Asset management of wastewater networks

Asset Management (AM) is a set of procedures operable at the strategic-tacticaloperational level, for the management of the physical asset’s performance, associated risks and costs within its whole life-cycle. AM combines the engineering, managerial and informatics points of view. In addition to internal drivers, AM is driven by the demands of customers (social pull) and regulators (environmental mandates and economic considerations). AM can follow either a top-down or a bottom-up approach. Considering rehabilitation planning at the bottom-up level, the main issue would be to rehabilitate the right pipe at the right time with the right technique. Finding the right pipe may be possible and practicable, but determining the timeliness of the rehabilitation and the choice of the techniques adopted to rehabilitate is a bit abstruse. It is a truism that rehabilitating an asset too early is unwise, just as doing it late may have entailed extra expenses en route, in addition to the cost of the exercise of rehabilitation per se. One is confronted with a typical ‘Hamlet-isque dilemma’ – ‘to repair or not to repair’; or put in another way, ‘to replace or not to replace’. The decision in this case is governed by three factors, not necessarily interrelated – quality of customer service, costs and budget in the life cycle of the asset in question. The goal of replacement planning is to find the juncture in the asset’s life cycle where the cost of replacement is balanced by the rising maintenance costs and the declining level of service. System maintenance aims at improving performance and maintaining the asset in good working condition for as long as possible. Effective planning is used to target maintenance activities to meet these goals and minimize costly exigencies. The main objective of this dissertation is to develop a process-model for asset replacement planning. The aim of the model is to determine the optimal pipe replacement year by comparing, temporally, the annual operating and maintenance costs of the existing asset and the annuity of the investment in a new equivalent pipe, at the best market price. It is proposed that risk cost provide an appropriate framework to decide the balance between investment for replacing or operational expenditures for maintaining an asset. The model describes a practical approach to estimate when an asset should be replaced. A comprehensive list of criteria to be considered is outlined, the main criteria being a visà- vis between maintenance and replacement expenditures. The costs to maintain the assets should be described by a cost function related to the asset type, the risks to the safety of people and property owing to declining condition of asset, and the predicted frequency of failures. The cost functions reflect the condition of the existing asset at the time the decision to maintain or replace is taken: age, level of deterioration, risk of failure. The process model is applied in the wastewater network of Oslo, the capital city of Norway, and uses available real-world information to forecast life-cycle costs of maintenance and rehabilitation strategies and support infrastructure management decisions. The case study provides an insight into the various definitions of ‘asset lifetime’ – service life, economic life and physical life. The results recommend that one common value for lifetime should not be applied to the all the pipelines in the stock for investment planning in the long-term period; rather it would be wiser to define different values for different cohorts of pipelines to reduce the uncertainties associated with generalisations for simplification. It is envisaged that more criteria the municipality is able to include, to estimate maintenance costs for the existing assets, the more precise will the estimation of the expected service life be. The ability to include social costs enables to compute the asset life, not only based on its physical characterisation, but also on the sensitivity of network areas to social impact of failures. The type of economic analysis is very sensitive to model parameters that are difficult to determine accurately. The main value of this approach is the effort to demonstrate that it is possible to include, in decision-making, factors as the cost of the risk associated with a decline in level of performance, the level of this deterioration and the asset’s depreciation rate, without looking at age as the sole criterion for making decisions regarding replacements.

A Law and Economics Analysis of Lobbying Regulation Towards an optimal structure through the Cost Indicator Index

This research primarily represents a contribution to the lobbying regulation research arena. It introduces an index which for the first time attempts to measure the direct compliance costs of lobbying regulation. The Cost Indicator Index (CII) offers a brand new platform for qualitative and quantitative assessment of adopted lobbying laws and proposals of those laws, both in the comparative and the sui generis dimension. The CII is not just the only new tool introduced in the last decade, but it is the only tool available for comparative assessments of the costs of lobbying regulations. Beside the qualitative contribution, the research introduces an additional theoretical framework for complementary qualitative analysis of the lobbying laws. The Ninefold theory allows a more structured assessment and classification of lobbying regulations, both by indication of benefits and costs. Lastly, this research introduces the Cost-Benefit Labels (CBL). These labels might improve an ex-ante lobbying regulation impact assessment procedure, primarily in the sui generis perspective. In its final part, the research focuses on four South East European countries (Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia), and for the first time brings them into the discussion and calculates their CPI and CII scores. The special focus of the application was on Serbia, whose proposal on the Law on Lobbying has been extensively analysed in qualitative and quantitative terms, taking into consideration specific political and economic circumstances of the country. Although the obtained results are of an indicative nature, the CII will probably find its place within the academic and policymaking arena, and will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of lobbying regulations worldwide.

The Influence of Direct Democracy on Agency Costs: Lessons from Corporate Governance

This dissertation seeks to improve the usage of direct democracy in order to minimize agency cost. It first explains why insights from corporate governance can help to improve constitutional law and then identifies relevant insights from corporate governance that can make direct democracy more efficient. To accomplish this, the dissertation examines a number of questions. What are the key similarities in corporate and constitutional law? Do these similarities create agency problems that are similar enough for a comparative analysis to yield valuable insights? Once the utility of corporate governance insights is established, the dissertation answers two questions. Are initiatives necessary to minimize agency cost if referendums are already provided for? And, must the results of direct democracy be binding in order for agency cost to be minimized?

Quality of Service in Distributed Stream Processing for large scale Smart Pervasive Environments

The wide diffusion of cheap, small, and portable sensors integrated in an unprecedented large variety of devices and the availability of almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity make it possible to collect an unprecedented amount of real time information about the environment we live in. These data streams, if properly and timely analyzed, can be exploited to build new intelligent and pervasive services that have the potential of improving people's quality of life in a variety of cross concerning domains such as entertainment, health-care, or energy management. The large heterogeneity of application domains, however, calls for a middleware-level infrastructure that can effectively support their different quality requirements. In this thesis we study the challenges related to the provisioning of differentiated quality-of-service (QoS) during the processing of data streams produced in pervasive environments. We analyze the trade-offs between guaranteed quality, cost, and scalability in streams distribution and processing by surveying existing state-of-the-art solutions and identifying and exploring their weaknesses. We propose an original model for QoS-centric distributed stream processing in data centers and we present Quasit, its prototype implementation offering a scalable and extensible platform that can be used by researchers to implement and validate novel QoS-enforcement mechanisms. To support our study, we also explore an original class of weaker quality guarantees that can reduce costs when application semantics do not require strict quality enforcement. We validate the effectiveness of this idea in a practical use-case scenario that investigates partial fault-tolerance policies in stream processing by performing a large experimental study on the prototype of our novel LAAR dynamic replication technique. Our modeling, prototyping, and experimental work demonstrates that, by providing data distribution and processing middleware with application-level knowledge of the different quality requirements associated to different pervasive data flows, it is possible to improve system scalability while reducing costs.