Algorithms and Applications in Timed Discrete Event Systems

Application sharing services design and performance

Digital information is becoming increasingly integrated in our daily life. We can communicate with each other via e-mail and exchange documents, photographs and video fragments and use webcams during a telephone call ("nice for the kids"). Digital information is used in education to communicate with other students and teachers and it is used for...

Scheduling in high performance buffered crossbar switches

High performance routers are the basic building blocks of the Internet. Most high performance routers built today use crossbars and a centralized scheduler. Due to their high scheduling complexity, crossbar-based routers are not scalable and cannot keep pace with the explosive growth of the Internet. This dissertation studies a slight variation...

The design and implementation of the KOALA grid resource management system

Grid computing is an emerging form of distributed computing, distinguished from traditional forms by its focus on large-scale, multi-organizational resource sharing and innovative applications. To harness shared resources across multiple organizations, and at the same time to deal with the challenges of grid resource management and of deploying...

Mind Your Step: Exploring aspects in the application of long accelerating moving walkways

Accelerating Moving Walkways (AMWs) are conveyor systems that accelerate pedestrians from a low speed at the entrance to a higher speed at the middle section, and then decelerate them to a low speed again at the exit. It is envisaged they can be a potential transport mode to fill the gap between short and moderate distance transport. However,...

Application-Oriented Scheduling in Multicluster Grids

Grid computing appeared in the mid 1990s with the vision of sharing geographically dispersed large computational resources for executing computation-intensive scientific applications. Today, we can name numerous grid projects that run successfully to solve challenging scientific problems such as the grid project of European Organization for...

Performance-Oriented Fault Tolerance in Computing Systems

In this dissertation we address the overhead reduction of fault tolerance (FT) techniques. Due to technology trends such as decreasing feature sizes and lowering voltage levels, FT is becoming increasingly important in modern computing systems. FT techniques are based on some form of redundancy. It can be space redundancy (additional hardware),...

Managing change in IT outsourcing arrangements

Few studies in the field of IT outsourcing relations include the view of providers. Previous research has identified the lack of sustainability in service performance as a recurring problem, e.g. the continuous delivery of high quality services over time. It can be argued that IT outsourcing providers who manage to establish a dynamic fit...

From mind to market at university: How diversity in knowledge networks makes a difference

How to achieve aircraft availability in the MRO&U triad

The financial crisis and the introduction of low-budget companies have brought major changes to the air freight community. Competition became stronger and cost control became more important. This led to new ways of organizing aircraft Maintenance, Repair, Overhauls and Upgrades (MRO&U), which became performance oriented. For the triad of...

Risk Based Maintenance in Electricity Network Organisations

Presently, maintenance management of assets in infrastructure utilities such as electricity, gas and water are widely undergoing changes towards new working environments. These are mainly driven against the background of stringent regulatory regimes, an ageing asset base, increased customer demands and constrained financial resources. Therefore,...

Polycentricity, Performance and Planning: Concepts, Evidence and Policy in Barcelona, Catalonia

Despite strong efforts made by scholars to study the polycentric spatial organization of agglomeration in metropolitan areas, there is still no consensus about the conceptualization (i.e., identification and measurement) of polycentricity and its economic, social, and environmental (dis)advantages. Additionally, little is known in the policy...

Aerodynamics of Propellers in Interaction Dominated Flowfields: An Application to Novel Aerospace Vehicles

This research is on the aerodynamics of propellers in interaction. As a propeller is dependent on the flowfield it encounters, any disturbance in that inflow results in changes in loading on the propeller. This can result in propulsive efficiency changes and affect stability through generation of in-plane forces and out-of-plane moments. The...