This dissertation is composed of three essays, investigating two aspects of the role of agricultural sector in climate change mitigation: leakage and additionality. Leakage happens when mitigation policies reduce net GHG emissions in one context, but increase (decrease) prices, which in turn causes production (demand) expansion resulting in an offsetting rise in emissions elsewhere. The first essay documents an integration of a US domestic agricultural sectoral model and a global agricultural sectoral model, with the aim to deliver better leakage assessment. The second essay investigates the trend of US crop yield growth and its implication on the international leakage effect. We find that the slowdowns have occurred to the growth rates of most US major crops. The implementation of climate change mitigation strategies, such as the expansion of bioenergy production, causes demand for the agricultural sector to increase substantially. The new demand would cause noticeable leakage effect if crop yields continue to grow at the current rates. Such effect may be potentially alleviated by higher crop yield growth rates; but the extent of alleviation depends on the mix of technological progress obtained across crops as well. Additionality is often a concern in programs designed to incentivize the production of environmental services. Additionality is satisfied if payments are made to services that would not have occurred without the payment. However, because of the information asymmetry between service buyers and sellers, ensuring additionality poses a challenge to program designers. The third essay investigates how the pursuit of ensuring additionality would complicate environmental policy design with a theoretical model. Specifically, we examine 4 types of policy design, including 2 discriminating schemes and 2 simpler non-discriminating schemes. We found that under certain conditions, some of the non-discriminating schemes can be almost as good as the discriminating ones. Findings in this dissertation contribute to inform policy makers about the potential impacts of climate change mitigation policies in the agricultural sector and also help to improve understanding of environmental program design.

This thesis presents mobile positioning and tracking with non-line of sight (NLOS) mitigation using time difference of arrival (TDOA) in biased extended Kalman filter (BEKF) in indoor dense multipath Ultra-Wideband (UWB) environment. The most serious issues which render to influence accuracy for the time-based location system is NLOS problem. Kalman filters (KFs) are used for smoothing range measurement data, and a method with sliding window is proposed to process range data for calculating standard deviation in a hypothesis testing and then identifying NLOS scenarios. When the measured arrival time has been converted to range difference, the biased extended Kalman filter is proposed to mitigate the NLOS error in the certain base stations (BSs) for mobile station (MS) positioning and trajectory tracking. From the simulation results in the indoor positioning environment with measurement and NLOS error, the sliding window algorithm and biased extended Kalman filter have higher accuracy than other related methods for NLOS identification and mitigation in positioning.

Accurate indoor geolocation is an important and novel emerging technology for commercial, public safety, and military applications. Since most wireless communication systems used for indoor position location may suffer from dense multipath situation, which leads to a severe degradation of position accuracy. The improved TDOA/AOA(Time Difference of Arrival/ Angle of Arrival) position location for indoor ultra-wide band (UWB) systems in the thesis improves the position accuracy of indoor location by using fine resolution of UWB signals. In the line of sight situation, by means of increasing angle of arrival (AOA) information to time difference of arrival (TDOA) based location to achieve the goal of accurate indoor geolocation and provides non-line of sight (NLOS) error mitigation for time measurement and AOA selection to suppress the impact to position accuracy in NLOS environment. Finally, the extended Kalman filter is used to perform position tracking of the target. In the simulations, the NLOS error in time measurement is produced according to the characteristics of indoor UWB channel. Several assumptions of NLOS errors are made in angular measurement. It is observed that proposed method efficiently mitigates the position error in NLOS environment, and detect if the NLOS exists between base station and mobile station immediately.

There is no bank in Taiwan who doesn¡¦t prepare meticulously for implementation of The New Basel Capital Accord coming in 2007.Banking is more complex in recent years, except tranditional loans and investments.The products of derivatives are to change with each passing day under rapid development of financial engineering among which the credit derivatives not only can transfer credit risks,but also be a tool admitted within Basel II for mitigation,so This research is to prob into Basel II and the function of credit derivatives affecting the management strategy of medium and small-sized non-financial holding banks. This research was adopted qualitative methods which is to select two medium and small-sized non-financial holding banks whose total assets are beneath NT$600 billions at the end of Year 95 as interview cases,and conducted in-depth interviews with officers of the two banks.The interview result obtained was induced and analyzed found as follow: 1. The constitution of medium and small-sized non-financial holding banks is generally not sound. 2. The medium and small-sized non-financial holding banks have limited weakness of resoures and credit rating relatively,and will suffer biggest impact after implementation of Basel II. 3. Banks will execute a more strict lending policy to avoid over-risky loan assets and boost the efficiency of capital utility. 4. The medium and small-sized banks have no room and ability to develop and design the products of credit derivatives at present. 5. The effects of mitigation resulted from using the tool of credit derivatives or securitization of financial assets require observing. 6. As The banking industry changes,Lebensraum of the medium and small-sized banks becomes more and more limited.They should seek to keep strategic alliance with or to be merged by large-scale financial holding company or foreign bank for survival.

The development of steel industry makes progress simultaneously with economy and society of a country. The steel industry is an important industry for each country. From 2001, there was an insufficient supply gap of steel due to strong demand of China, which pushes main integrated steel works to increase their capacities. However, the mitigation pressure of the emission of Green House Gas make a limitations for capacity expansion. The objective of this study is to make appropriate policies for integrated steel works to cope with new operation environment. From the analysis of steel industry, this study discovers the features and the related operation issues of global steel industry. The relationship between production and CO2 emission was investigated, and the casual loop among the production, revenue, and CO2 emission was analyzed. A dynamic model was developed by system dynamics approach and related tools to simulate the dynamic relationship between the revenue and CO2 emission of steel work. After thorough tests of reliability, model behavior, and policy implications, this model was used to investigate the influence of main operational and environmental parameters on the revenue of steel work. The appropriate production policies for steel works was also proposed. Simulation results showed that, there was no universal production policy without the economic penalty for CO2 emission, but keeping the production under regulation limit was the most suitable strategy after the implementation of economic penalty. Increasing energy utilization efficiency, the ration of R&D budget in annual profit, and lowering the growth rate of production would facilitate the revenue increase of steel work. The simultaneous adjustment of these parameters could downgrade the negative effect of economic penalty. The main strategy to cope with the pressure of the CO2 mitigation is to reduce the unit cost of mitigation. Four approaches can be adopted by the steel work to tackle the CO2 mitigation. They are (1) carefully scheduling the capacity expansion of steel work, (2) actively deriving the legislation of economic penalty for CO2 emission, (3) reducing the unit cost for CO2 mitigation, (4) enhancing the power of R&D activities.

With the increase of sensitive loads in industrial and commercial customers, more attention has been paid to the power quality problems. Voltage sag is among the major power quality problems that cause interruptions in production lines that result in significant losses. Power quality mitigation devices, that provide different protection levels, can be adopted to match individual customer¡¦s special needs. This thesis presents a cost-benefit assessment of various voltage sag mitigation options at locations with different types of distribution feeders and customers. Simulation results have revealed that using the assumed power quality cost data, the installation of small capacity and low cost UPS has the highest benefit/cost ratio in all the options tested.

An implementation of a series interconnection scheme for small distributed generation systems is presented in this thesis. The concept uses one set of voltage source converter to control the injected voltage magnitude and phase angle for power injection and voltage sag mitigation. Because of the use of series interconnection scheme, the energy storage device outputs vary concurrently with the line loading and provides loading leveling functions. Under voltage sag situations, it provides missing voltage to effectively deal with power quality problems. The control algorithm uses the reference voltage tracking concept. A signal phase 484 VA prototype of the proposed system is implemented. The performance of the proposed method is simulated and verified by using Matlab-simulink package and the implemented module.

In the thesis, we propose a non-line of sight (NLOS) mitigation approach based on the interacting multiple model (IMM) algorithm. The IMM-based structure, composed of a biased Kalman filter (BKF) and a Kalman filter with NLOS-discarding process (KF-D), is capable of mitigating the ranging error caused by the NLOS effects, and therefore improving the performance and accuracy in wireless location systems. The NLOS effect on signal transmission is one of the major factors that affect the accuracy of the time-based location systems. Effective NLOS identification and mitigation usually count on pre-determined statistic distribution and hypothesis assumption in the signals. Because the variance of the NLOS error is much large than that of measurement noise, hypothesis testing on the LOS/NLOS status can be formulated.The BKF combines the sliding window and decides the status by using hypothesis testing. The calculated variance and the detection result are used in switching between the biased and unbiased modes in the Kalman filter. In the contrast, the KF-D scheme identifies the NLOS status and tries to eliminate the NLOS effects by directly using the estimated results from the LOS stage. The KF-D scheme can achieve reasonably good NLOS mitigation if the estimates in the LOS status are obtained. Due to the discarding process, changes of the state vector within the NLOS stage are possibly ignored, and will cause larger errors in the state estimates. The BKF and KF-D can make up for each other by formulating the filters in an IMM structure, which could tune up the probabilities of BKF and KF-D. In our approach, the measured data are smoothed by sliding window and a BKF. The variance of data and the hypothesis test result are passed to the two filters. The BKF switches between the biased/unbiased modes by using the result. The KF-D may receive the estimated value from BKF based on the results. The probability computation unit changes the weights to get the estimated TOA values. With the simulations in ultra-wideband (UWB) signals, it can be seen that the proposed IMM-based approach can effectively mitigate the NLOS effects and increase the accuracy in wireless position.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of West Florida, 2007. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 114 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. P. A.)--Texas State University-San Marcos, 2009. / "Fall 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-109).