Building a sustainable community of coastal leaders to deal with sea level rise and inundation

Sea level rise and inundation were stated to be the highest priorities in the community-developed Ocean Research Priorities Plan and Implementation Strategy in 2005. Although they remain stated priorities, very few resources have been allocated towards this challenge. Inundation poses a substantial risk to many coastal communities, and the risk is projected to increase because of continued development, changes in the frequency and intensity of inundation events, and acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise along our vulnerable shorelines. (PDF contains 4 pages) There is an increasing urgency for federal and state governments to focus on the local and regional levels and consistently provide the information, tools, and methods necessary for adaptation. Calls for action at all levels acknowledge that a viable response must engage federal, state and local expertise, perspectives, and resources in a coordinated and collaborative effort. A workshop held in December 2000 on coastal inundation and sea level rise proposes a shared framework that can help guide where investments should be made to enable states and local governments to assess impacts and initiate adaptation strategies over the next decade.

Optimal design of building structures using genetic algorithms

A general framework for multi-criteria optimal design is presented which is well-suited for automated design of structural systems. A systematic computer-aided optimal design decision process is developed which allows the designer to rapidly evaluate and improve a proposed design by taking into account the major factors of interest related to different aspects such as design, construction, and operation.

The proposed optimal design process requires the selection of the most promising choice of design parameters taken from a large design space, based on an evaluation using specified criteria. The design parameters specify a particular design, and so they relate to member sizes, structural configuration, etc. The evaluation of the design uses performance parameters which may include structural response parameters, risks due to uncertain loads and modeling errors, construction and operating costs, etc. Preference functions are used to implement the design criteria in a "soft" form. These preference functions give a measure of the degree of satisfaction of each design criterion. The overall evaluation measure for a design is built up from the individual measures for each criterion through a preference combination rule. The goal of the optimal design process is to obtain a design that has the highest overall evaluation measure - an optimization problem.

Genetic algorithms are stochastic optimization methods that are based on evolutionary theory. They provide the exploration power necessary to explore high-dimensional search spaces to seek these optimal solutions. Two special genetic algorithms, hGA and vGA, are presented here for continuous and discrete optimization problems, respectively.

The methodology is demonstrated with several examples involving the design of truss and frame systems. These examples are solved by using the proposed hGA and vGA.

Stress and load calculation for unknown building

Not available.

The effect of earthquakes on reinforced concrete building design

The building under consideration was the Pasadena Furniture Building, on East Colorado St., Pasadena, California. It is a modern reinforced concrete building that may be classed as a warehouse of flat-slab construction.

CONTRIBUTION TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTELLIGENT CONVERSATIONAL ASSISTANTS IN AUTOMOTIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Esta tesis presenta el diseño y desarrollo del Asistente Conversacional del Automóvil, Voice User Help en inglés, un sistema conversacional basado en el paradigma pregunta-respuesta y diseñado para consultar documentación del vehículo duartne la conducción. Este trabajo recoge investigaciones realizadas en los campos de la documentación técnica, recuperación de información, procesamineto de lenguaje natural, diseñode interfaces de usuario para vehículos, experiencia del usuario y computación afectiva con el fin de crear un asistente adaptativo y dinámico que modifica su comportamiento conversacional dependiendo del estado emocional del usuario.

Pitch Based Wind Turbine Intelligent Speed Setpoint Adjustment Algorithms

This work is aimed at optimizing the wind turbine rotor speed setpoint algorithm. Several intelligent adjustment strategies have been investigated in order to improve a reward function that takes into account the power captured from the wind and the turbine speed error. After different approaches including Reinforcement Learning, the best results were obtained using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO)-based wind turbine speed setpoint algorithm. A reward improvement of up to 10.67% has been achieved using PSO compared to a constant approach and 0.48% compared to a conventional approach. We conclude that the pitch angle is the most adequate input variable for the turbine speed setpoint algorithm compared to others such as rotor speed, or rotor angular acceleration.