Dade County Trauma Task Force: a multi-system comparative analysis.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Washington, D.C.

Decision analysis for abandoned mine reclamation site selection and planning : a report /

"August 1979."

Decision analysis and environmental regulations /

Mode of access: Internet.

Multi-criteria decision making approaches for supplier evaluation and selection:a literature review

Supplier evaluation and selection problem has been studied extensively. Various decision making approaches have been proposed to tackle the problem. In contemporary supply chain management, the performance of potential suppliers is evaluated against multiple criteria rather than considering a single factor-cost. This paper reviews the literature of the multi-criteria decision making approaches for supplier evaluation and selection. Related articles appearing in the international journals from 2000 to 2008 are gathered and analyzed so that the following three questions can be answered: (i) Which approaches were prevalently applied? (ii) Which evaluating criteria were paid more attention to? (iii) Is there any inadequacy of the approaches? Based on the inadequacy, if any, some improvements and possible future work are recommended. This research not only provides evidence that the multi-criteria decision making approaches are better than the traditional cost-based approach, but also aids the researchers and decision makers in applying the approaches effectively.

Planning and decision-making for energy recovery from waste at the sub-regional level

This research project has developed a novel decision support system using Geographical Information Systems and Multi Criteria Decision Analysis and used it to develop and evaluate energy-from-waste policy options. The system was validated by applying it to the UK administrative areas of Cornwall and Warwickshire. Different strategies have been defined by the size and number of the facilities, as well as the technology chosen. Using sensitivity on the results from the decision support system, it was found that key decision criteria included those affected by cost, energy efficiency, transport impacts and air/dioxin emissions. The conclusions of this work are that distributed small-scale energy-from-waste facilities score most highly overall and that scale is more important than technology design in determining overall policy impact. This project makes its primary contribution to energy-from-waste planning by its development of a Decision Support System that can be used to assist waste disposal authorities to identify preferred energy-from-waste options that have been tailored specifically to the socio-geographic characteristics of their jurisdictional areas. The project also highlights the potential of energy-from-waste policies that are seldom given enough attention to in the UK, namely those of a smaller-scale and distributed nature that often have technology designed specifically to cater for this market.

Developing a forest data portal to support multi-scale decision making

Forests play a pivotal role in timber production, maintenance and development of biodiversity and in carbon sequestration and storage in the context of the Kyoto Protocol. Policy makers and forest experts therefore require reliable information on forest extent, type and change for management, planning and modeling purposes. It is becoming increasingly clear that such forest information is frequently inconsistent and unharmonised between countries and continents. This research paper presents a forest information portal that has been developed in line with the GEOSS and INSPIRE frameworks. The web portal provides access to forest resources data at a variety of spatial scales, from global through to regional and local, as well as providing analytical capabilities for monitoring and validating forest change. The system also allows for the utilisation of forest data and processing services within other thematic areas. The web portal has been developed using open standards to facilitate accessibility, interoperability and data transfer.

A review of multi-criteria decision-making methods for bioenergy systems

Bioenergy schemes are multi-faceted and complex by nature, with many available raw material supplies and technical options and a diverse set of stakeholders holding a raft of conflicting opinions. To develop and operate a successful scheme there are many requirements that should be considered and satisfied. This paper provides a review of those academic works attempting to deal with problems arising within the bioenergy sector using multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. These methods are particularly suitable to bioenergy given its multi-faceted nature but could be equally relevant to other energy conversion technologies. Related articles appearing in the international journals from 2000 to 2010 are gathered and analysed so that the following two questions can be answered. (i) Which methods are the most popular? (ii) Which problems attract the most attention? The review finds that optimisation methods are most popular with methods choosing between few alternatives being used in 44% of reviewed papers and methods choosing between many alternatives being used in 28%. The most popular application area was to technology selection with 27% of reviewed papers followed by policy decisions with 18%. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach to Compare and Contrast the Websites of China-based and U.S-based Hotels

The improvement in living standards and the development of telecommunications have led to a large increase in the number of Internet users in China. It has been reported by China National Network Information Center that the number of Internet users in China has reached 33.7 million in 2001, ranting the country third in the world. This figure also shows that more and more Chinese residents have accepted the Internet and use it to obtain information and compete their travel planning. Milne and Ateljevic stated that the integration of computing and telecommunications would create a global information network based mostly on the Internet. The Internet, especially the World Wide Web, has had a great impact on the hospitality and tourism industry in recent years. The WWW plays an important role in mediating between customers and hotel companies as a place to acquire information acquisition and transact business.

Bayesian Emulation for Sequential Modeling, Inference and Decision Analysis

The advances in three related areas of state-space modeling, sequential Bayesian learning, and decision analysis are addressed, with the statistical challenges of scalability and associated dynamic sparsity. The key theme that ties the three areas is Bayesian model emulation: solving challenging analysis/computational problems using creative model emulators. This idea defines theoretical and applied advances in non-linear, non-Gaussian state-space modeling, dynamic sparsity, decision analysis and statistical computation, across linked contexts of multivariate time series and dynamic networks studies. Examples and applications in financial time series and portfolio analysis, macroeconomics and internet studies from computational advertising demonstrate the utility of the core methodological innovations.

Chapter 1 summarizes the three areas/problems and the key idea of emulating in those areas. Chapter 2 discusses the sequential analysis of latent threshold models with use of emulating models that allows for analytical filtering to enhance the efficiency of posterior sampling. Chapter 3 examines the emulator model in decision analysis, or the synthetic model, that is equivalent to the loss function in the original minimization problem, and shows its performance in the context of sequential portfolio optimization. Chapter 4 describes the method for modeling the steaming data of counts observed on a large network that relies on emulating the whole, dependent network model by independent, conjugate sub-models customized to each set of flow. Chapter 5 reviews those advances and makes the concluding remarks.

UTILIZATION OF GIS AND SPATIAL ANALYSIS TECHNIQUES IN ARTISANAL AND SMALL SCALE MINING TO LOCATE A CENTRALIZED PROCESSING CENTRE

One of the global phenomena with threats to environmental health and safety is artisanal mining. There are ambiguities in the manner in which an ore-processing facility operates which hinders the mining capacity of these miners in Ghana. These problems are reviewed on the basis of current socio-economic, health and safety, environmental, and use of rudimentary technologies which limits fair-trade deals to miners. This research sought to use an established data-driven, geographic information (GIS)-based system employing the spatial analysis approach for locating a centralized processing facility within the Wassa Amenfi-Prestea Mining Area (WAPMA) in the Western region of Ghana. A spatial analysis technique that utilizes ModelBuilder within the ArcGIS geoprocessing environment through suitability modeling will systematically and simultaneously analyze a geographical dataset of selected criteria. The spatial overlay analysis methodology and the multi-criteria decision analysis approach were selected to identify the most preferred locations to site a processing facility. For an optimal site selection, seven major criteria including proximity to settlements, water resources, artisanal mining sites, roads, railways, tectonic zones, and slopes were considered to establish a suitable location for a processing facility. Site characterizations and environmental considerations, incorporating identified constraints such as proximity to large scale mines, forest reserves and state lands to site an appropriate position were selected. The analysis was limited to criteria that were selected and relevant to the area under investigation. Saaty’s analytical hierarchy process was utilized to derive relative importance weights of the criteria and then a weighted linear combination technique was applied to combine the factors for determination of the degree of potential site suitability. The final map output indicates estimated potential sites identified for the establishment of a facility centre. The results obtained provide intuitive areas suitable for consideration

A multi vector energy analysis for interconnected power and gas systems

This paper presents the first multi vector energy analysis for the interconnected energy systems of Great Britain (GB) and Ireland. Both systems share a common high penetration of wind power, but significantly different security of supply outlooks. Ireland is heavily dependent on gas imports from GB, giving significance to the interconnected aspect of the methodology in addition to the gas and power interactions analysed. A fully realistic unit commitment and economic dispatch model coupled to an energy flow model of the gas supply network is developed. Extreme weather events driving increased domestic gas demand and low wind power output were utilised to increase gas supply network stress. Decreased wind profiles had a larger impact on system security than high domestic gas demand. However, the GB energy system was resilient during high demand periods but gas network stress limited the ramping capability of localised generating units. Additionally, gas system entry node congestion in the Irish system was shown to deliver a 40% increase in short run costs for generators. Gas storage was shown to reduce the impact of high demand driven congestion delivering a reduction in total generation costs of 14% in the period studied and reducing electricity imports from GB, significantly contributing to security of supply.