Enlightened forest management requires reliable information on the status and condition of each forest ± interpreted from a broad context ± and of change in forest conditions over time. The process of forest planning must begin with a clear statement of goals, from which detailed objectives and management plans follow. Goals and objectives for forest management should re ̄ect the conservation va...

In multi-objective optimization the hypervolume indicator is a measure for the size of the space within a reference set that is dominated by a set of μ points. It is a common performance indicator for judging the quality of Pareto front approximations. As it does not require a-priori knowledge of the Pareto front it can also be used in a straightforward manner for guiding the search for finite ...

This paper presents some aspects related to the issues of aggregating economic indicators. Departing from the research of Gh. Paun (1983) we will prove a theorem which states that under certain, natural assumptions, it is impossible to obtain an optimum aggregation. Unlike the original work of Paun, in this paper we are giving a rather simple proof of this theorem.

The validity of the Michaelis-Menten-Briggs-Haldane approximation for single enzyme reactions has recently been improved by the formalism of the total quasi-steady-state approximation. This approach is here extended to fully competitive systems, and a criterion for its validity is provided. We show that it extends the Michaelis-Menten-Briggs-Haldane approximation for such systems for a wide ran...

In December 2003, seventeen years after the first UK research assessment exercise, Italy started up its first-ever national research evaluation, with the aim to evaluate, using the peer review method, the excellence of the national research production. The evaluation involved 20 disciplinary areas, 102 research structures, 18,500 research products and 6,661 peer reviewers (1,465 from abroad); i...

Ameisen: Die heimliche Weltmacht (Ants: Nature's Secret Power) is a nature documentary about ants. Wolfgang Thaler wrote, filmed, and directed the film, which focuses on the work of ant researcher Bert Hölldobler. The 2004 film was produced by Adi Mayer Film for Österreichischer Rundfunk (Austrian Broadcasting), a public service broadcaster headquartered in Vienna, Austria. Ants: Nature's Secre...

This paper presents a methodology to integrate life cycle assessment (LCA) in models used to design energy conversion systems. It is illustrated by an application to a thermo-economic model for the multi-objective optimization of synthetic natural gas (SNG) production from woody biomass. The life cycle inventory (LCI) is written as a function of the parameters of the thermoeconomic model. The o...

The integration of environmental impacts in the conceptual design of energy systems can be achieved by combining Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with process integration techniques. The use and the disaggregation of life cycle inventory (LCI) databases allows for extending the systematic generation of resources to services conversion chains and for including the environmental impacts in the process...

As an efficient and effective evolutionary algorithm, Differential evolution (DE) has received ever-increasing attention over recent years. However, how to make DE suitable for multi-objective optimization is still worth further studying. Moreover, various means from different perspectives are promising to promote the performance of the algorithm. In this study, we propose a novel multi-objecti...