Human beings are facing instant and serious chemical fuel shortage and global warming subjects. We have being relying on the central power system, but causing low power efficiency and series environmental issues. Distributed power system can affect efficiently on the large investment on capital and land for central power system. It can backup the central power system for power management to maximize the power efficiency. It is one of the options for power system. Therefore, we expect to build up a reasonable measurer to the micro gas turbine thermal efficiency when the fat becomes power.

This thesis is focused on possibility of constructing distributed underwater sonar which has an ability to increase or decrease number of sensor elements without any modification on its hardware. Each sonar module works individually. Its synchronization and communication between modules and the image processing unit are archived by using CAN protocol. This new design concept gives several advantages over conventional design.Only one prototype was made, but several modules must be combined in the actual application. The discussion about a complete system can be found in the future work section.The project composes of two main parts: design and building a prototype. The testing procedure and result of both parts are described and summarized with a conclusion.

We address two problems dealing with fault-tolerant communication in networks. The first one is designing a distributed storage protocol tolerant to Byzantine failure of servers. The protocol implements a multi-writer multi-reader register which satisfies a weaker consistency condition called MWReg. Most of the earlier work gives multiwriter implementations by simulating m copies of a single-writer protocol where m is the number of writers. Our solution gives a direct multi-writer implementation and thus has bounded message and time complexity independent of the number of writers. We have simulated the complete protocol to test its performance and also proved its correctness theoretically. The second problem we address is of providing a reliable communication link between two nodes in a network. We present a capacity reservation algorithm in the case for upper bounds on edge capacities and costs associated with using per unit capacity on any edge. We give a flow based approximation algorithm with cost at most four times optimal. To conclude, we design a distributed storage protocol and a capacity reservation algorithm which are tolerant to network failures.

Educators are frequently faced with the challenges of politics, hostility, selfishness, and violence; it is unwise to think that the principal is the only one providing leadership for school improvement. Thus a distributed perspective of leadership urges us to take leadership practice as the focus of interest and address both teachers and administrators as leaders. The purpose of this descriptive statistical study was to explore principals’ leadership practices as perceived by teacher leaders and its possible affect to student achievement. Data were collected by using the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) (self and observer) instrument (Kouzes & Posner, 2003) from all willing teacher leaders to determine the leadership practices of the principals in Region VI, Texas. Also, statewide assessment data available from three school years (2004-2006) were obtained from the Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) report. In order to answer research questions one to four, descriptive statistics including frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation were calculated for the LPI results. The distributed framework offers considerable influence for studying leadership as a schoolwide rather than individual practice. Based on the literature, six conclusions were drawn and recommendations were made regarding practice, future study and policy. First, the findings indicated that principals’ collaborative working style with teacher leaders seems to have positive impact on student achievement. Second, failing to enlist teacher leaders in a common vision might have a negative affect on student academic performance. Third, the perceptions of teacher leaders in School 7, School 5 and School 16 reflected a need for the principal to take challenges and seek challenging opportunities to change and grow. Fourth, recognizing teacher leaders’ contributions and celebrating team accomplishments is likely to have a positive and indirect impact on school academic performance. Fifth, schools that had higher principal self and observer LPI scores tended to have better TAKS scores. Last, the findings from the study complement studies of the effects of site-based management teams. The positive impact of “Enabling Others to Act” and “Inspiring a Shared Vision” on student achievement implies that distributed leadership is most likely to contribute to school improvement and to build school capacity for improvement.

The eigenstructure assignment scheme for robust multivariable feedback control is extended to redundantly actuated dynamical systems. It is shown that an orthonormal set of close loop eigenvectors is always exactly assignable in the case of redundant actuation proving the inherent robustness in the control design methodology. A choice of close loop eigenvector set to minimize the feedback gain matrix is suggested. Partial Eigenstructure Assignment methodology is proposed for second order mechanical systems. A methodology for coordinated actuation of redundant actuator sets by a trained weighted minimum norm solution is presented. To apply the methodology to hyper-redundant actuator arrays, for application to smart actuator arrays, a novel adaptive discretization algorithm is proposed. The adaptive aggregation strategy, based on the physics of the system, introduces nodes, to optimize a performance index of the overall plant model. The dimensionality of the inputs thus reduces to a finite number, making it a candidate plant for control by the robust redundant control scheme. The adaptive aggregation together with robust redundant control methodology is demonstrated on a finite element model of a novel morphing wing. This schema unifies the traditionally disparate methods of modeling and controller design.

The process of bioinformatics computing consumes huge computing resources, in situation of difficulty in improvement of algorithm and high cost of mainframe, many scholars choice distributed computing as an approach for reducing computing time. When using distributed computing for bioinformatics, how to find a properly tasks allocation strategy among different computing nodes to keep load-balancing is an important issue. By adopting multi-agent system as a tool, system developer can design tasks allocation strategies through intuitional view and keep load-balancing among computing nodes. The purpose of our research work is using multi-agent system as an underlying tool to develop a distributed computing environment and assist scholars in solving bioinformatics computing problem, In comparison with public computing projects such as BOINC, our research work focuses on utilizing computing nodes deployed inside organization and connected by local area network.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Computer Science and Engineering. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-173). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38826

Thesis (M.S.)--Tennessee Technological University, 2008. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Mar. 18, 2010). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-103). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2002. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.