Business process models are a suitable means to describe the temporal and logical order of tasks for achieving a given goal. Therefore they become crucial in the coordination of intervention actions to efficiently recover from a disaster or tragic event. Past experience is vital in handling these scenarios, but every new emergency would almost always present peculiar characteristics. So althoug...

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We show that drought-induced changes in the intensity of riots lead to moves towards democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, and that these changes are often a result of concessions made as a result of the riots. This provides evidence that low-intensity conflict can have a substantial short-run impact on democratic change, and supports the “window of opportunity” hypothesis: droughts lead to an incre...

This paper addresses the problem of guaranteed delivery of messages with hard deadlines in a DQDB network. We present a cyclic reservation scheme capable of allocating bandwidth with any arbitrary granular-ity and provide deterministic delay guarantees. We propose two implementations of the allocation scheme within the framework of DQDB medium access control protocol. The proposed implementatio...

{ For modeling, we replace unstructured state-transition graphs with the heterogeneous modeling framework of reactive modules [AH96]. The de nition of reactive modules is inspired by formalisms such as Unity [CM88], I/O automata [Lyn96], and Esterel [BG88], and allows complex forms of interaction between components within a single transition. Reactive modules provide a semantic glue that allows...

The increasing amount of bandwidth-intensive applications of modern vehicles overstrains traditional field buses and prompted the industry to consider alternative physical layers, most prominently Ethernet. Developed for consumer requirements, stringent constraints regarding energy consumption are hard to fulfill with standard Ethernet. An alternative is an Ethernet incarnation called Energy-Ef...

A number of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications demand timely data delivery. However, existing WSNs are designed to conserve energy and not to support timely data transmission. This paper shows how WSNs can be dimensioned, deployed and operated such that both reliable and timely data delivery is ensured while scarce energy is preserved. The presented solution employs a novel Medium Acces...

Identifying sets of metastable conformations is a major research topic in RNA energy landscape analysis, and recently several methods have been proposed for finding local minima in landscapes spawned by RNA secondary structures. An important and time-critical component of such methods is steepest, or gradient, descent in attraction basins of local minima. We analyse the speed-up achievable by r...

Today’s large data centers are the computational hubs of the next generation of IT services. With the advent of dynamic smart cooling and rack level sensing, the need for visual data exploration is growing. If administrators know the rack level thermal state changes and catch problems in real-time, energy consumption can be greatly reduced. In this paper, we apply a cell-based spatio-temporal o...

Diverse anthropogenic impacts will trigger worldwide environmental and social problems as e.g. climate change or social transformation processes. To observe these processes current information about status, direction of development and spatial or temporal dynamics of the processes are required. As the demand for current environmental information is increasing, earth observation (EO) and remote ...