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Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is envisioned to be one of the most challenging security problems in the coming decade. One key challenge in CIP is the ability to allocate resources, either personnel or cyber, to critical…
Street-level bureaucrats, such as caseworkers and border guards routinely face the dilemma of whether to follow rigid policy or exercise discretion based on professional judgement. However, frequent overrides threaten consistency and…
Line planning, i.e. choosing paths which are operated by one vehicle end-to-end, is an important aspect of public transport planning. While there exists heuristic procedures for generating lines from scratch, most theoretical observations…
Software architecture knowledge transfer is essential for software development, but related documentation is often incomplete or ambiguous, making oral explanations a common means. Our broader aim is to explore how such explanations might…
Transportation infrastructures, particularly those supporting intermodal freight, are vulnerable to natural disasters and man-made disasters that could lead to severe service disruptions. These disruptions can drastically degrade the…
Workflows are prevalent in today's computing infrastructures. The workflow model support various different domains, from machine learning to finance and from astronomy to chemistry. Different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements and other…
Many critical infrastructure systems have network structure and are under stress. Despite their national importance, the complexity of large-scale transport networks means we do not fully understand their vulnerabilities to cascade…
To achieve ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in time, the planning of future energy systems needs to accommodate societal preferences, e.g. low levels of acceptance for transmission expansion or onshore wind turbines, and…
Many studies in economics deal with the non-reliability cost to assess insurance fees or investment analyses, but none takes into consideration the mechanical aspect of reliability analysis. Other studies in mechanics give some tools and…
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must be both safe and trustworthy to gain social acceptance and become a viable option for everyday public transportation. Explanations about the system behaviour can increase safety and trust in AVs.…
Hierarchical structures are ubiquitous in human and animal societies, but a fundamental understanding of their raison d'\^etre has been lacking. Here, we present a general theory in which hierarchies are obtained as the optimal design that…
Different types of reasoning impose different structural demands on representational systems, yet no systematic account of these demands exists across psychology, AI, and philosophy of mind. I propose a framework identifying four structural…
Distributed storage infrastructures require the use of data redundancy to achieve high data reliability. Unfortunately, the use of redundancy introduces storage and communication overheads, which can either reduce the overall storage…
We study the problem of option pricing and hedging strategies within the frame-work of risk-return arguments. An economic agent is described by a utility function that depends on profit (an expected value) and risk (a variance). In the…
Urban transportation systems are vulnerable to congestion, accidents, weather, special events, and other costly delays. Whereas typical policy responses prioritize reduction of delays under normal conditions to improve the efficiency of…
Managing project risk is a key part of the successful implementation of any large project and is widely recognized as a best practice for public agencies to deliver infrastructures. The conventional method of identifying and evaluating…
We study a general and simple model for communication processes. In the model, agents in a network (in particular, an organization) interchange information packets following simple rules that take into account the limited capability of the…
Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimal strategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial state to the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which are often…
This paper analyzes the working or default assumptions researchers in the formal, statistical, and case study traditions typically hold regarding the sources of unexplained variance, the meaning of outliers, parameter values, human…
The energy and material processing industries are traditionally characterized by very large-scale physical capital that is custom-built with long lead times and long lifetimes. However, recent technological advancement in low-cost…