Development of Seismic Fragility Functions for a Moment Resisting Reinforced Concrete Framed Structure

Understanding the seismic vulnerability of building structures is important for seismic engineers, building owners, risk insurers and governments. Seismic vulnerability defines a buildings predisposition to be damaged as a result of an earthquake of a given severity. There are two components to seismic risk; the seismic hazard and the exposure of the structural inventory to any given earthquake event. This paper demonstrates the development of fragility curves at different damage states using a detailed mechanical model of a moment resisting reinforced concrete structure typical of Southern Europe. The mechanical model consists of a complex three-dimensional finite element model of the reinforced concrete moment resisting frame structure and is used to define the damage states through pushover analysis. Fragility curves are also defined using the HAZUS macroseismic methodology and the Risk-UE macroseismic methodology. Comparison of the mechanically modelled and HAZUS fragility curve shows good agreement while the Risk-UE methodology shows reasonably poor agreement.

Interactive management control via analytic hierarchy process (AHP). An empirical study in a public university hospital

Management control in public university hospitals is a challenging task because of continuous changes due to external pressures (e.g. economic pressures, stakeholder focuses and scientific progress) and internal complexities (top management turnover, shared leadership, technological evolution, and researcher oriented mission). Interactive budgeting contributed to improving vertical and horizontal communication between hospital and stakeholders and between different organizational levels. This paper describes an application of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to enhance interactive budgeting in one of the biggest public university hospital in Italy. AHP improved budget allocation facilitating elicitation and formalization of units' needs. Furthermore, AHP facilitated vertical communication among manager and stakeholders, as it allowed multilevel hierarchical representation of hospital needs, and horizontal communication among staff of the same hospital, as it allowed units' need prioritization and standardization, with a scientific multi-criteria approach, without using complex mathematics. Finally, AHP allowed traceability of a complex decision making processes (as budget allocation), this aspect being of paramount importance in public sectors, where managers are called to respond to many different stakeholders about their choices.

Managed Acceleration for In-Memory Database Analytic Workloads

In-Memory Databases (IMDBs), such as SAP HANA, enable new levels of database performance by removing the disk bottleneck and by compressing data in memory. The consequence of this improved performance means that reports and analytic queries can now be processed on demand. Therefore, the goal is now to provide near real-time responses to compute and data intensive analytic queries. To facilitate this, much work has investigated the use of acceleration technologies within the database context. While current research into the application of these technologies has yielded positive results, they have tended to focus on single database tasks or on isolated single user requests. This paper uses SHEPARD, a framework for managing accelerated tasks across shared heterogeneous resources, to introduce acceleration into an IMDB. Results show how, using SHEPARD, multiple simultaneous user queries all receive speed-up by using a shared pool of accelerators. Results also show that offloading analytic tasks onto accelerators can have indirect benefits for other database workloads by reducing contention for CPU resources.