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    Approcci innovativi per l'analisi di reti acquedottistiche

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    In the water distribution systems research, the emergence of new technologies and methods has led to the development of new approaches for both typical problems (e. g. pipe network design, model calibration) and new challenges (e. g. network segmentation, pumping optimization). The research activity here described has had as primary objective the construction and calibration of the numerical model of a real urban water distribution system (50’000 inhabitants). It has been possible to suggest two operations in order to improve the management and to reduce losses and energy costs. The second part of the activity has focused on the districtualization problem, i. e., the identification of subnetworks for a better control of water losses in the distribution network. A new method has been proposed that is fully automatic and fast also for real water distribution network. Finally, it is presented an application of genetic algorithms to the real network modeled previously. The optimization is used to identify the positions and the settings of the pressure reducing valves to be installed in the distribution network

    Water Distribution System Modeling and Optimization: A Case Study

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    In the last years, the scientific literature has reported an increasing use of hydraulic models to describe water distribution systems (WDS). Hydraulic models represent tools for managing the complexity of WDSs, and a number of optimization methods have been proposed to improve the performance of these infrastructures. However, because of the lack of available data on WDSs many works have only considered synthetic WDS with idealized behaviour or small-sized WDSs with simple topology and limited complexity. This lack of complex case studies has often hindered the demonstration of the potential of hydraulic models and of the optimization approaches relying on their use. In this work, we present a case study about a real large WDS. The system is composed of approximately 3000 pipes (>170 km) and 3000 demand nodes (corresponding to 50,000 users) that are spread across a hilly area over a 200 m elevation gradient. Water is provided by ten wells and it is distributed by five pumping stations and four tanks at different elevations. Pump operation is partly automatically controlled by water levels in tanks and partly by a fixed temporal schedule. This complexity results in a nontrivial hydraulic behaviour that is well reproduced by our hydraulic model. The model is also used with a multi-objective genetic algorithm solver to identify different operational scenarios that lead to a reduction of energy consumption and water leakages

    Community Detection as a Tool for District Metered Areas Identification

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    AbstractWater losses, the portion of water introduced in a pipe network but not consumed by users, represent a significant problem in water distribution system (WDS) management. Modern guidelines suggest to divide the pipe network in clusters, in order to compute a water balance and measure water consumption by each group. These clusters are called district metered areas (DMAs). The division of a pipe network in DMAs is usually realized with a visual exam supported by technical experience. This approach, which is convenient for small WDSs, becomes difficult to apply to large WDSs characterized by thousands of user nodes and pipes. Therefore, it is necessary to have an automatic tool to recognize the affinity degree of neighbouring nodes and to decide how to assign a node to a particular DMA. We propose an automated approach to subdivide pipes, that only requires flow rates through the network. The method has been tested to a large WDS often used as benchmark. The approach successfully divides the pipe network in an acceptable number of DMAs. Each resulting DMA is characterized by a low number of external links and by a proper number of users

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Variations on the Author

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    “Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship

    Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis

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    We provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis

    Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts

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    We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more sophisticated methods

    Author Index

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    koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist

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    We have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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