A central challenge for natural resource management is developing rigorous yet practical approaches for balancing the costs and benefits of diverse human uses of ecosystems. Economic theory has a long history of evaluating tradeoffs in returns from different assets to identify optimal investment strategies. There has been recent progress applying this framework to the delivery of ecosystem serv...

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging paradigm for developing software systems that employ services. Presently there is already much research effort in the areas of service discovery and orchestration, business process modelling, and the semantic web. While these are all important aspects for moving towards the pervasive adoption of SOC, most existing work assumes the existence of bla...

This chapter presents a methodical strategic technology engineering planning (STEP) approach, to effectively cope with the design complexity in service-oriented architecture and manage the strategic planning of solution development of information systems. This holistic model comprises four modules: Want-Is-Target (WIT) model, Transition and Alignment Grid (TAG), Comprehensive Architecting Proce...

This report describes ways to make transportation planning evaluation more comprehensive and multi-modal. Conventional transport planning is mobility-based, it assumes that the planning objective is to maximize travel speed, and evaluates transport system performance based primarily on motor vehicle travel conditions. A new paradigm recognizes that the ultimate goal of most transport activity i...

In recent years, urban spaces all over the world have been effectively staged, sometimes too obviously, and design has often concentrated on implementation of "beautiful" lighthouse projects globally oriented lifestyle urbanism. However, beauty – also in broader sense a beautiful experience cannot be an end itself planning. An responsibility to committed residents address pressing challenges ou...

Urban planning has a considerable impact on the economic performance of cities and on the quality of life of their populations. Efficiency at this level has been hampered by the lack of integrated tools to adequately describe urban space in order to formulate appropriate design solutions. This paper describes an ontology called LBCS-OWL2 specifically developed to overcome this flaw, based on th...

The total replacement value of the US transmission lines alone (excluding land) is conservatively estimated at over $100 billion dollars [1] and triples when including transformers and circuit breakers. Investment in new transmission equipment has significantly declined over the past 15 years. Some of the equipment is well beyond intended life, yet is operated under increasing stress, as load g...

reservoir dams are among the main storage systems employed in agriculture for the several past decades. proper operation of these reservoirs is important for irrigation espe-cially in such arid and semi-arid areas like iran, and particularly during dry years. a computational framework for reservoir simulation and flood routing is hereby presented. a key aspect of the reservoir simulation is the...