Smart Grid technology is likely to be implemented in various magnitudes across utilities in the near future. To accommodate these technologies significant changes will have to be incorporated in building design construction and planning. This research paper attempts to evaluate public utility executives’ plans to adopt smart grid technologies and to assess timing of smart grid impacts on future design and construction practices. Telephone survey was the data collection method used to collect information from executives at cooperative and municipal utilities. The study focuses on small and medium utilities with more than five thousand customers and fewer than one hundred thousand customers. A stratified random sampling approach was applied and sample results for fifty-nine survey responses were used to predict the timing of smart grid implementation and the timing of smart grid impacts on future design and construction practices. Results of this research indicate that design and construction professionals should already be developing knowledge and experience to accommodate smart grid impacts on the built environment.

Abstract Facing to the upcoming of knowledge and economic age, the intellectual property of manpower resource is the key factor for government to upgrade the competitive capability. If the governmental employees desired to be a worker of knowledge, the department in government must provide the opportunity to let governmental employees learn. And they must have equipped themselves with ability and intention for learning the new knowledge so as to expand their intellectual property and to be an authentic worker for knowledge. Starting from July 1, 2001, the lifelong learning passport of governmental employees was officially implemented. This is the first time to promote this activity for governmental employees for lifelong learning. In addition to investigate the satisfaction of governmental employees on lifelong learning, this study also researches on personal statistical variance, individual attitude, organization factor, individual behavior and intention, and influence on satisfaction with lifelong learning passport for the governmental employees. This study adopts questionnaire method, and because it is limited by time and labor, only governmental employees served in Taichung City Government are interviewed. There are total 1173 copies of questionnaire issued, and 966 copies are collected. Among them, 916 copies are effective, and 51 copies are ineffective. The recovery rate is 82.35%, and effective recovery is 78.09%. Through SPSS software and statistical analysis with LISREL, the results of this study are concluded as follows: 1. Variance of statistical for individual attitude under analysis, there is a significant difference on lifelong learning passport for governmental employees at different ages. And the rest assumptions are unacceptable. 2. In the structure of behavior intention affected to lifelong learning passport of governmental employees, ¡§Recognition¡¨, ¡§Preference¡¨, ¡§Colleague Relationship¡¨ have reached a significant standard for behavior and have a positive relation. Moreover, ¡§Organization Supporting¡¨ and ¡§Senior Officer¡¦s Attitude¡¨ have no significant relation with behavior intention. 3. In the structure of satisfaction on lifelong learning for governmental employees, ¡§Behavior Intention¡¨ ¡§Organization Supporting¡¨ ¡§Senior Officer¡¦s Attitude¡¨ and ¡§Colleague Relationship¡¨ have a significant standard for satisfaction and have a positive relation.

Physical security systems are intended to prevent or mitigate potentially catastrophic loss of property or life. Decisions regarding the selection of one system or configuration of resources over another may be viewed as design decisions within a risk theoretic setting. The problem of revealing a clear preference among design alternatives, using only a partial or inexact delineation of event probabilities, is examined. In this dissertation, an analytical framework for the assessment of the risk associated with a physical security system is presented. Linear programming is used to determine bounds on the expected utility of an alternative, and conditions for the separation of preferences among alternatives are shown. If distinguishable preferences do not exist, techniques to determine what information may help to separate preferences are presented. The linear programming approach leads to identification of vulnerabilities in a security system through an examination of the solution to the dual problem. Security of a hypothetical military forward operating base is considered as an illustrative example. For two alternative security schemes, the uncertainty inherent in the scenario is represented using probability assessments consisting of bounds on event probabilities and exact probability assignments. Application of the framework reveals no separation of preferences between the alternatives. Examination of the primal and dual solutions to the linear programming problems, however, reveals insights into information which, if obtained, could lead to a separation of preferences as well as information on vulnerabilities in one of the alternative security postures.

Taiwan Power Company (the Company) is devoted to the development and operation for the power industry in Taiwan, which is the driving power to Taiwan industry. By the ¡§quality¡¨ analysis of the Company¡¦s organization, changes and innovation, and the ¡§quantity¡¨ analysis of changes of the Company¡¦s operation data (during 2004 to 2008), we discuss the impact and influence on the Company¡¦s operation under Taiwan government¡¦s environmental protection and saving policies in such circumstances of more and more importance on environment issues. We adopt ¡§SWOT¡¨ analysis of the Company¡¦s action to environmental protection policy. On the points of view form two sides, government policy and the Company¡¦s operation, we interview some power industries, academic communities and official communities, and by means of case study to summarize their suggestion to the Company¡¦s strategies for facing environmental protection policy. From the concepts of enhancing power control and reducing operation costs, we put the strategies and action plans for the Company, and hope to ensure its long-term competition advantage.

Thesis (M.S.)--Tennessee Technological University, 2009. / Title from title page screen (viewed on Mar. 12, 2010). Bibliography: leaves 93-97.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004. Directed by Philip Shapira. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 173-182).

This dissertation consists of three research papers on Preference models of decision making, all of which adopt an axiomatic approach in which preference conditions are studied so that the models in this dissertation can be verified by checking their conditions at the behavioral level. The first paper “Utility Functions Representing Preference over Interdependent Attributes” studies the problem of how to assess a two attribute utility function when the attributes are interdependent. We consider a situation where the risk aversion on one attribute could be influenced by the level of the other attribute in a two attribute decision making problem. In this case, the multilinear utility model—and its special cases the additive and multiplicative forms—cannot be applied to assess a subject’s preference because utility independence does not hold. We propose a family of preference conditions called nth degree discrete distribution independence that can accommodate a variety of dependencies among two attributes. The special case of second degree discrete distribution independence is equivalent to the utility independence condition. Third degree discrete distribution independence leads to a decomposition formula that contains many other decomposition formulas in the existing literature as special cases. As the decompositions proposed in this research is more general than many existing ones, the study provides a model of preference that has potential to be used for assessing utility functions more accurately and with relatively little additional effort. The second paper “On the Axiomatization of the Satiation and Habit Formation Utility Models” studies the axiomatic foundations of the discounted utility model that incorporates both satiation and habit formation in temporal decision. We propose a preference condition called shifted difference independence to axiomatize a general habit formation and satiation model (GHS). This model allows for a general habit formation and satiation function that contains many functional forms in the literature as special cases. Since the GHS model can be reduced to either a general satiation model (GSa) or a general habit formation model (GHa), our theory also provides approaches to axiomatize both the GSa model and the GHa model. Furthermore, by adding extra preference conditions into our axiomatization framework, we obtain a GHS model with a linear habit formation function and a recursively defined linear satiation function. In the third paper “Hope, Dread, Disappointment, and Elation from Anticipation in Decision Making”, we propose a model to incorporate both anticipation and disappointment into decision making, where we define hope as anticipating a gain and dread as anticipating a loss. In this model, the anticipation for a lottery is a subjectively chosen outcome for a lottery that influences the decision maker’s reference point. The decision maker experiences elation or disappointment when she compares the received outcome with the anticipated outcome. This model captures the trade-off between a utility gain from higher anticipation and a utility loss from higher disappointment. We show that our model contains some existing decision models as its special cases, including disappointment models. We also use our model to explore how a person’s attitude toward the future, either optimistic or pessimistic, could mediate the wealth effect on her risk attitude. Finally, we show that our model can be applied to explain the coexistence of a demand for gambling and insurance and provides unique insights into portfolio choice and advertising decision problems. / text

Not available / text

Engineered system complexity continues to increase rapidly, concurrent with the requirement for the engineered system to be robust. Robustness is often considered a critical attribute of complex engineered systems, but an exact definition of robustness is not agreed upon within the systems engineering community. Lack of a clear definition, makes it difficult to develop or utilize a quantitative measure of robustness. Having a formal measure for robustness may not be considered necessary, but a lack of a specific measure results in the inability to communicate the desired level of robustness, inability to measure how various options impact robustness, and makes it difficult to measure tradeoffs between robustness and other engineering parameters. The objective of this research is to examine robustness and how it can be attained in systems engineering. In order to accomplish this objective, data from several scientific communities is examined to develop the meaning of robustness. While definitions between and even within each community differ, a key attribute is present in each definition: A robust system needs to maintain its core functions in the presence of internal and external changes. The key component of the characteristic is that each function within a system has its own measure of robustness. When robustness and engineering are discussed, Robust Design must be examined. The scientific community uses variance as its measure for robustness. The Robust Design method has the adverse characteristic of forcing preferences upon the designer. Examining the mean-variance approach with utility theory shows that it imposes an increasingly risk averse position upon the designer. This position may not be compatible with the designer’s true risk attitude, causing issues when applying the method. To contend with this issue, a novel utility-based approach is suggested. The approach focuses on generating functional models of the proposed systems, which provide the designer with insight into which perturbations are relevant to the system and subsystems. Additionally this approach incorporates utility theory to allow the designer to convey their preferences. The utility-based approach allows the designer to convey their own preferences, while incorporating steps to ensure the final design is robust.

This thesis proposes a novel system to determine the best representation of a video in the sense that, a user watching the video reaches the highest level of satisfaction possible, given the resource capabilities of the viewing device. Utility theory is used to obtain a utility function representing the user satisfaction as a function of video coding parameters, and the viewing device capabilities. The utility function is formulated as the weighted sum of three individual components. These components are chosen such that, the satisfaction on any one of the components is independent of the satisfaction on every other component. The advantage of such decomposition is the ability to express individual components as simple mathematical relations, modeling user satisfaction. Afterwards, the unknown parameters of these models are determined by results of subjective tests, performed by a multitude of users. Finally, simulated annealing is utilized to find the global optimum of this utility function representing the user satisfaction. Simulation results based on subjective viewing tests on a resource limited mobile device indicate a consistent user satisfaction by the determined optimal encoding parameters of the video.