Thesis (M.S. in Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2009. / Thesis Advisor(s): Abdel-Hamid, Tarek ; Ferrer, Geraldo. "March 2009." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 24, 2009. Author(s) subject terms: Manpower Forecasting; Brazilian Air Force Health System Manpower; Systems Dynamics; System Thinking; Modeling and Simulation; Multivariate Analysis. Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-66). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Notre Dame, 2009. / Thesis directed by Scott E. Maxwell for the Department of Psychology. "December 2009." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-72).

The phenomenon of dopant diffusion as a viable means of coupler fabrication is investigated. It is well known that the diffusion of dopants can improve the uniformity of multimode star couplers manufactured by the fused biconical taper technique. The theoretical basis for the same phenomenon in a single mode coupler is developed, on the basis of the theory of diffusion and the Gaussian approximation for circular fibers. A novel technique to manufacture and design single mode optical fiber couplers with a minimization of the manufacturing complexity is demonstrated. Traditionally fused biconical tapered couplers have been manufactured by twisting, fusing and elongating optical fibers at elevated temperatures. Usually, high temperature oxy-hydrogen flames are used for such purposes and some degree of skill is needed for a human operator. The complexity of control procedures for automation of the process is greatly increased by the fact that the tapering process is an integral part of the feedback loop. This can be eliminated if a constant tension is maintained on the fibers in the heating process while heat is applied uniformly from a source such as a platinum wire furnace. Since the refractive index differentials responsible for the guiding phenomenon at optical frequencies are directly dependent on concentration of dopants like fluorine and germania, radial diffusion of such dopants causes the fiber cores that are heated in a platinum wire furnace to come closer together. Such proximity leads to the phenomenon of evanescent field interaction or coupling of optical power from one arm of the coupler to the other. The time evolution of the coupling process can be predicted in theory. While initial results are promising, the ability to automate the manufacture of couplers will be successful only after greater control over the variables is established. It is the intention of this work to understand the physics behind the mechanism as well as to prove the feasibility of modeling real world phenomena under controlled conditions. / Master of Science

The offshore Sierra Leone basin is an exploration frontier area with commercial hydrocarbon potential. The basin is located at the northernmost end of the equatorial Atlantic margin in the South Atlantic; it is bound to the South by the Gulf of Guinea Petroleum province. The Sierra Leone margin has not had the exploration attention like most basins in the equatorial Atlantic, such lack of attention may be explained by the structural complexity of the basin. Despite the recent successful petroleum activities in the basin, very little geological information have been placed in the public domain by the operators. This research will be the first published detailed analysis of the offshore Sierra Leone basin. This work focuses on the broader aspects of basin structural evolution, seismic stratigraphy and reservoir development. The basin analysis is based on 2D seismic dataset, acquired in 2002 by TGS-NPEC. Seven megasequence boundaries have been identified in the offshore Sierra Leone basin. There is one megasequence boundary each in the pre-transform and syn-transform phases. The post-transform phase is composed of five megasequences. They have been dated using well data information and through correlation with the seismic surfaces of adjacent basins in the region. The Sierra Leone margin is structurally divided into three segments, which evolved through transtensional and/or extensional rifting. From a geological perspective, this basin straddles a major tectonic transition zone (the Sierra Leone Transform). The Mesozoic-Cenozoic tectonic evolution of the basin was partly controlled by basement heterogeneity and plate kinematics. This study also highlights the importance of N-S and ENE-WSW trending Archaean structural lineaments, which were vectors for the Sierra Leone margin segmentation. The structural division of the Sierra Leone margin into the Northern, Central andSouthern segments is based on varying structural geometries. The Northern and Central segments developed as rift-transform margins, while the Southern segment developed as a volcanic rifted margin. Syn-transform sequences (late Early Cretaceous) show the influence of normal fault related subsidence and uplift, modified by localised transpressional deformation. The basin bounding faults and half grabens are oriented at high angles to the ensuing passive margin slope strike. Post-transform sequences (Late Cretaceous to Present) are dominated by major phases of slope failure and the development of extensive lowstand submarine fan systems. Some models of slope failure and synchronous development of submarine channel and canyon systems have been developed for this basin. Extensional slope failure is controlled by pre-existing structural trends. Submarine canyons which developed in the hanging-walls of these fault-blocks, became the site of rapid head-ward expansion of turbidite filled channels. The temporal development of these systems are expected to have profoundly affected the distribution and quality of key play elements, such as reservoirs and stratigraphic traps in slope settings, and the distribution of sands in deeper water and base of slope plays.

This work presents a modeling and control study of a reactive distillation column used for hydrogenation of benzene. A steady state and a dynamic model have been developed to investigate control structures for the column. The most important aspects of this control problem are that the purity of the product streams regarding benzene need to be met. At the same time as little toluene as possible should be converted. The former is a constraint imposed by EPA regulations while the latter is tied to process economics due to the high octane number of toluene. It is required to satisfy both of these objectives even under the influence of disturbances, as the feed composition changes on a regular basis. The dynamic model is used for developing transfer function models of two potential control structures. Pairing of inputs and outputs is performed based upon the Relative Gain Array (RGA) and PI controllers were designed for each control structure. The controller performance was then compared in simulation studies. From our results, control structure 2 performed better than control structure 1. The main advantage of CS2 over CS1 is noticed in the simulation of feed composition disturbance rejection, where CS2 returns all variables back to steady state within 3 hrs while it take CS1 more than 20 hrs to return the temperature variables back to steady state.

Single view reconstruction is fundamentally an under-constrained problem. We aim to develop new approaches to model human face and motion with model priors that restrict the space of possible solutions. First, we develop a novel approach to recover the 3D shape from a single view image under challenging conditions, such as large variations in illumination and pose. The problem is addressed by employing the techniques of non-linear manifold embedding and alignment. Specifically, the local image models for each patch of facial images and the local surface models for each patch of 3D shape are learned using a non-linear dimensionality reduction technique, and the correspondences between these local models are then learned by a manifold alignment method. Local models successfully remove the dependency of large training databases for human face modeling. By combining the local shapes, the global shape of a face can be reconstructed directly from a single linear system of equations via least square. Unfortunately, this learning-based approach cannot be successfully applied to the problem of human motion modeling due to the internal and external variations in single view video-based marker-less motion capture. Therefore, we introduce a new model-based approach for capturing human motion using a stream of depth images from a single depth sensor. While a depth sensor provides metric 3D information, using a single sensor, instead of a camera array, results in a view-dependent and incomplete measurement of object motion. We develop a novel two-stage template fitting algorithm that is invariant to subject size and view-point variations, and robust to occlusions. Starting from a known pose, our algorithm first estimates a body configuration through temporal registration, which is used to search the template motion database for a best match. The best match body configuration as well as its corresponding surface mesh model are deformed to fit the input depth map, filling in the part that is occluded from the input and compensating for differences in pose and body-size between the input image and the template. Our approach does not require any makers, user-interaction, or appearance-based tracking. Experiments show that our approaches can achieve good modeling results for human face and motion, and are capable of dealing with variety of challenges in single view reconstruction, e.g., occlusion.

No description available.

Current technologies such as anti-virus software programs and network firewalls provide reasonably secure protection at the host and network levels, but not at the application level. When network and host-level entry points are comparatively secure, public interfaces of web applications become the focus of malicious software attacks. In this thesis, we focus on one of most serious web application vulnerabilities, broken access control. Attackers often try to access unauthorized objects and resources other than URL pages in an indirect way; for instance, using indirect access to back-end resources such as databases. The consequences of these attacks can be very destructive, especially when the web application allows administrators to remotely manage users and contents over the web. In such cases, the attackers are not only able to view unauthorized content,but also to take over site administration. To protect against these types of attacks, we have designed and implemented a security analysis framework for dynamic web applications. A reverse engineering process is performed on an existing dynamic web application to extract a role-based access-control security model. A formal analysis is applied on the recovered model to check access-control security properties. This framework can be used to verify that a dynamic web application conforms to access control polices specified by a security engineer. Our framework provides a set of novel techniques for the analysis and modeling of web applications for the purpose of security verification and validation. It is largely language independent, and based on adaptable model recovery which can support a wide range of security analysis tasks. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-04-30 14:30:53.018

During the past decade service-orientation has become a popular design paradigm, offering an approach in which services are the functional building blocks. Services are self-contained units of composition, built to be invoked, composed, and destroyed on (user) demand. Service-oriented systems (SOS) are a collection of services that are developed based on several design principles such as: (i) loose coupling between services (e.g., inter-service communication can involve either simple data passing or two or more connected services coordinating some activity) that allows services to be independent, yet highly interoperable when required; (ii) service abstraction, which emphasizes the need to hide as many implementation details as possible, yet still exposing functional and extra-functional capabilities that can be offered to service users; (iii) service reusability provided by the existing services in a rapid and flexible development process; (iv) service composability as one of the main assets of SOS that provide a design platform for services to be composed and decomposed, etc. One of the main concerns in such systems is ensuring service quality per se, but also guaranteeing the quality of newly composed services. To accomplish the above, we consider two system perspectives: the developer's and the user's view, respectively. In the former, one can be assumed to have access to the internal service representation: functionality, enabled actions, resource usage, and interactions with other services. In the second, one has information primarily on the service interface and exposed capabilities (attributes/features). Means of checking that services and service compositions meet the expected requirements, the so-called correctness issue, can enable optimization and possibility to guarantee a satisfactory level of a service composition quality. In order to accomplish exhaustive correctness checks of design-time SOS, we employ model-checking as the main formal verification technique, which eventually provides necessary information about quality-of-service (QoS), already at early stages of system development. ~As opposed to the traditional approach of software system construction, in SOS the same service may be offered at various prices, QoS, and other conditions, depending on the user needs. In such a setting, the interaction between involved parties requires the negotiation of what is possible at request time, aiming at meeting needs on demand. The service negotiation process often proceeds with timing, price, and resource constraints, under which users and providers exchange information on their respective goals, until reaching a consensus. Hence, a mathematically driven technique to analyze a priori various ways to achieve such goals is beneficial for understanding what and how can particular goals be achieved. This thesis presents the research that we have been carrying out over the past few years, which resulted in developing methods and tools for the specification, modeling, and formal analysis of services and service compositions in SOS. The contributions of the thesis consist of: (i)constructs for the formal description of services and service compositions using the resource-aware timed behavioral language called REMES; (ii) deductive and algorithmic approaches for checking correctness of services and service compositions;(iii) a model of service negotiation that includes different negotiation strategies, formally analyzed against timing and resource constraints; (iv) a tool-chain (REMES SOS IDE) that provides an editor and verification support (by integration with the UPPAAL model-checker) to REMES-based service-oriented designs;(v) a relevant case-study by which we exercise the applicability of our framework.The presented work has also been applied on other smaller examples presented in the published papers. / Under det senaste årtiondet har ett tjänstorienterat paradigm blivit allt-mer populärt i utvecklingen av datorsystem. I detta paradigm utgör så kallade tjänster den minsta funktionella systemenheten. Dessa tjänster är konstruerade så att de kan skapas, användas, sammansättas och avslutas separat. De ska vara oberoende av varandra samtidigt som de ska kunna fungera effektivt tillsammans och i samarbete med andra system när så behövs. Vidare ska tjänsterna dölja sina interna implementa-tionsdetaljer i så stor grad som möjligt, samtidigt som deras fulla funktionalitet ska exponeras för systemdesignern. Tjänsterna ska också på ett enkelt sätt kunna återanvändas och sammansättas i en snabb och flexibel utvecklingsprocess.En av de viktigaste aspekterna i tjänsteorienterade datorsystem är att kunna säkerställa systemens kvalitet. För att åstadkomma detta ärdet viktigt att få en djupare insikt om tjänstens interna funktionalitet, i termer av möjliga operationer, resursinformation, samt tänkbar inter-aktion med andra tjänster. Detta är speciellt viktigt när utvecklaren har möjlighet att välja mellan två funktionellt likvärda tjänster somär olika med avseende på andra egenskaper, såsom responstid eller andra resurskrav. I detta sammanhang kan en matematisk beskrivning av en tjänsts beteende ge ökad förståelse av tjänstemodellen, samt hjälpa användaren att koppla ihop tjänster på ett korrekt sätt. En matematisk beskrivning öppnar också upp för ett sätt att matematiskt resonera kring tjänster. Metoder för att kontrollera att komponerade tjänstermöter ställda resurskrav möjliggör också resursoptimering av tjänster samt verifiering av ställda kvalitetskrav.I denna avhandling presenteras forskning som har bedrivits under de senaste åren. Forskningen har resulterat i metoder och verktyg föratt specificera, modellera och formellt analysera tjänster och sammansättning av tjänster. Arbetet i avhandlingen består av (i) en formell definition av tjänster och sammansättning av tjänster med hjälp avett resursmedvetet formellt specifikationsspråk kallat Remes; (ii) två metoder för att analysera tjänster och kontrollera korrektheten i sammansättning av tjänster, både deduktivt och algoritmiskt; (iii) en modell av förhandlingsprocessen vid sammansättning av tjänster som inkluderar olika förhandlingsstrategier; (iv) ett antal verktyg som stödjer dessa metoder. Metoderna har använts i ett antal fallstudier som är presenterade i de publicerade artiklarna. / Contesse

Feedforward is known to be one of the best methods for power amplifier linearization due to its superior linearization performance and broadband stable operation. However feedforward systems have relatively poor power efficiency and are complicated due to the presence of two nonlinear amplifiers and the requirements of amplitude, phase and delay matching within two different loops. In this thesis stochastic characterization of a simple feedforward system with autocorrelation analysis has been presented for Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) applications taking the amplitude and delay mismatches into consideration. It has been assumed that, the input signal can be represented as Gaussian noise, main and error amplifiers can be modeled with third order AM/AM nonlinearities and there exists no phase mismatch within the loops. Hence closed form expressions, which relate the main channel and distorted adjacent channel power at any point in the feedforward circuitry to the system parameters, have been obtained. Consequently, a mathematical handy tool is achieved towards specifying the circuit parameters rapidly for optimum linearity performance and efficiency. The developed analytical model has been verified by Radio Frequency (RF) and system simulations. An alternative approach towards modeling feedforward systems for arbitrary signals has also been brought into consideration and has been verified with system simulations.