An understanding of natural coastal hazards is essential for improving resilience of coastal communities. Effective management of coastal hazards relies on prediction tools and mitigation structures that have been designed to handle the dynamic coastal system. This dissertation is a collection of manuscripts that cover a diverse range of fundamental...
These three papers address uncertainty in the management and valuation of renewable natural resources. The first paper develops a model to integrate both stock and price uncertainty to obtain optimal resource levels. The model is an extension of Reed (1974) and shows by proof and by example that when prices...
In a relay network for full truckload (TL) transportation, facilities known as relay points (RPs) serve as exchange points where truck drivers can exchange trailers. This would help carriers to assign more regular tours to drivers when compared to the excessively long tours that exist in the traditional Point-to-Point (PtP)...
Under today's environmental conditions and with the increasing worldwide competition for water, errors in irrigation management decisions can be costly. Therefore, providing both accurate evapotranspiration estimation on a daily basis and estimation of the magnitude of error associated with this estimate is vital for informed water management decisions that allow...
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2.2.1.3. Intrinsic uncertainty of Penman-Monteith model ................................ 16
This dissertation consists of three papers studying optimization, conservation
and valuation of contingent claims in economic resource nianagement under
uncertainty.
In the first paper the Markovian optinial policies are studied for resource
management in a finite time horizon. Under sonic conditions, in particular, when
the prices are stochastic and there...
This thesis presents a novel approach for propagation of uncertainty in river systems. Errors in data observations and predictions (e.g., stream inflows), in model parameters, and resulting from the discretization of continuous systems, all point to the need to accurately quantify the amount of uncertainty carried through the modeling process....
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has grown out of traditional research and military applications and has captivated the commercial and consumer markets, showing the ability to perform a spectrum of autonomous functions. This technology has the capability of saving lives in search and rescue, fighting wildfires in environmental monitoring, and...
In certain cases in system modeling, parameter search problems
are complicated by the availability of scanty and corrupt physical
system data and a large number of model parameters. An algorithm
using man-machine interaction is presented to attack this type
of parameter search problem with the objective of efficiency in the...
Biomechanical models have been used in designing human work environments to evaluate potential risks to workers before a work environment is constructed. In order for work environments to be modeled correctly, most biomechanical models require as input, an accurate body posture of the worker. This information can be obtained by,...
This dissertation consists of three papers on land use economics and policies. The first two papers focus primarily on local land use policies and urban development. The third paper addresses the question how environmental amenities affect households' residential choices in a metropolitan area. In the first paper, an option value...