Suburban, exurban, and rural development in the United States consumes nearly 1 million hectares of land per year and is a leading threat to biodiversity. In response to this threat, conservation development has been advanced as a way to combine land development and land conservation while providing functional protection for natural resources. Yet, although conservation development techniques h...

There are two main issues to be resolved in order that design tools can be used in cooperative mode, each communicating with the other. Firstly, there is a need to put in place a consistent product model of a building and its systems from which disparate design tools can obtain their inputs and return their outputs. Secondly, there is the requirement to manage the transactions between users and...

Distributed directory protocols for shared objects play an important role in providing access to higher level abstractions like transactional memory. They offer primitives to retrieve data and read it, or to move data and allow to write it. This chapter describes directory protocols for large-scale distributed systems and discusses the subtleties of incorporating them in a large-scale distribut...

The insight and experience gained by a researcher are often lost because the current productive and analytics software are inherently data-centric, disconnected, and scattered. The connected nature of insight and experience can be captured if the applications themselves are connected. How connected applications concept is implemented in COnstruct cheMical and BIological NEtwork (COMBINE), a nov...

This paper discusses the dimensioning of buffers and the bandwidth allocation for data traffic in the ATM network. Data traffic is notoriously complex and bursty, making such dimensioning a difficult task. However, the COMBINE project, when dimensioning their interworking units (IWUs), adopted a Poissonian packet arrival model, based upon the argument that burstiness at timescales higher than t...

Modify the scatterer configuration of a planar, finitehorizon Lorentz process in a bounded domain. Sinai asked in 1981 whether for the diffusively scaled variant of the modified process convergence to Brownian motion still holds. The main result of the work answers Sinai’s question in the affirmative. Other types of local perturbations are also investigated: finite horizon periodic Lorentz proc...

Traditional and fuzzy control correspond to two different cases: traditional control is applicable when we have a precise knowledge of the controlled system, and possible uncertainties are described in probabilistic terms (as a noise). Fuzzy control (see, e.g., [S85, B91, L90]) is applicable in the situation when uncertainty is described in terms of natural language like “small”, “to some exten...

A series of new dispiro[fluorene-9',6,9'',12-indeno[1,2b]fluorenes] (DSF-IFs) has been synthesised. These new building blocks for blue-light-emitting devices and electroactive polymers combine indenofluorene (IF) and spirobifluorene (SBF) properties. We report here our synthetic investigations towards these new structures and their thermal, structural, photophysical and electrochemical properti...

A great deal of work has been carried out in the area of information modelling to support the sharing of information across participants in a construction project. Efforts in this area include projects such as ATLAS (Bohms et al., 1994) (for large scale engineering), COMBINE (Dubois et al., 1995) (for HVAC and building design), RATAS (Björk, 1994) and ICON (Aouad et al., 1995) (for building des...