Plant diseases continue to challenge our global agricultural production systems resulting in an average of 13% annual yield loss despite our best efforts to manage them with fungicides, resistant cultivars, and a variety of agronomic practices. About forty years ago the concepts of biological control were first developed. Interest in the development of “nature’s own products” or biological cont...

Lemna spp. are the standard test species representing aquatic macrophytes in the current risk assessment schemes for herbicides and plant growth regulators in the European Union and North America. At a Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) 2008 workshop on Aquatic Macrophyte Risk Assessment for Pesticides (AMRAP), a Species Sensitivity Distribution (SSD) working group was fo...

In-plant railroad engine scheduling involves routing and scheduling decisions for a heterogeneous fleet of switching engines to serve a set of time-windowand capacity-constrained transportation requests. Despite an ever-increasing competition, the current planning is purely by pencil and paper. Our paper describes the mathematical and algorithmic developments for addressing in-plant railroad de...

Thirty years after the production of the first generation of genetically modified plants we are now set to move into a new era of recombinant crop technology through the application of synthetic biology to engineer new and complex input and output traits. The use of synthetic biology technologies will represent more than incremental additions of transgenes, but rather the directed design of com...

The paper describes a new approach to generate plant models automatically at the end of the plant engineering process using a simulation model catalogue. Such a model can be used to test the functionality of the plant by simulation before it is built and to simulate and optimise the integrated control functions using Computer Aided Control System Design (CACSD) tools. To demonstrate the feasibi...

In this paper we propose a methodology for coordinating a group of mobile robots that go through predefined paths in a dynamic industrial environment. The technique is developed to be implemented into a real industrial framework. Coordination diagrams are used for representing the possible collisions among the vehicles. We exploit this information for developing a centralized and incremental pl...

In this study, the Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) C needles (i.e. the current-year-needles) were used as bioindicators in determining the aerial distribution pattern of sulphur emissions around industrial point sources at Kemi, Northern Finland. The average sulphur concentration in the C needles was 897 mg/kg (d.w.), with a standard deviation of 118 mg/kg (d.w.) and range 740 – 1350 mg/kg (d....

Model predictive control has proved its effectiveness in many industrial applications. Predictive algorithms are available in various commercial control packages but their implementation costs could be considerable. Control of industrial processes is often realized using small industrial controllers that offer only simple control structures, like PID control loop. The aim of the paper is to der...

Variations in sampling time, or sampling jitter, is a common industrial control problem. This paper investigates the performance of industrial PI and PID controllers in the presence of sampling jitter. The commonly employed controller performance assessment (CPA) benchmark index is used on a wide variety of industrial plant models to show that while the PI control is relatively immune to jitter...

We report the production of hGM-CSF cytokine in leaves of industrial tobacco cultivars DH-17 and DH-27 by using Agrobacterium-mediated transient expression. We prove the concept that very high biomass industrial tobacco plants are suitable platforms for rapid, low cost production of foreign proteins. Successful transient expression of the GM-CSF was achieved in less than three months, opening t...