The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of incarcerated women who participated in a service-learning program to help the homeless. Service-learning is effective pedagogy for involving students in civic engagement, and their involvement has been shown to increase the self-esteem of participating college students....
In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) nodes are battery powered. Therefore, the available
energy resources of sensor nodes should be managed efficiently in order to increase
the network lifetime. As a result, researchers have proposed routing schemes in order to
maximize network lifetime. Even though these schemes increase the network lifetime,...
Over the last 20 years, there has been rapid growth in the amount of installed wind power in the Pacific Northwest, specifically in the Columbia River Gorge. The variable and non-dispatchable nature of this resource requires that it be balanced in some form by other sources on the grid. In...
Routing from a single source node to multiple destination nodes using node disjoint paths (NDP) has many important applications in parallel systems. For example, if a source node wants to send distinct messages to distinct destination nodes, then the one-to-many NDP routing is useful.
Unlike parallel systems with shared-memory, each...
Infrastructure systems are a critical component supporting today's modern society. From
power grids to traffic networks, we rely on these systems to perform as intended, despite
the various sources of uncertainty present in their operation. Designing for system
robustness can help mitigate the impact of failures caused by unexpected events....
Renewable energy, particularly wind power, has increased dramatically over the past two decades. In the Pacific Northwest, the power system has accommodated a large amount of new wind power. The variability of wind power has introduced many challenges, requiring additional reserve generation to be available to maintain system stability. The...
This thesis is the combination of two research publications working toward a unified strategy in which to represent complex engineered systems as complex networks. Current engineered system modeling techniques segment large complex models into multiple groups to be simulated independently. These methods restrict the evaluations of such complex systems as...
The primary objective of a grid is to maintain a balance between generation and load. If these quantities are not in balance with each other, severe damages such as voltage fluctuations, low power quality, power outages or even cascaded blackouts may occur. Hence one of the primary factors that holds...
Increased penetration of renewable energy sources results in higher operating reserve requirements, due to the inherent variability and uncertainty of these resources. Many studies, primarily focusing on wind and solar, have determined that geographic diversity of variable renewables substantially reduces system variability and uncertainty. The Pacific Northwest is well suited...
The objective of the work presented herein is the development of the extended Kalman filter for nonlinear system modeling. A standard Kalman filter is a well-known filter for estimating the state of a system, assuming the system is linear and it has a Gaussian distribution in its noise. In reality,...