Urban food planning, city logistics and sustainability: the role of the wholesale produce market. The cases of Parma and Bologna food hubs.

At global level, the population is increasingly concentrating in the cities. In Europe, around 75% of the population lives in urban areas and, according to the European Environmental Agency (2010), urban population is foreseen to increase up to 80 % by 2020. At the same time, the quality of life in the cities is declining and urban pollution keeps increasing in terms of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, waste, noise, and lack of greenery. Many of European cities struggle to cope with social, economic and environmental problems resulting from pressures such as overcrowding or decline, social inequity, health problems related to food security and pollution. Nowadays local authorities try to solve these problems related to the environmental sustainability through various urban logistics measures, which directly and indirectly affect the urban food supply system, thus an integrated approach including freight transport and food provisioning policies issues is needed. This research centres on the urban food transport system and its impact on the city environmental sustainability. The main question that drives the research analysis is "How the urban food distribution system affects the ecological sustainability in modern cities?" The research analyses the city logistics project for food transport implemented in Parma, Italy, by the wholesale produce market. The case study investigates the renewed role of the wholesale market in the urban food supply chain as commercial and logistic operator, referring to the concept of food hub. Then, a preliminary analysis on the urban food transport for the city of Bologna is presented. The research aims at suggesting a methodological framework to estimate the urban food demand, the urban food supply and to assess the urban food transport performance, in order to identify external costs indicators that help policymakers in evaluating the environmental sustainability of different logistics measures

Mortgage securitization and its credit risk control

This dissertation concentrate on the mortgage securitization and its credit risk, which are criticized as the main causes of the financial crisis. From the point of the veiw of mortgage's evolution, the nature, structure and function of mortgage has been radically changed, yet the mortgage law did not give appropriate response to this market change. Meanwhile, the U.S legilslations facilitating the mortgage securitization also have rotten the legal foundations for mortgage market self-regulation and sustained development. In contrast, the EU covered bond system has kept financial stability for 200 years' time, and their statutory approach has been proved to be able to control the credit risk and incentive problems very well, in combination of market self-regulation and public regulation. So the future reform should be directed to strengthen the market's capacity of self-regulation and improve the public regulation. For the development of mortgage securitization in China, it is suggested to introduce the EU covered bond system for the reason of the equilibrium between funding efficiency and financial stability.

Social inclusion of vulnerable groups through participatory and emancipatory approaches. Implementing active citizenship and socially innovative actions in the framework of civil & human rights model of disability

The research hypothesis of the thesis is that “an open participation in the co-creation of the services and environments, makes life easier for vulnerable groups”; assuming that the participatory and emancipatory approaches are processes of possible actions and changes aimed at facilitating people’s lives. The adoption of these approaches is put forward as the common denominator of social innovative practices that supporting inclusive processes allow a shift from a medical model to a civil and human rights approach to disability. The theoretical basis of this assumption finds support in many principles of Inclusive Education and the main focus of the hypothesis of research is on participation and emancipation as approaches aimed at facing emerging and existing problems related to inclusion. The framework of reference for the research is represented by the perspectives adopted by several international documents concerning policies and interventions to promote and support the leadership and participation of vulnerable groups. In the first part an in-depth analysis of the main academic publications on the central themes of the thesis has been carried out. After investigating the framework of reference, the analysis focuses on the main tools of participatory and emancipatory approaches, which are able to connect with the concepts of active citizenship and social innovation. In the second part two case studies concerning participatory and emancipatory approaches in the areas of concern are presented and analyzed as example of the improvement of inclusion, through the involvement and participation of persons with disability. The research has been developed using a holistic and interdisciplinary approach, aimed at providing a knowledge-base that fosters a shift from a situation of passivity and care towards a new scenario based on the person’s commitment in the elaboration of his/her own project of life.

Stream sediments analysis for geochemical mapping of Romagna Apennines (Northern Italy): monitoring and management tool of environmental resources at various scales

Geochemical mapping is a valuable tool for the control of territory that can be used not only in the identification of mineral resources and geological, agricultural and forestry studies but also in the monitoring of natural resources by giving solutions to environmental and economic problems. Stream sediments are widely used in the sampling campaigns carried out by the world's governments and research groups for their characteristics of broad representativeness of rocks and soils, for ease of sampling and for the possibility to conduct very detailed sampling In this context, the environmental role of stream sediments provides a good basis for the implementation of environmental management measures, in fact the composition of river sediments is an important factor in understanding the complex dynamics that develop within catchment basins therefore they represent a critical environmental compartment: they can persistently incorporate pollutants after a process of contamination and release into the biosphere if the environmental conditions change. It is essential to determine whether the concentrations of certain elements, in particular heavy metals, can be the result of natural erosion of rocks containing high concentrations of specific elements or are generated as residues of human activities related to a certain study area. This PhD thesis aims to extract from an extensive database on stream sediments of the Romagna rivers the widest spectrum of informations. The study involved low and high order stream in the mountain and hilly area, but also the sediments of the floodplain area, where intensive agriculture is active. The geochemical signals recorded by the stream sediments will be interpreted in order to reconstruct the natural variability related to bedrock and soil contribution, the effects of the river dynamics, the anomalous sites, and with the calculation of background values be able to evaluate their level of degradation and predict the environmental risk.

Knowledge Patterns for the Web: extraction, tranformation and reuse

This thesis aims at investigating methods and software architectures for discovering what are the typical and frequently occurring structures used for organizing knowledge in the Web. We identify these structures as Knowledge Patterns (KPs). KP discovery needs to address two main research problems: the heterogeneity of sources, formats and semantics in the Web (i.e., the knowledge soup problem) and the difficulty to draw relevant boundary around data that allows to capture the meaningful knowledge with respect to a certain context (i.e., the knowledge boundary problem). Hence, we introduce two methods that provide different solutions to these two problems by tackling KP discovery from two different perspectives: (i) the transformation of KP-like artifacts to KPs formalized as OWL2 ontologies; (ii) the bottom-up extraction of KPs by analyzing how data are organized in Linked Data. The two methods address the knowledge soup and boundary problems in different ways. The first method provides a solution to the two aforementioned problems that is based on a purely syntactic transformation step of the original source to RDF followed by a refactoring step whose aim is to add semantics to RDF by select meaningful RDF triples. The second method allows to draw boundaries around RDF in Linked Data by analyzing type paths. A type path is a possible route through an RDF that takes into account the types associated to the nodes of a path. Then we present K~ore, a software architecture conceived to be the basis for developing KP discovery systems and designed according to two software architectural styles, i.e, the Component-based and REST. Finally we provide an example of reuse of KP based on Aemoo, an exploratory search tool which exploits KPs for performing entity summarization.

Rigorous results in Spin Glasses and Monomer-Dimer systems

In this work I reported recent results in the field of Statistical Mechanics of Equilibrium, and in particular in Spin Glass models and Monomer Dimer models . We start giving the mathematical background and the general formalism for Spin (Disordered) Models with some of their applications to physical and mathematical problems. Next we move on general aspects of the theory of spin glasses, in particular to the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model which is of fundamental interest for the work. In Chapter 3, we introduce the Multi-species Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model (MSK), we prove the existence of the thermodynamical limit and the Guerra's Bound for the quenched pressure together with a detailed analysis of the annealed and the replica symmetric regime. The result is a multidimensional generalization of the Parisi's theory. Finally we brie y illustrate the strategy of the Panchenko's proof of the lower bound. In Chapter 4 we discuss the Aizenmann-Contucci and the Ghirlanda-Guerra identities for a wide class of Spin Glass models. As an example of application, we discuss the role of these identities in the proof of the lower bound. In Chapter 5 we introduce the basic mathematical formalism of Monomer Dimer models. We introduce a Gaussian representation of the partition function that will be fundamental in the rest of the work. In Chapter 6, we introduce an interacting Monomer-Dimer model. Its exact solution is derived and a detailed study of its analytical properties and related physical quantities is performed. In Chapter 7, we introduce a quenched randomness in the Monomer Dimer model and show that, under suitable conditions the pressure is a self averaging quantity. The main result is that, if we consider randomness only in the monomer activity, the model is exactly solvable.

Fault detection, diagnosis and active fault tolerant control for a satellite attitude control system

Modern control systems are becoming more and more complex and control algorithms more and more sophisticated. Consequently, Fault Detection and Diagnosis (FDD) and Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) have gained central importance over the past decades, due to the increasing requirements of availability, cost efficiency, reliability and operating safety. This thesis deals with the FDD and FTC problems in a spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control System (ADCS). Firstly, the detailed nonlinear models of the spacecraft attitude dynamics and kinematics are described, along with the dynamic models of the actuators and main external disturbance sources. The considered ADCS is composed of an array of four redundant reaction wheels. A set of sensors provides satellite angular velocity, attitude and flywheel spin rate information. Then, general overviews of the Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI), Fault Estimation (FE) and Fault Tolerant Control (FTC) problems are presented, and the design and implementation of a novel diagnosis system is described. The system consists of a FDI module composed of properly organized model-based residual filters, exploiting the available input and output information for the detection and localization of an occurred fault. A proper fault mapping procedure and the nonlinear geometric approach are exploited to design residual filters explicitly decoupled from the external aerodynamic disturbance and sensitive to specific sets of faults. The subsequent use of suitable adaptive FE algorithms, based on the exploitation of radial basis function neural networks, allows to obtain accurate fault estimations. Finally, this estimation is actively exploited in a FTC scheme to achieve a suitable fault accommodation and guarantee the desired control performances. A standard sliding mode controller is implemented for attitude stabilization and control. Several simulation results are given to highlight the performances of the overall designed system in case of different types of faults affecting the ADCS actuators and sensors.

NLGA based Active Control in Aerospace: fault tolerability, disturbance rejection, and parameter estimation

A new control scheme has been presented in this thesis. Based on the NonLinear Geometric Approach, the proposed Active Control System represents a new way to see the reconfigurable controllers for aerospace applications. The presence of the Diagnosis module (providing the estimation of generic signals which, based on the case, can be faults, disturbances or system parameters), mean feature of the depicted Active Control System, is a characteristic shared by three well known control systems: the Active Fault Tolerant Controls, the Indirect Adaptive Controls and the Active Disturbance Rejection Controls. The standard NonLinear Geometric Approach (NLGA) has been accurately investigated and than improved to extend its applicability to more complex models. The standard NLGA procedure has been modified to take account of feasible and estimable sets of unknown signals. Furthermore the application of the Singular Perturbations approximation has led to the solution of Detection and Isolation problems in scenarios too complex to be solved by the standard NLGA. Also the estimation process has been improved, where multiple redundant measuremtent are available, by the introduction of a new algorithm, here called "Least Squares - Sliding Mode". It guarantees optimality, in the sense of the least squares, and finite estimation time, in the sense of the sliding mode. The Active Control System concept has been formalized in two controller: a nonlinear backstepping controller and a nonlinear composite controller. Particularly interesting is the integration, in the controller design, of the estimations coming from the Diagnosis module. Stability proofs are provided for both the control schemes. Finally, different applications in aerospace have been provided to show the applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed NLGA-based Active Control System.