Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Shu S. Liao, John E. Mutty. Includes bibliographical references (p. 41-42). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Thomas W. Crouch, Keith F. Snider. Includes bibliographical references (p. 95). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Lyn R. Whitaker, Arnold H. Buss. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-78). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Samuel E. Buttrey. Includes bibliographical references (p. 53). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Samuel E. Buttrey, Robert A. Koyak. Includes bibliographical references (p. 49). Also available online.

In this dissertation, we elaborate on the inherent risks and uncertainties in power systems and associated industries, and develop practical solution methods to eliminate their adverse effects. our research agenda consists of practice-driven problems in different stages of power generation as follows. (1) Affordable fuel procurement through developing a comprehensive fuel supply chain design and operations planning system for electricity generation companies, (2) reliable electricity generation through incorporating dynamic asset rating concept in the unit commitment problem, and (3) efficient demand management through proposing a job scheduling model for effective local generation consumption. Since reliability cannot be compromised in energy sector, robust optimization has been adopted as a powerful method to model multiple sources of uncertainty, and to protect the performance of the systems against worst situations. Exact and heuristic methods are then developed and customized to solve these computationally challenging problems. In particular, inspired by the challenges in solving two-stage robust optimization problems, we developed a multi-scenario cutting plane generation algorithm, that considers all the realizations of the uncertainty set at once, and thus, alleviates the computational challenge.

Low-power and small size analog to digital converters (ADCs) are the strategic building blocks in state of the art mobile wireless communication systems. Various techniques have been developed to reduce both power consumption and die area of the ADC. Among these, the opamp-sharing technique shows the most promise. In opamp-sharing, power and die area are saved by sharing one opamp between two successive pipeline stages. However, this technique suffers from the well-known memory effect drawback due to the absence of the reset phase that discharges the opamp's input parasitics. In this dissertation, this drawback is solved by introducing a discharge phase before the opamp is used for the pipeline stages without compromising speed and resolution of the ADC. Further power and area reduction is achieved by using a capacitor-sharing technique. This technique reduces the effective load capacitance of the opamp by reusing the charge on the feedback capacitor for the MDAC operation of the following stage, resulting in faster settling without increasing opamp power. The proposed low input-capacitance variable-gm opamp also helps to reduce the memory effect and improves the settling behavior of the stage output by increasing the bandwidth of the opamp while input parasitics of the opamp are kept small. The prototype designs of a 10-bit 50MSample/s pipelined ADC and a 14-bit 100MSample/s pipelined ADC implemented in 0.18¹m CMOS technology demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. The first ADC achieves 56.2dB SNDR and 72.7dB SFDR for a Nyquist input at full sampling rate while consuming 12 mW from a 1.8-V supply. The FOM, defined as, [power/2[superscript ENOB].Fs], is 0.46 pJ/step with Fin = 24.5MHz at 50MS/s. The second ADC achieves 72.4dB SNR and 88.5dB SFDR at 100MS/s with a 46MHz input and consumes 230mW from a 3V supply. The FOM of the second ADC is 0.69 pJ/step with Fin = 46MHz at 100MS/s.

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The Tamil Tigers were one of the most organized, focused, and influential organizations in Asian politics during the last three decades. Throughout the existence of the organization, the goal of the LTTE was to establish a separate Tamil state – Tamil Eelam - comprising the Northern and Eastern parts of Sri Lanka where Tamil-speaking populations were dense. The Sri Lankan civil war, which ended in May of 2009, claimed tens of thousands of lives, displaced hundreds of thousands of residents, and impeded the economic well-being of Sri Lanka. This thesis employs the operational code analysis as a way to better understand the character, behaviour, and norms of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. An additional purpose of this thesis is to test the utility of this model in the case of a terrorist organization such as the LTTE. The Operational Code Analysis framework was premiered by Nathan Leites in his two-part study of the Bolshevik Party, and was subsequently revived and re-imagined by a number of academics. The iteration of the Operational Code framework used in this thesis is a qualitative analysis which is comprised of ten questions: five ‘philosophical’ and five ‘instrumental’. This examination reveals that while this model has much to offer in analyzing this terrorist organization, it is in some ways a flawed method of exposition. However, the model produces unexpected insights about the stated beliefs of the LTTE.