Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Water problems prevalent in the Nyando River Basin are due to an ineffective water allocation system and lack of adequate conditions for implementation of sustainable integrated water resources management (IWRM) strategies. The basin is bedevilled by poor water resources management, inequitable allocation of water among consumers, physical infrastructural deficiencies, inefficient water utilisation, illegal water abstractions, natural resource mismanagement, conflicting and weak institutional roles and lack of stakeholder involvement in water resource management. The results of the study reveal sufficient per capita annual water availability with the potential to realise both Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Kenyan Vision 2030. However, analyses from flow duration curves (FDCs) and the water evaluation and planning (WEAP) model show that monthly water demands including environmental flow requirements (EFRs) are met only between 43% and 94% of the time. While the Water Act (2002) upholds the principles of IWRM on equitable and sustainable water resources allocation, in practice the current water allocation system falls short of implementing these strategies due to lack of a water allocation plan (WAP), inadequate water demand management (WDM), low infrastructural development and lack of community participation in WRM. For example, the total revenue generated in water supply schemes is only about 25 to 30% of their operational costs, which means that in the absence of subsidies the schemes cannot operate. The goal of this study was to examine the influence of the current water allocation system on water resources management in the Nyando River Basin by comparing the various sectoral water demands in the basin with the available water resources in order to improve understanding of how water allocation systems work in practice. The analyses further revealed that irrigation uses up to 72% of the available water, which is mainly drawn from the regular low flow contrary to the permit order. For example, the Ahero National Irrigation Scheme is permitted to draw 47 m3/day of water from regular flow and 13,500 m3/day from flood flow, but draws the whole amount from the regular flow; hence irrigation is the main cause of water deficits in the basin. Projections show that the irrigation sector will experience 300% increase in an unmet demand of 92.4 Mm3 by 2030 up from the current annual deficit of 2.9 Mm3. In light of the above challenges, both improvement of WDM and infrastructural provision have complementary roles in contributing to sustainable water availability, socioeconomic growth and poverty eradication in the basin and help achieve SDGs at the local scale. The results of the study will facilitate an understanding of the influence of water allocation systems on regional hydrology and form the basis of improving water allocation systems, and inform policy formulations to ensure sustained water availability and environmental sustainability in river basins. In that regard, this study contributes to the on-going global debate on Sustainable Development Goals by exploring ways of realising and improving IWRM strategies and the National targets.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis presents the results of an application of grounded theory research methodology to an area of study not previously tested by this technique. The allocation of land to urban growth impacts on both urban areas and the environment. A group of twenty leading practitioners in the field was interviewed and asked, in a set of structured questions, about their roles, the most important issues confronting them from ongoing urban development of Greenfield sites, how they saw the interaction between the current system of regulation and these issues, and changes they considered to be required. Applying grounded theory identified that the issues which concerned the practitioners fall into the following groupings: urban and environmental sustainability, the inadequate integration of these components yet the need to recognise their interaction, and the decision making process in terms of who is making decisions and how and when decisions are made about the allocation of land for urban growth. The current system is based primarily on the objective of resolving conflicts concerning land use. It was expected that the data obtained during the interviews may confirm the current orthodoxy. Unexpectedly, the data revealed not only a commonality of views but also a set of recommendations which could form the basis of a management framework to achieve greater environmental and urban sustainability. The interviewees pointed to proposals for urban growth in coastal NSW where a number of the recommendations have already been embraced by the NSW Government.

Australian universities are multi-million dollar operations employing tens of thousands of people. They attract revenue from a variety of government and non-government sources, and yet, as non-profit organisations they are judged by governments, peers and their communities on their performance in teaching and research rather than on a financial bottom line. In order to achieve these results, university managers must make decisions on how to allocate available funding throughout the university. Faced with competing demands on scarce funds, how do university managers make these choices? One option is to use a resource allocation model to 'crunch the numbers'. Resource allocation models can incorporate a number of elements - student and staff numbers, weightings and performance data, for example - to allocate available funds. These allocation models are used in different ways in different universities, but serve the same basic purpose of assisting decision-making on how much to allocate to different sections of the organisation. Such models operate within a process and context that includes the strategic aims of the University, the organisation structure, its committees and culture. This thesis contains case studies of resource allocation models and processes used in three Australian universities. It examines the methods used for resource allocation at the first and second levels within each university; that is, from the Vice-Chancellor to Dean (or equivalent), and from Dean to Head of School (or equivalent). Observations and conclusions are drawn on the models used, the processes surrounding the models, and the continuity between the two layers of allocations. The research finds all the case-study universities operate models at multiple levels in their organisations, and that there is a concerning lack of consistency and flow-through at these different levels. The messages that the university leadership intends to send through the allocations may be lost to managers one-process removed from them. The research also concludes that transparency is the most important element of the resource allocation process. University staff dealing with allocation processes will accept the results, even if they are not ideal, if they can understand how and why decisions were made. As a professional doctorate thesis, the aim is to provide a practical aid to people with responsibility for resource allocation in universities.

Thesis (M.S.) -- Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: virtual machine; agility. Includes bibliographical references (p.58-59).

Le problème d'allocation de ressources consiste à optimiser le coût global d'un système en répartissant selon diverses composantes une ressource contrainte par un budget. Chaque composante du système est régie par une loi reliant la ressource au coût qu'elle engendre. Cette description s'applique à de nombreux contextes dont les deux principaux évoqués ici sont issus du codage en communications numériques. Ainsi, les systèmes de codage de source par transformée ou de codage de canal à modulation multi-porteuses intègrent ce problème dans la recherche d'un point de fonctionnement optimal, s'adaptant bien à un formalisme commun. En communications numériques, différentes méthodes de résolution ont été élaborées au cours des quarante dernières années. Leur validité se limite souvent à des cas non-exhaustifs et leurs performances dépendent des caractéristiques des fonctions considérées. De plus, complexité et optimalité revêtent une importance particulière mais sont rarement optimisées de concert en raison des techniques de modélisation et des principes de recherche employés. Un des problèmes majeurs provient en particulier de l'existence de points dit "cachés" n'appartenant pas à l'enveloppe convexe du nuage global et souvent ignorés par les méthodes actuelles d'optimisation. Cette thèse propose d'aborder le problème d'allocation de ressources en communications numériques sous un angle nouveau et global. La reformulation complète du problème et de l'ensemble des concepts sous-jacents permet ainsi d'énoncer des critères propices à la description de quatre algorithmes novateurs.

À l'ère de la mondialisation, l'environnement industriel et économique a subi plusieurs changements majeurs. Les chaînes logistiques sont en train de devenir de plus en plus de complexes réseaux composés de nombreux acteurs qui sont tantôt en concurrence et tantôt coopèrent pour répondre aux incessantes exigences des consommateurs. Dans un tel contexte, les entreprises se sont rapidement rendu compte de la limite du modèle complètement décentralisé où chacune d'entre elles optimise sa propre chaîne logistique indépendamment des autres acteurs. Afin de trouver de nouvelles sources de compétitivité et de faire face à la perpétuelle complexité de l'environnement économique, les entreprises tentent de dépasser la frontière des actions individuelles favorisant les actions coordonnées et centralisées. Désormais, la coopération entre les diverses chaînes logistiques et la formation d'alliances se trouvent au coeur des préoccupations des entreprises. En effet, en mutualisant les moyens logistiques, la coopération permet une meilleure exploitation des ressources et par le biais des actions collectives, elle permet de mieux bénéficier des économies d'échelles conduisant à réduire significativement les coûts et à générer des bénéfices considérables. Toutefois, dans de tels systèmes coopératifs, les acteurs sont indépendants et par ailleurs toujours intéressés en priorité par leurs profits individuels. De ce fait, la coopération soulève deux enjeux essentiels : (1) Quelles sont les alliances qui sont susceptibles de se former ? Et (2), comment partager les bénéfices réalisés sur les différents acteurs coopérants ? Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons au phénomène de la coopération dans les chaînes logistiques. Particulièrement, nous posons les précédentes questions dans des chaînes logistiques ou plusieurs firmes peuvent réduire leurs coûts logistiques en optant pour une gestion collective des stocks. Les principaux résultats de cette thèse portent sur l'utilisation des principes de la théorie des jeux coopératifs pour déterminer les alliances les plus profitables ainsi que la portion de profit que chaque firme doit recevoir afin de garder la stabilité des alliances formées.

<p>In order to be competitive with emerging mobile systems and to satisfy the ever growing request for higher data rates, the 3G consortium, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), is currently developing concepts for a long term evolution (LTE) of the 3G standard. The LTE-concept at Ericsson is based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as downlink air interface. OFDM enables the use of frequency domain link adaptation to select the most appropriate transmission parameters according to current channel conditions, in order to maximize the throughput and maintain the delay at a desired level. The purpose of this thesis work is to study, implement and evaluate different link adaptation algorithms. The main focus is on modulation adaptation, where the differences in performance between time domain and frequency domain adaptation are investigated. The simulations made in this thesis are made with a simulator developed at Ericsson. Simulations show in general that the cell throughput is enhanced by an average of 3% when using frequency domain modulation adaptation. When using the implemented frequency domain power allocation algorithm, a gain of 23-36% in average is seen in the users 5th percentile throughput. It should be noted that the simulations use a realistic web traffic model, which makes the channel quality estimation (CQE) difficult. The CQE has great impact on the performance of frequency domain adaptation. Throughput improvements are expected when using an improved CQE or interference avoidance schemes. The gains with frequency domain adaptation shown in this thesis work may be too small to motivate the extra signalling overhead required. The complexity of the implemented frequency domain power allocation algorithm is also very high compared to the performance enhancement seen.</p>

We constructed a parallelizing compiler that utilizes partial evaluation to achieve efficient parallel object code from very high-level data independent source programs. On several important scientific applications, the compiler attains parallel performance equivalent to or better than the best observed results from the manual restructuring of code. This is the first attempt to capitalize on partial evaluation's ability to expose low-level parallelism. New static scheduling techniques are used to utilize the fine-grained parallelism of the computations. The compiler maps the computation graph resulting from partial evaluation onto the Supercomputer Toolkit, an eight VLIW processor parallel computer.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 114-121). Also available in electronic version.

This research develops yield and reliability models for fault-tolerant semiconductor integrated circuits and develops optimization algorithms that can be directly applied to these models. Since defects cause failures in microelectronics systems, accurate yield and reliability models considering these defects as well as optimization techniques determining efficient defect-tolerant schemes are essential in semiconductor manufacturing and nanomanufacturing to ensure manufacturability and productivity. The defect-based yield model considers various types of failures, fault-tolerant schemes such as hierarchical redundancy and error correcting code, and burn-in effects, simultaneously. The reliability model counts on carry-over single-cell failures accompanied by the failure rate of the semiconductor integrated circuits under the assumption of an error correcting code policy. The redundancy allocation problem, which seeks to find an optimal allocation of redundancy that maximizes system reliability, is one of the representative problems in reliability optimization. The problem is typically formulated as a nonconvex integer nonlinear programming problem that is nonseparable and coherent. Two iterative heuristics, tree and scanning heuristics, and variants are studied to obtain local optima and a branch-and-bound algorithm is proposed to find the global optimum for redundancy allocation problems. The proposed algorithms engage a multiple-search paths strategy to accelerate efficiency. Experimental results of these algorithms indicate that they are superior to the existing algorithms in terms of computation time and solution quality. An example of memory semiconductor integrated circuits is presented to show the applicability of both the yield and reliability models and the optimization algorithms to fault-tolerant semiconductor integrated circuits.