The strain on modern electrical power system operation has led to an ever increasing utilization of new Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems to enhance the reliability and efficiency of grid operation. Among these proposals, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU)-based Wide-Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) systems have been recognized as one of the enablers of “Smart Grid”, particularly at the transmission level, due to their capability to improve the real-time situational awareness of the grid. These systems differ from the conventional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems in that they provide globally synchronized measurements at high resolutions. On the other hand, the WAMC systems also impose several stringent requirements on the underlying ICT systems, including performance, security, and availability, etc. As a result, the functionality of the WAMC applications is heavily, but not exclusively, dependent on the capabilities of the underlying ICT systems. This tight coupling makes it difficult to fully exploit the benefits of the synchrophasor technology without the proper design and configuration of ICT systems to support the WAMC applications. The strain on modern electrical power system operation has led to an ever increasing utilization of new Information Communication Technology (ICT) systems to enhance the reliability and efficiency of grid operation. Among these proposals, Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU)-based Wide-Area Monitoring and Control (WAMC) systems have been recognized as one of the enablers of “Smart Grid”, particularly at the transmission level, due to their capability to improve the real-time situational awareness of the grid. These systems differ from the conventional Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems in that they provide globally synchronized measurements at high resolutions. On the other hand, the WAMC systems also impose several stringent requirements on the underlying ICT systems, including performance, security, and availability, etc. As a result, the functionality of the WAMC applications is heavily, but not exclusively, dependent on the capabilities of the underlying ICT systems. This tight coupling makes it difficult to fully exploit the benefits of the synchrophasor technology without the proper design and configuration of ICT systems to support the WAMC applications. In response to the above challenges, this thesis addresses the dependence of WAMC applications on the underlying ICT systems. Specifically, two of the WAMC system data quality attributes, latency and completeness, are examined together with their effects on a typical WAMC application, PMU-based wide-area damping systems. The outcomes of this research include quantified results in the form of PMU communication delays and data frame losses, and probability distributions that can model the PMU communication delays. Moreover, design requirements are determined for the wide-area damping systems, and three different delay-robust designs for this WAMC application are validated based on the above results. Finally, a virtual PMU is developed to perform power system and communication network co-simulations. The results reported by this thesis offer a prospect for better predictions of the performance of the supporting ICT systems in terms of PMU data latency and completeness. These results can be further used to design and optimize the WAMC applications and their underlying ICT systems in an integrated manner. This thesis also contributes a systematic approach to design the wide-area damping system considering the PMU data latency and completeness. Finally, the developed virtual PMU, as part of a co-simulation platform, provides a means to investigate the dependence of WAMC applications on the capabilities of the underlying ICT systems in a cost-efficient manner. / <p>QC 20131015</p>

Genetic improvement of indigenous pig populations in tropical developing countries can make a significant contribution to the conservation and utilization of local genetic resources. Designing a swine breeding program requires knowledge of genetic parameters for economically important traits. A meta-analysis of genetic parameters determined under tropical conditions and published from 1974 to 2009 was carried out to provide consensus estimates of genetic parameters. Given that the data recording and analysis infrastructure for implementing the conventional best linear unbiased prediction (BLUP) methods is generally lacking in developing countries, Genome-wide selection (GS) provides an approach for achieving faster genetic progress without developing a pedigree recording system. A simulation study was carried out to evaluate the option of using available 60 K single nucleotide polymorphism marker panel. The observed levels of linkage disequilibrium (LD) in the tropical pig populations were simulated and utilized. Genomic predictions were from ridge regression analysis. The results showed that expected accuracies of genomic breeding values (GBV) were in the range of 0.31 - 0.86 for the validation set. Genome-wide selection improved accuracy of GBVs over conventional BLUP method for traits with low heritability and in young animals with no performance data. Crossbred training populations had higher accuracy than purebred training populations. An assessment of the opportunities for GS in tropical pig breeding was conducted. Genome-wide selection performed better than conventional methods by increasing genetic gain and maintaining genetic variation while lowering inbreeding especially for traits with low heritability, by exploiting LD and the Mendelian sampling effects. Combining GS with repeated backcrossing of crossbreds to the selected exotic population in moderate LD promises faster improvements of the commercial population. A two-step selection strategy that involves the use of GS to pre-select candidates that entered the performance test station and for selecting replacement candidates in a nucleus swine breeding program was evaluated and compared to other conventional approaches. Genome-wide selection generated an increase of about 38% to 172% in annual returns compared to other conventional approaches for previously selected population in moderate LD and about 2% to 50% increases in return for unselected population in low LD. / Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Program, University of Guelph

As genomic sequencing technologies continue to advance, researchers are furthering their understanding of the relationships between genetic variants and expressed traits (Hirschhorn and Daly, 2005). However, missing data can significantly limit the power of a genetic study. Here, the use of a regularized generalized linear model, denoted GLMNET is proposed to impute missing genotypes. The method aimed to address certain limitations of earlier regression approaches in regards to genotype imputation, particularly multicollinearity among predictors. The performance of GLMNET-based method is compared to the performance of the phase-based method fastPHASE. Two simulation settings were evaluated: a sparse-missing model, and a small-panel expan- sion model. The sparse-missing model simulated a scenario where SNPs were missing in a random fashion across the genome. In the small-panel expansion model, a set of test individuals that were only genotyped at a small subset of the SNPs of the large panel. Each imputation method was tested in the context of two data-sets: Canadian Holstein cattle data and human HapMap CEU data. Although the proposed method was able to perform with high accuracy (>90% in all simulations), fastPHASE per- formed with higher accuracy (>94%). However, the new method, which was coded in R, was able to impute genotypes with better time efficiency than fastPHASE and this could be further improved by optimizing in a compiled language.

No description available.

The U.S. is the largest maize producer in the world with a production of 300 million tons in 2012. Approximately 86% of the maize production is focused on the Midwestern states. The rest of the production is focused in the Southern states, where Texas is the largest maize producer. Grain yield in Texas ranges from 18 tons/ha in the irrigated production zones to 3 tons/ha in the dryland production zones. As a result, grain yield has increased slowly because of the poor production in the non-irrigated acres. Methods to improve the grain yield in Texas is to breed for maize varieties adapted to Texas growing conditions, including mapping genes that can be incorporated into germplasm through marker assisted selection. This dissertation includes two separate projects that exploit historical data and maize diversity to increase grain yield in Texas. For the first project, a large dataset collected by Texas AgriLife program was analyzed to elucidate past trends and future hints on how to improve maize yield within Texas. This study confirmed previous reports that the rate of increase for grain yield in Texas is less than the rate observed in the Midwestern US. For the second project, a candidate gene and whole genome association mapping analysis was performed for drought and aflatoxin resistance in maize. In order to do so, maize inbred lines from a diversity panel were testcrossed to isogenic versions of Tx714. The hybrids were evaluated under irrigated and non-irrigated conditions. The irrigated trials were inoculated with Aspergillus flavus and the aflatoxin level was quantified. This study found that the gene ZmLOX4 was associated with days to silk, and the gene ZmLOX5 gene was associated with plant and ear height. In addition, this study identified 13 QTL variants for grain yield, plant height, days to anthesis and days to silk. Furthermore, this study shows that diverse maize inbred lines can make hybrids that out yield commercial hybrids under heat and drought stress. Therefore, there are useful genes present in these diverse lines that can be exploited in maize breeding programs

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The dissertation addresses the communication issues of interconnecting the different government sectors LANs, and access to the global Internet. Network capacities are being purposely overengineered in today's commercial Internet. Any network provider, be it a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Information Technology Service department at government sector, company or university site, will design network bandwidth resources in such a way that there will be virtually no data loss, even during the worst possible network utilization scenario. Thus, the service delivered by today's end-to-end wide area Internet would be perfect if it wasn't for the inter-domain connections, such as Internet access link to the ISP, or peering points between ISPs. The thesis studies the performance of the network in Eritrea, displaying the problems of Local Area Networks (LANs) and Wide Area Networks (WAN) and suggesting initial solutions and investigating the performance of (WAN) through the measured traffic analysis between Asmara LAN and Massawa LAN, using queuing theory system (M/M/1 and M/M/2) solution. The dissertation also uses OPNET IT Guru simulation software program ·to study the performance of LAN and WLAN in Eritrea. The items studied include traffic, collision, packet loss, and queue delay. Finally in order to follow the current trends, we study the performance ofVOIP links in Eritrean WANs environment, with a focus on five different link capacities: 28 kbps, 33 kbps, 64 kbps, and 128 kbps for voice and 256/512 kbps for voice and data. Using the R value as a measure of mean opinion score (MOS), we determine that the 33 kbps link would be adequate for Eritrean WANs. / Thesis (M.Sc.Eng.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2006.

No description available.