The introduction of analytical techniques along the steps of the development of a space launcher will allow significant reductions in terms of costs and manpower, and will enable, by a more systematical way of tuning and assessing control laws, to get flyable designs much faster. In this scope, IQC based tools already present promising result and show that they may be the most appropriate ones for the robustness analysis of large complex systems. They account for the system structure and allow dealing specifically with each subsystems, it means that we can improve the representation contained in the multipliers easily and reuse the set up to assess the improvements. The flexibility of the method is a huge advantage. We experienced it during two phases. The first was dedicated to the analysis of the three-degree-of-freedom uncertain nonlinear equation of motion of a rigid body. Secondly, we studied the influence of the pulse-width modulator behavior of the attitude control system on the launcher stability. IQC-based stability analysis allowed defining estimations of the stability domain with respect to uncertainties and system parameters. Moreover, the results obtained with IQC can go way beyond stability analysis with performance analysis with description of the particular performance criteria of the field with appropriate multipliers. Later on controller synthesis and merging of IQC method with worst-case search algorithms could extend greatly the frame of use of this analytical tool and give it the influence it deserves.

This thesis brings together six works published between 2003 and 2007 which consider public involvement in environmental matters. The later works focus on access to justice, one of three elements of public involvement. The works support the thesis that aspects of public involvement and, in particular access to justice in environmental matters, remain elusive for many individuals and groups in society; something that is inconsistent with both domestic and international law. They include analysis of why the need for participation arises and how it should be secured. By publishing primary research and new commentary the publications identify the gaps in the provision of public involvement in environmental matters and offer options for change. They have also informed further research and debate. The publications are brought together in this submission in chronological order, which illustrates how the hypothesis develops. The works are critically appraised in an introductory chapter. Public involvement is first discussed in The Prestige oil disaster, another example of the West living beyond its means (Environmental Law & Management 15[2003]1 16 (Jan 2003). LawText Publishing, Banbury, UK) and sets the backdrop for the later works. It highlights some of the key environmental problems of our time including, for instance, that environmental protection remains subservient to the pursuit economic development. Getting to the real EIA (Journal of Environmental Law, (2003) Vol 15, No. 2, p. 141 Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK) considers the role of public involvement in major land use development decision making by analysing one of the key participatory areas of public involvement; environmental impact assessment (EIA). EIA places emphasis on access to information and public participation in helping to prevent rather than alleviate adverse socio-environmental impacts. It is argued in Getting to the real F£IA that for the major development projects requiring EIA, public participation is nominal in nature and that, often, IS entirely absent. While Getting to the real EIA considers information and participation, access to justice is the focus of the third work; Civil law aspects of environmental justice ((2003) Environmental Law Foundation, London, UK). The work is based upon primary research which was necessary once it became evident that there was little, if any, data on how effective the judicial system is in securing access to environmental justice. The search conclusions were critical of the present judicial system highlighting that, in practice, a legal remedy was often unavailable to individuals and communities in challenging environmental decisions and resolving environmental problems; the most significant barrier being prohibitive expense. This was to such an extent that the UK Government was not meeting its international obligations. The failure to provide effective access to the courts as highlighted in Civil law aspects prompted the publication of the later work; The cost of doing the rights thing (Environmental Law & Management 16[2004]2 p. 59 (Mar 2004). LawText Publishing, Banbury, UK) which reviews the problems of access to environmental justice and then proposes innovative ways of starting to resolve those inherent in the legal justice system, including liability for an opponent's costs' if any legal challenge is ultimately unsuccessful. As the arguments surrounding funding constraints on access to justice were crystallising, the need to produce a substantive text clarifying the environmental rights and responsibilities of all interested parties became clear. This prompted the publication of A Practical Approach to Environmental Law ((2005). OUP, Oxford, UK) which is, in the main, a practitioner's text. However, the text also seeks to explain and raise awareness of the environmental rights that are available in the UK and the notion that public involvement in environmental decision-making has a central role. For instance, Chapter .2 Environmental rights and principles which is incorporated into this submission, outlines the main aspects of information, participation and access to justice and explains their relevant judicial and governmental application. While A Practical Approach to Environmental Law is novel in its comprehensive approach, its primary purpose is to inform readers, in an objective way, of the present legal position. Its inclusion in this submission is to illustrate how the arguments raised in the earlier publications have been presented to a wide audience. The final published work, ‘Current concerns in environmental decision making’ (Journal of Environment and Planning Law [2007] p. 536 Sweet & Maxwell, London, UK), places the argument of limitations of access to justice alongside the parallel and associated problems of an unwilling public protector and a conservative judiciary. It revisits the need for public participation in environmental matters by highlighting the reluctance of public bodies and the courts to take the issue of environmental justice seriously. It also argues that recent efforts in access to justice are largely superficial and that fundamental change remains necessary. The final paper was presented at the University of Kent, Critical Lawyer's Conference on 24 February 2007. The submitted works follow a distinct .theme by exploring the application of public involvement in environmental matters highlighting what is the main criticism of the public participatory provision in the UK the provision of access to the courts without prohibitive expense. The works have also been directly related to practical experience and work in seeking to improve the position. In drawing the published works together in one volume it has been helpful to outline some of the underlying issues relating to public involvement including what is meant by public participation, any levels and limitations to the rights now said to be conferred. This analysis has been provided in an expanded introduction which also includes a' critical appraisal of the main published works. Paul Stookes 22nd April 2008

We present in this thesis three distinct models in Financial Economics. In the first chapter we present a pure exchange economy model with collateral constraints in the spirit of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). As a first result in this chapter we prove the existence of an equilibrium for this type of economies. We show that in this type of models bubbles can exist and provide a bubble example in which the asset containing the bubble pays positive dividends. We also show for the case of high interest rates the equivalence between this type of models and the Arrow-Debreu market structure. In the second chapter we present a model with limited commitment and one-side exclusion from financial markets in case of default. For this type of models we prove a no-trade theorem in the spirit of Bulow and Rogoff (1989). This is done for an economy with and without bounded investment in a productive activity. The third chapter presents a 2 period economy with complete markets, and 250 states of the world and assets. For this economies we generate a sequence of observed returns, and we show that a market proxy containing only 80% of the assets in the economy provides similar results as the true market portfolio when estimating the CAPM. We also show that for the examples we present a vast amount of observations is required in order to reject the CAPM. This raises the question what the driving force behind the bad empirical performance of the CAPM is.

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited. / This thesis presents a formal analysis process and the results of applying that process to the MLS LAN: TCB-to- TCBE, Session Status, and TCBE-to-Session Server Protocols. The formal analysis process consists of several distinct stages: the creation of a detailed informal protocol description, analyzing that description to reveal assumptions and areas of interest not directly addressed in the protocol description, the transformation of that description and the related assumptions into a formal Strand Space representation, analyzing that representation to reveal assumptions and areas of interest, and concluding with an application of John Millen's automated Constraint Checker analysis tool to the Strand Space representations under an extremely limited set of conditions to prove certain protocol secrecy properties.

Scheduling is a major task in project management. The current scheduling technique, Critical Path Method (CPM), has been widely applied for several decades, but a large number of projects fail to be completed on time and schedule delays occur in many projects. This raises question about the validity of the current project scheduling system. Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), derived from Theory of Constraints, is a relatively new alternative approach toward scheduling projects. This study compared CCPM and CPM to determine which scheduling method delivers a shorter project duration and has a better usage of resources. A scheduling software called ProChain was used to reschedule a CPM based construction project using CCPM. The study concluded that the CCPM has the possibility to deliver shorter project duration and better resource usage in comparison to CPM. It was revealed that ProChain has limitation in the process of transforming a CPM schedule to a CCPM schedule. For example, ProChain treats any tasks without any predecessor as a project terminating task and puts a project buffer after it.

Nous étudions des classes d'automates à états finis calculant sur les arbres, étendus par des contraintes permettant de tester des égalités et diségalités entre sous-arbres. Nous nous concentrons sur des automates d'arbres à contraintes globales où les tests sont opérés en fonction des états que l'automate atteint lors de ses calculs. De tels automates ont été introduit dans le cadre de travaux sur les documents semi-structurés. Nous procédons ici à une comparaison détaillée en expressivité entre ces automates et d'autres modèles permettant de réaliser des tests similaires, comme les automates à contraintes entre frères ou les automates d'arbres avec une mémoire auxiliaire. Nous montrons comment de tels automates peuvent être utilisés pour vérifier des propriétés de sécurité sur les protocoles cryptographiques. Les automates d'arbres ont déjà été utilisés pour modéliser les messages échangés lors d'une session d'un protocole. En ajoutant des contraintes d'égalité, nous pouvons décrire précisement des sessions qui utilisent à plusieurs reprises un même message, évitant ainsi une approximation trop grande. Nous répondons ensuite positivement au problème de la décision du vide des langages reconnus par les automates à contraintes globales. En montrant que leur expressivité est très proche de celle des automates opérant sur des représentations de termes par des graphes orientés acycliques, nous en déduisons une procédure de décision du vide en temps non-déterministe doublement exponentiel. Finalement, nous étudions le problème de la décision du vide pour des automates à contraintes globales pour lesquels on autorise des contraintes dites de clé, exprimant intuitivement que tous les sous arbres d'un certain type dans un arbre en entrée sont distincts deux à deux. Le type des clés est classiquement utilisé pour représenter un identifiant unique, comme un numéro de sécurité sociale.Nous décrivons alors une procédure de décision du vide de complexité non-élementaire. Nous montrons que cette procédure est très robuste, et qu'il est possible d'étendre les automates avec des contraintes supplémentaires, comme des contraintes de comptage ou des tests locaux, tout en préservant la décidabilité du vide. / We study here several classes of finite state automata running on trees, extended with constraints that allow to test for equalities or disequalities between subterms. We focus on tree automata with global constraints where the tests are done depending on the states reached by the automaton on its runs. Such automata were introduced in studies on semi-structured documents. We do here a detailed comparison between those automata and other models that allow to operate similar tests, like tree automata with constraints between brothers, or tree automata with an auxiliary memory. We show how such automata may be used to verify security properties on cryptographic protocols. Tree automata have already been used to modelize the messages exchanged during a protocol session. By adding equality constraints, we can describe precisely protocol sessions that use a same message several times, hence avoiding an approximation. Then, we answer positively the decision problem of the emptiness of the languages recognized by tree automata with global constraints. By showing that their expressivity is very close from the one of the automata operating on directed acyclic graphs representations of terms, we infer an emptiness decision procedure in double exponential non-deterministic time. Finally, we study the emptiness decision problem for automata with global constraints where we authorize "key constraints", that intuitively allow that all subtrees of a given type in an input tree are distincts. We give an emptiness decision procedure of non-primitive recursive complexity. Key constraints are classicaly used to represent a unique identifier. We describe a non-primitive recusrive emptiness decision procedure. We show that this procedure is very robust and that it allows to extend the automata with additionnal constraints, like counting constraints or local tests, while preserving decidability.

Aggregate demand is influenced by the functional income distribution of an economy and that of its trading partners. This relationship between income distribution and output is analyzed in a short-run two-country Neo-Kaleckian model. The effects of devaluation and redistribution are discussed in detail. Trade and redistribution within one country interact and output increases or decreases with changes in either depending on the specific distributional and exchange rate movements. The Marshall-Lerner condition is shown to be equivalent to the assumption of expansionary devaluation. If devaluation increases output, national redistribution policy toward wage earners is also more likely to be expansionary. (author's abstract)

We consider the problem of minimizing costs in the generation unit commitment problem, a cornerstone in electric power system operations, while enforcing an -- reliability criterion. This reliability criterion is a generalization of the well-known - criterion and dictates that at least fraction of the total system demand (for ) must be met following the failure of or fewer system components. We refer to this problem as the contingency-constrained unit commitment problem, or CCUC. We present a mixed-integer programming formulation of the CCUC that accounts for both transmission and generation element failures. We propose novel cutting plane algorithms that avoid the need to explicitly consider an exponential number of contingencies. Computational studies are performed on several IEEE test systems and a simplified model of the Western US interconnection network. These studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods relative to current state-of-the-art.

Using a unique dataset comprising information for (up to) 153 firms in the machine building sector in Belarus, we investigate the determinants of firm growth for an economy where state ownership of enterprises is widespread. We use panel data models based on generalizations of Gibrat's law, total factor productivity estimates and matching methods to assess the differences in firm growth between private and state-contolled firms. Our results indicate that labor hoarding and soft budget constraints play a particularly important role in explaining differences in performance between these two groups of firms.

This thesis focuses on the issues of lexical negation in French adjectives as well as on other parts of speech - nouns and adverbs. Its objective is the description of functioning of the lexical negation and the examination of restriction, which it is accompanied by. Based on these findings, the practical part (i.e. personal research) will try to define the tendencies of the use of lexical negation in the near future. Last but not least, this thesis also describes the use of general negation or out of standard French language - in argot or in spoken language.