The National Airspace System in its current incarnation is nearing its maximum capacity. The Free Flight initiative, which would alter the current system by allowing pilots to select more direct routes to their destinations, has been proposed as a solution to this problem. However, allowing pilots to fly anywhere, as opposed to being restricted to planned jetways, greatly complicates the problem of ensuring separation between aircraft. In this thesis I propose using cooperative, multi-agent negotiation techniques in order to efficiently and pseudo-optimally resolve air traffic conflicts. The system makes use of software agents running in each aircraft that negotiate with one another to determine a safe and acceptable solution when a potential air traffic conflict is detected. The agents negotiate using the Monotonic Concession Protocol and communicate using aircraft to aircraft data links, or possibly the ADS-B signal. There are many benefits to using such a system to handle the resolution of air traffic conflicts. Automating CD&R will improve safety by reducing the workloads of air traffic controllers. Additionally, the robustness of the system is improved as the decentralization provided by software agents running in each aircraft reduces the dependence on a single ground based system to coordinate all aircraft movements. The pilots, passengers, and carriers benefit as well due to the increased efficiency of the solutions reached by negotiation.

Nowadays, Web caching technique has been widely used and become one of the most promising ways to reduce network traffic, server load, and user-experienced latency while users surf the Web. In the context of traditional systems, caching techniques have been extensively studied. However, these techniques are not directly applicable to Web due to larger size of working set and cache storage in proxies. Many studies have presented their approaches to improving the performance of Web caching. Two of most representative approaches are hash routing [25] and directory-base digest [12]. Hash routing provides amapping fromthe URL of object to the location of proxy, which has the cached object, while directory-based digest records the pairs of proxy locations and object URLs for answering the query when local misses occur in any proxy. Hash routing can best utilize storage space by eliminating duplicated objects among proxies,while directory-based digest allows object replicas among proxies to resist proxy failures. These two conventional approaches have complementary tradeoffs. In this thesis, a comprehensive approach to cooperative caching for Web proxies, using a combination of hash routing and directory-based digest, is presented. Our approach tends to subsume these widely used approaches and thus gives a spectrum of trade-off between the overall hit ratio and its associated overhead. Through the simulations using real-life proxy traces, the performance and overhead of our proposed mechanism were evaluated. The experimental results showed that our approach outperforms the previous competitors.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 195-208). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.C.R.P.) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thesis (Master of Arts in Security Studies (Homeland Security and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2009. / Thesis Advisor: Rollins, John. Second Reader: Woodbury, Glen. "December 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on January 29, 2010. Author(s) subject terms: Public private partnerships, private sector, private business sector, collaboration, coordination, emergency management, local government, continuity of community, challenges to partnering, emergency preparedness, emergency response. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-88). Also available in print.

Thesis (M. Div.)--St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-95).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 443-454).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-125). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 310-317).

Thesis--M. Phil., University of Hong Kong, 1978.