No presente trabalho, fez-se a adaptação do reservatório superficial do ModSimLS para trabalhar como reservatório do solo. O modelo denomina-se IrrigaLS. Por comparação com o método do balanço hídrico, verificou-se que o IrrigaLS é apto para determinar demandas de irrigação suplementares e/ou totais. Com a adaptação, o modelo considera a produção agrícola como o resultado da interação dos fatores água-clima-planta-solo. A capacidade de simular sistemas complexos de recursos hídricos foi testada por comparação dos resultados do IrrigaLS com um modelo de simulação similar (ModSimLS). No ModSimLS, as demandas foram calculadas usando método tradicional de balanço hídrico. Verificou-se que o modelo é apto para simular sistemas complexos de recursos hídricos e apresenta algumas vantagens sobre o ModSimLS, quais sejam: determina a necessidade hídrica real da cultura; garante em períodos de seca um suprimento mínimo de água para a planta; garante uma economia de água pela inclusão da precipitação e possibilidade de variação do volume meta; diferencia as culturas com relação a sensibilidade ao déficit hídrico e calcula o balanço hídrico diário do solo. / In this work, an adaptation in the ModSimLS surface reservoir has been made in order to make it work as a soil reservoir. The model is called IrrigaLS. When compared to the water balance method, it was ascertained that IrrigaLS is suitable for determining supplementary and/or total irrigation demands. The model adaptation considers agricultural production as a result from water-weather-plant-soil factors interaction. The model capability to simulate complex water resources systems has been tested by comparing the results of IrrigaLS with a similar simulation model (ModSimLS) where the irrigation demands were computed using traditional water balance methods. It was ascertained that the model is suitable for simulating complex water resources systems and it has some advantages over ModSimLS, that are: it determines the real water needs of the culture; it guarantees a minimum water supply to the crop during dry periods, it guarantees water saving by the inclusion of rainfall and by the possibility to choose the soil moisture target; it distinguishes the crops in relation to the water deficit sensibility and it calculates the soil daily water balance.

The pervasiveness and operational autonomy of mesh-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) make them an ideal candidate in offering sustained monitoring functions at reasonable cost over a wide area. To extend the functional lifetime of battery-operated sensor nodes, stringent sleep scheduling strategies with communication duty cycles running at sub-1% range are expected to be adopted. Although ultra-low communication duty cycles can cast a detrimental impact on sensing coverage and network connectivity, its effects can be mitigated with adaptive sleep scheduling, node deployment redundancy and multipath routing within the mesh WSN topology. This work proposes a cross-layer organizational approach based on sleep scheduling, called Sense-Sleep Trees (SS-Trees), that aims to harmonize the various engineering issues and provides a method to extend monitoring capabilities and operational lifetime of mesh-based WSNs engaged in wide-area surveillance applications. Various practical considerations such as sensing coverage requirements, duty cycling, transmission range assignment, data messaging, and protocol signalling are incorporated to demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed design approach.

The pervasiveness and operational autonomy of mesh-based wireless sensor networks (WSNs) make them an ideal candidate in offering sustained monitoring functions at reasonable cost over a wide area. To extend the functional lifetime of battery-operated sensor nodes, stringent sleep scheduling strategies with communication duty cycles running at sub-1% range are expected to be adopted. Although ultra-low communication duty cycles can cast a detrimental impact on sensing coverage and network connectivity, its effects can be mitigated with adaptive sleep scheduling, node deployment redundancy and multipath routing within the mesh WSN topology. This work proposes a cross-layer organizational approach based on sleep scheduling, called Sense-Sleep Trees (SS-Trees), that aims to harmonize the various engineering issues and provides a method to extend monitoring capabilities and operational lifetime of mesh-based WSNs engaged in wide-area surveillance applications. Various practical considerations such as sensing coverage requirements, duty cycling, transmission range assignment, data messaging, and protocol signalling are incorporated to demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed design approach.

In this thesis we develop integer programming approaches for solving network flow problems with equal-split restrictions. Such problems arise in traffic engineering of internet protocol networks. Equal-split structure is used in protocols like OSPF and IS-IS that allow flow to be split among the multiple shortest paths. Equal-split assumptions also arise in peer-to-peer networks and road optimization problems. All the previous work on this problem has been focused on developing heuristic methods for the specific applications. We are the first ones to study the problem as a general network flow problem and provide a polyhedral study. First we consider a general multi-commodity network flow problem with equal split restrictions. This problem is NP-hard in general. We perform a polyhedral study on mixed integer linear programming formulation for this problem. Valid inequalities are obtained, and are incorporated within a branch-and-cut framework to solve the problem. We provide fast separation schemes for most of the families of valid inequalities. Computational results are presented to show the effectiveness of cutting plane families. Next, we consider the OSPF weight setting problem. We propose an integer programming formulation for this problem. A decomposition based approach to solve the problem is presented next. Valid inequalities, exploiting the structure, are obtained for this problem. We also propose heuristic methods to get good starting solutions for the problem. The proposed cutting planes and heuristic methods are integrated within a branch-and-cut framework to solve the problem. We present computational experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to obtain solutions with tight optimality gaps as compared with default CPLEX. Finally, we consider an equal split flow problem on bipartite graphs. We present an integer programming formulation for this problem that models the equal-split in a different way than the multi-commodity network flow problem discussed before. Valid inequalities and heuristic methods for this problem are proposed, and are integrated within the branch-and-cut framework. We present computational experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of our solution strategy. We present an alternate formulation for the problem with some favorable polyhedral properties. Lastly, a computational comparison between the two formulations is presented.

Every knapsack problem may be relaxed to a cyclic group problem. In 1969, Gomory found the subadditive characterization of facets of the master cyclic group problem. We simplify the subadditive relations by the substitution of complementarities and discover a minimal representation of the subadditive polytope for the master cyclic group problem. By using the minimal representation, we characterize the vertices of cardinality length 3 and implement the shooting experiment from the natural interior point. The shooting from the natural interior point is a shooting from the inside of the plus level set of the subadditive polytope. It induces the shooting for the knapsack problem. From the shooting experiment for the knapsack problem we conclude that the most hit facet is the knapsack mixed integer cut which is the 2-fold lifting of a mixed integer cut. We develop a cutting plane algorithm augmenting cutting planes generated by shooting, and implement it on Wong-Coppersmith digraphs observing that only small number of cutting planes are enough to produce the optimal solution. We discuss a relaxation of shooting as a clue to quick shooting. A max flow model on covering space is shown to be equivalent to the dual of shooting linear programming problem.

This research contributes to the state of the art and state of the practice in solving a very important and computationally challenging problem in the areas of urban transportation systems, operations research, disaster management, and public policy. Being a very active topic of research during the past few decades, the problem of developing an efficient and practical strategy for evacuation of real-sized urban traffic networks in case of disasters from different causes, quickly enough to be employed in immediate disaster management scenarios, has been identified as one of the most challenging and yet vital problems by many researchers. More specifically, this research develops fast methods to find the optimal integrated strategy for traffic routing and traffic signal control to evacuate real-sized urban networks in the most efficient manner. In this research a solution framework is proposed, developed and tested which is capable of solving these problems in very short computational time. An efficient relaxation-based decomposition method is proposed, implemented for two evacuation integrated routing and signal control model formulations, proven to be optimal for both formulations, and verified to reduce the computational complexity of the optimal integrated routing and signal control problem. The efficiency of the proposed decomposition method is gained by reducing the integrated optimal routing and signal control problem into a relaxed optimal routing problem. This has been achieved through an insight into intersection flows in the optimal routing solution: in at least one of the optimal solutions of the routing problem, each street during each time interval only carries vehicles in at most one direction. This property, being essential to the proposed decomposition method, is called "unidirectionality" in this dissertation. The conditions under which this property exists in the optimal evacuation routing solution are identified, and the existence of unidirectionality is proven for: (1) the common Single-Destination System-Optimal Dynamic Traffic Assignment (SD-SODTA) problem, with the objective to minimize the total time spent in the threat area; and, (2) for the single-destination evacuation problem with varying threat levels, with traffic models that have no spatial queue propagation. The proposed decomposition method has been implemented in compliance with two widely-accepted traffic flow models, the Cell Transmission Model (CTM) and the Point Queue (PQ) model. In each case, the decomposition method finds the optimal solution for the integrated routing and signal control problem. Both traffic models have been coded and applied to a realistic real-size evacuation scenario with promising results. One important feature that is explored is the incorporation of evacuation safety aspects in the optimization model. An index of the threat level is associated with each link that reflects the adverse effects of traveling in a given threat zone on the safety and health of evacuees during the process of evacuation. The optimization problem is then formulated to minimize the total exposure of evacuees to the threat. A hypothetical large-scale chlorine gas spill in a high populated urban area (downtown Tucson, Arizona) has been modeled for testing the evacuation models where the network has varying threat levels. In addition to the proposed decomposition method, an efficient network-flow solution algorithm is also proposed to find the optimal routing of traffic in networks with several threat zones, where the threat levels may be non-uniform across different zones. The proposed method can be categorized in the class of "negative cycle canceling" algorithms for solving minimum cost flow problems. The unique feature in the proposed algorithm is introducing a multi-source shortest path calculation which enables the efficient detection and cancellation of negative cycles. The proposed method is proven to find the optimal solution, and it is also applied to and verified for a mid-size test network scenario.

Container terminals use intelligent freight technologies (e.g., EDI, RFID and GPS) to exchange data with their partners, to locate containers and equipment within the terminal, and to automate tasks. This thesis illustrated, via two examples, how this data may be used to optimize operations at the terminal.The first part uses information on announced volumes to allocate internal handling equipment. The objective is to minimize overall delays at the terminal. The problem is represented as a network flow problem and implemented as a linear mixed integer programming model. A case study for a terminal at the Grand Port Maritime de Marseille is carried out. We also showed that combining the allocation problem with the dimensioning of a truck appointment system may reduce overall delays at the terminal. The second part uses information on announced container retrievals and container positions to improve retrieval operations. The objective is to retrieve containers from a bay in a given sequence with a minimum number of parasite relocations. We improve an existing binary programming model and introduce an exact branch and price approach - with a binary subproblem and two variants of an enumerative subproblem - and a heuristic branch and price approach - with a heuristic subproblem. The exact approach solves only small instances; the heuristic approach performs well on several instances, but should be improved further. We also deal with a dynamic version of the problem where the retrieval order becomes revealed over time and evaluate different relocation strategies for this case.

The evolution of Mobile Internet has led to the growth of bandwidth demanding applications like video streaming and social networking. The required data rates projected for such applications cannot be sustained by current cellular networks. New network architectures like Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE Advanced have been carefully engineered and introduced to fulfill such large data rates. The recent introduction of femtocells enabled high data rates and better coverage indoors, without the need for site establishment or upgrading the network infrastructure. Femtocells, however, will potentially suffer from major interference problems due to their expected dense and ad hoc deployment. The main contribution in this thesis is the introduction of a new and a very promising direction in deriving capable and efficient interference mitigation schemes, and comparing this direction to current techniques in the literature. Several works have studied the effect of interference on networks employing femtocells. In this thesis, we also survey such works and provide an overview of the elements considered in mitigating interference. We introduce a new scheme known for its optimality, and use it for frequency assignment in downlink femtocell networks. The algorithm is based on optimization search rather than greedy or heuristic methods. Experimental simulations will be shown to evaluate the proposed scheme against other schemes from the literature. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2012-03-31 02:14:28.549

The accurate determination of gender of biological samples has valuable applications in medical and forensic investigations. Gender determination based on length variations in the X-Y homologous amelogenin gene, is part of most commercial multiplex DNA profiling kits. The first report of a failure of the amelogenin sex test was in 1998 when two normal males were typed as female. Subsequently, several amelogenin Y (AMELY) negative males have been reported. This study represents the first report of this phenomenon in the black South African population. This study determined the size of the Y-chromosome deletion that resulted in the failure of the amelogenin sex test in two black South African AMELY-negative males by typing specific DNA markers surrounding the amelogenin locus. Through deletion size and Y-chromosome microsatellite haplotypes, the relationship between the samples was investigated. The samples were sequenced at the amelogenin gene and typed for thirteen sites on the short arm of the Y-chromosome. In order to determine the Y-chromosome haplotypes, eleven Y-chromosome microsatellite markers were typed. These samples had the same size deletion of approximately 3 Mb. The Y-chromosome haplotypes indicated that these were probably independent events. The frequency of AMELY-negative males is rare in this population sample of 8,344 individuals, with a frequency of 0.065% in the black South African sample population. Notwithstanding, tests performed for detecting the presence of male DNA based on the presence of the amelogenin gene alone should be reconsidered, as this study confirms that these deletions do occur in the African population. The impact of the results generated in this study on the medical and forensic practise of DNA testing is significant. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Biochemistry))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

There are many practical decision problems that fall into the category of network flow problems: numerous examples of applications can be found in areas such as telecommunications, logistics, distributions, engineering, computer science and so on. One of the most popular and valuable tools to solve network flow problems of a topological nature is the use of linear programming models. An important extension of these models is that of integer programming models that deal with problems where some, or all, of the variables are required to assume integer variables. A significant application in this class of problems is the knapsack problem that arises in different contexts such as loading containers in aircraft or satisfying the demand for various lengths of cloth which must be cut from fixed length bolts of fabric. In this study, the feasibility of representing a network flow model in a tree network model and subsequently solving it using a tree knapsack approach is investigated. To compare and validate the proposed technique, a specific case study was chosen from the literature that can be used as a basis for the research project. The said study was an oil pipeline design problem, addressed by Brimberg et al. (2003). This focuses on the optimal design of an oil pipeline network for the South Gabon oil field in Africa. The objective was to reduce oil transportation costs to a major port. Following an overview of different network flow and knapsack models, an overview of the said matter is presented. A description of the proposed tree knapsack approach and the application of this approach to the given problem is given. Results have indicated that it is feasible to apply a tree knapsack approach to solve network flow problems. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Computer Science))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.