Artificial Intelligence to improve the availability of Mission Critical communication

In modern society, critical operations, such as emergency response and public safety, rely on communication systems, in this context also referred to as mission critical systems. These systems must meet strict availability requirements, since any failure can lead to severe consequences, including loss of life. Traditionally, dedicated private...

Controller Placement with Optimal Availability

The controller placement problem concerns the placement of controllers on Software-Defined Networks such that a pre-defined objective is optimized. In this thesis, we conduct research on the controller placement problem with network availability as the performance metric. Unlike other approximate evaluations, we compute the exact value with the...

Galileo High Accuracy Services: Analysis of its potential for cadastral surveying

<br/>The NMCAs (National Mapping and Cadastral Agencies) of European countries have different cadastral survey accuracy standards (European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency, 2019). In order to meet these standards, the appropriate equipment and services should be determined. The augmentation service Galileo High Accuracy Service (HAS),...

A Multi-Objective Optimization Model for Offshore Wind Farm Operations & Maintenance Fleet Selection

Until recently, tenders in Europe were awarded to wind farm developers based on the highest auction prices or the lowest subsidized bids. The wind industry has suggested that non-price-related criteria should be considered for tenders, like plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As a result of the sustainable tender criteria, greenhouse gas...

A launch strategy to increase awareness and availability of MakaPads in rural Uganda

Girls and women in Uganda lack Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) information, and proper tools and facilities to manage their periods. There are different methods that girls in rural areas use to manage their menstruation such as cloths or pads. This project focuses on menstrual pads as they are hygienic, absorbent, and comfortable. Therefore,...

Assessment of Maintenance Strategies for the Next Generation Meuse Weirs

The Meuse is a river in West-Europe which rises at the Langres Plateau and flows from France through Belgium and the Netherlands. The river has always been an important shipping route, even though its navigability has been problematic in the Netherlands. To solve this problem seven weirs were constructed in the Dutch part of the Meuse. They are...

Simulating order fulfillment for aircraft line replaceable unit strategy: A case study at KLM component services

Aircraft LRU (Line Replaceable Unit) MROs (Maintenance, Repair Organization) struggle to meet service levels. To stay competitive, literature describes two strategies; increasing contracted fleet size and not reaching projected repair turn around times. Besides these two strategies, literature does not describe the use of triple echelon order...

Resilience-based approach to safety barrier performance assessment in process facilities

The performance assessment of safety barriers is essential to find vulnerable elements in a safety barrier system. Traditional performance assessment approaches mainly focus on using several static indicators for quantifying the performance of safety barriers. However, with the increasing complexity of the system, emerging hazards are highly...

Attack-resistant Spanning Tree Construction in Route-Restricted Overlay Networks

Nodes in route-restricted overlays have an im-mutable set of neighbors, explicitly specified by their users. Pop-ular examples include payment networks such as the Lightningnetwork as well as social overlays such as the Dark Freenet.Routing algorithms are central to such overlays as they enablecommunication between nodes that are not directly...

Long-term availability modelling of water treatment plants

Water treatment plants (WTPs) are characterised as complex configurations of repairable and deteriorating components. Previous studies have mainly focused on the average or steady-state availability of such systems while ignoring inherent characteristics like degradation. The current research proposes a two-level hierarchical model for long-term...

Availability of wind turbine converters with extreme modularity

Modularity is promising from a view to increasing turbine availability through fault tolerant operation as well as reduced downtimes, especially for offshore wind turbines. This paper focuses on a quantitative analysis of large scale (or extreme) modularity in power electronic converters of wind turbine generator systems. It uses mathematical...

Availability of a yacht at anchor: A quasi static design analysis to control the horizontal motions

Yachts are built to provide guests with a unique experience. In order to provide this experience, yachts are often anchored at special locations. Captains prefer to use a single bow anchor when they moor the vessel. Problems are reported with respect to the availability while yachts are at anchor. These are caused by environmental forces....

Improving Maintenance of Material Handling Systems: Matching a maintenance approach that explores the operational dynamics of the transportation industry at TNT Express

Due to automation and robotization of material handling systems (MHS) in the transportation industry, maintaining equipment and systems becomes more important, and needs to be integrated in the company’s business strategy (Tsang, 2002). Implementing and investing in the right maintenance approach to keep these systems in optimum state is...

A Review of Methods to Increase the Availability of Wind Turbine Generator Systems

Availability is an important factor to be considered when designing wind turbine generator systems. The quest for increasing availability is based on the following five design approaches - design for component reliability, active control for reliability, design for fault tolerance, prognostics, and design for maintainability. This paper reviews...

Gas Turbine Diagnostics Based on Gas Path Analysis

Better availability ensures economic operation of the gas turbine, saving in the order of millions. One step towards such an approach is to develop real-time monitoring methods. Real-time monitoring allows users to monitor the performance of the gas turbine and ensure proper functioning of the engine. Moreover changes in gas path components can...

Routing in Optical and Stochastic Networks

In most types of networks (e.g., optical or transportation networks), finding one or more best paths from a source to a destination, is one of the biggest concerns of network users and providers. This process is known as routing. The routing problems differ accordingly depending on different application scenarios with their respective routing...

Risk analysis of navigation systems and the associated concept of required navigation performance

Due to the increasing demand for aircraft operations in the next decades, new airspace management concepts arise which allow an enlargement of airspace capacity. Main question is whether these new concepts provide flight safety equal or better than the current safety level. To answer this question, the navigation process taking place during any...