyers deal with uncertainty in very different ways. Ecologists and environmental scientists approach uncertainty as an opportunity to do research, while lawyers (including judges) often view uncertainty as a barrier to enforceability and action. This tension at the intersection of law and science is particularly troublesome ...

Ensuring resilience – the ability to remain dependable in dynamic environment – constitutes a major challenge for engineering systems-of-systems (SoS). In this paper, we take a mission-centric view on the behaviour of SoS and demonstrate how to formally reason about their dependability. We use Event-B as our modelling framework and demonstrate how to formally specify and verify generic system-w...

Recently, the academic and industrial literature has coalesced around an enhanced vision of the electric power grid that is intelligent, responsive, dynamic, adaptive and flexible. One particularly emphasized “smart-grid” property is that of resilience where healthy regions of the grid continue to operate while disrupted and perturbed regions bring themselves back to normal operation. Multi-age...

Shifting cultivation is a traditional agricultural practice in most tropical regions of the world and has the potential to provide for human livelihoods while hosting substantial biodiversity. Little is known about the resilience of shifting cultivation to increasing agricultural demands on the landscape or to unexpected disturbances. To investigate these issues, we develop a simple social-ecol...

Safety engineering standards define rigorous and controllable processes for system development. Nevertheless, safety standards differences from distinct domains are non-negligible. We focus in particular on the aviation, automotive and railway standards, all related to the transportation market. We argue that the Safety Integrity Levels are not sufficient to be used as a top level requirement f...

Cloud computing (CC) is a promising information and communication technologies (ICT) services delivery model that has already had a significant impact on Government agencies, small and medium enterprises and large organisations. Even though its adoption is moving from the early stage to mainstream, many organisations are still afraid that their resilience might deteriorate because of the additi...

Stability of dynamical systems is a central topic with applications in widespread areas such as economy, biology, physics and mechanical engineering. The dynamics of nonlinear systems may completely change due to perturbations forcing the solution to jump from a safe state into another, possibly dangerous, attractor. Such phenomena can not be traced by the widespread local stability and resilie...