1,721,123 research outputs found
La creazione e la distribuzione del valore nella storia centenaria della Ferrovia Adriatico Sangritana: 1912-2006
No full textAlla ricerca di una metodologia per valutare la performance delle autorità per l'energia elettrica e il gas
No full textL'articolo propone un approccio metodologico per valutare la performance di un'autorità indipendente, basato sull'identificazione di alcuni input rilevanti (in particolare, le risorse umane e finanziarie) e sul rapporto con alcuni output significativi (es. apertura dei mercati, prezzi, soddisfazione dei clienti). La metodologia individuata viene applicata alle autorità regolatorie dell'energia di alcuni Paesi europe
Carbon capture and storage from energy and industrial emission sources: A Europe-wide supply chain optimisation
Full text linkPower, steel, cement and refining sectors are currently responsible for the largest shares of carbon dioxide emissions from stationary sources. Carbon capture and storage is envisioned as a key player for decarbonising the power and industry sectors. To achieve a significant penetration of carbon capture and storage technologies, supply chain optimisation has emerged as a crucial research task for designing such complex systems. A Europe-wide carbon capture and storage supply chain is here optimised via a mixed integer linear programming framework. The most significant carbon dioxide emitters (242 power plants, 25 steel mills, 111 cement plants and 59 refineries) are identified on exact geographic coordinates and included as candidates for capture. Capture plants are thoroughly represented in techno-economic terms, considering scale effects and different technological options. Transport and sequestration stages are implemented for either onshore or offshore operation. Different case studies are taken into account to assess carbon capture and storage policies and results determine optimal configurations in terms of costs, scale effects, technology options and network complexity. The minimum CO2 avoidance cost is 52 €/t, which increases by 9% if power plants are excluded from carbon sources. If offshore storage is preferred to onshore, cost raises by about 40%
Optimal design of sustainable supply chains for critical raw materials recycling in renewable energy technologies
Full text linkThe rising demand for critical raw materials (CRMs) driven by renewable energy technologies poses challenges like price volatility, supply chain disruptions, and geopolitical risks. As most CRMs are sourced internationally, their supply is vulnerable; recycling provides a key solution. In this respect, this study develops a multi-period mixed-integer linear programming model under uncertainty to optimise Italy's CRM recycling supply chain. Photovoltaic panels, electric vehicle batteries, and neodymium magnets from wind turbines and electric vehicles are considered under various future scenarios, including net-zero emissions. Projections for 2030 and 2050 indicate a sharp rise in waste availability, requiring significant infrastructure expansion. Costs are expected to double by 2031, driven primarily by battery recycling, and reach 2154 M€ by 2050 under the net-zero scenario. Strategic placement of facilities is essential to balance processing and transport costs and adapt to evolving waste availability trends, ensuring a resilient and efficient supply chain
Economic and environmental optimisation of mixed plastic waste supply chains in Northern Italy comparing incineration and pyrolysis technologies
Full text linkIn the quest for sustainable plastic waste management, understanding economic and environmental implications enables optimal selection of treatment technologies. This study presents a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming framework to optimise the supply chain for mixed plastic waste in Northern Italy. Two technologies are considered: incineration and pyrolysis. Results offer quantitative insights into economic and environmental performance, balancing trade-offs between maximising gross profit and minimising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Economic optimisation favours incineration for treating mixed plastic waste, resulting in the highest gross profit of 115 M€ per year, and the highest net GHG emissions of about 680 kt CO2eq per year. When the aim is environmental optimisation, pyrolysis is preferred due to its lower GHG emissions of 387 kt of CO2eq per year and yielding a gross profit of 54 M€ per year. Trade-off Pareto optimal solutions were analysed to identify reasonable trade-off configurations between the two objectives
Phase transition of a non-linear opinion dynamics with noisy interactions: (Extended abstract)
No full textIn several realMulti-Agent Systems(MAS), it has been ob-served that only weaker forms ofmetastable consensusare achieved, inwhich a large majority of agents agree on some opinion while other opin-ions continue to be supported by a (small) minority of agents. In thiswork, we take a step towards the investigation of metastable consensusfor complex (non-linear)opinion dynamicsby considering the famousUndecided-Statedynamics in the binary setting, which is known toreach consensus exponentially faster than theVoterdynamics. We pro-pose a simple form of uniform noise in which each message can changeto another one with probabilitypand we prove that the persistence of ametastable consensusundergoes aphase transitionforp=16. In detail,below this threshold, we prove the system reaches with high probabilitya metastable regime where a large majority of agents keeps supportingthe same opinion for polynomial time. Moreover, this opinion turns outto be the initial majority opinion, whenever the initial bias is slightlylarger than its standard deviation. On the contrary, above the thresh-old, we show that the information about the initial majority opinion is“lost” within logarithmic time even when the initial bias is maximum.Interestingly, using a simple coupling argument, we show the equivalencebetween our noisy model above and the model where a subset of agentsbehave in astubbornway
A novel QR-code based watermarking scheme for digital rights
Full text linkThis paper presents a digital rights protection scheme for both colour and grayscale images using a novel approach that combines watermarking and cryptography. The schema involves two parties: the owner of the digital rights and a generic user who acquired some rights on a copy of the image that will be watermarked. The watermark, a QR code derived from a signed “License Agreement”, is repeatedly inserted, and scrambled, by the image right’s owner, into the frequency components of the image, thus producing the watermarked image. The schema, a non-blind type, achieves good perceptive quality and fair robustness using the 3rd level of the Discrete Wavelet Transform. The experimental results show that, inserting more occurrences of a scrambled QR code, the proposed algorithm is quite resistant to JPEG compression, rotation, cropping and salt & peeper noise
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
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