Purdue University

About: Purdue University is a education organization based out in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Heat transfer. The organization has 73219 authors who have published 163563 publications receiving 5775236 citations. The organization is also known as: Purdue & Purdue-West Lafayette.

Application of Multicriteria Decision Analysis in Environmental Decision Making

Abstract: Decision making in environmental projects can be complex and seemingly intractable, principally because of the inherent trade-offs between sociopolitical, environmental, ecological, and economic factors. The selection of appropriate remedial and abatement strategies for contaminated sites, land use planning, and regulatory processes often involves multiple additional criteria such as the distribution of costs and benefits, environmental impacts for different populations, safety, ecological risk, or human values. Some of these criteria cannot be easily condensed into a monetary value, partly because environmental concerns often involve ethical and moral principles that may not be related to any economic use or value. Furthermore, even if it were possible to aggregate multiple criteria rankings into a common unit, this approach would not always be desirable because the ability to track conflicting stakeholder preferences may be lost in the process. Consequently, selecting from among many different alternatives often involves making trade-offs that fail to satisfy 1 or more stakeholder groups. Nevertheless, considerable research in the area of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) has made available practical methods for applying scientific decision theoretical approaches to complex multicriteria problems. This paper presents a review of the available literature and provides recommendations for applying MCDA techniques in environmental projects. A generalized framework for decision analysis is proposed to highlight the fundamental ingredients for more structured and tractable environmental decision making.

Foundations of dynamic traffic assignment : the past, the present and the future

Abstract: Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) has evolved substantially since the pioneering work of Merchant and Nemhauser. Numerous formulations and solutions approaches have been introduced ranging from mathematical programming, to variational inequality, optimal control, and simulation-based. The aim of this special issue is to document the main existing DTA approaches for future reference. This opening paper will summarize the current understanding of DTA, review the existing literature, make the connection to the approaches presented in this special issue, and attempt to hypothesize about the future.

A Survey of Computation Offloading for Mobile Systems

Abstract: Mobile systems have limited resources, such as battery life, network bandwidth, storage capacity, and processor performance. These restrictions may be alleviated by computation offloading: sending heavy computation to resourceful servers and receiving the results from these servers. Many issues related to offloading have been investigated in the past decade. This survey paper provides an overview of the background, techniques, systems, and research areas for offloading computation. We also describe directions for future research.

Timing and climate forcing of volcanic eruptions for the past 2,500 years

Abstract: Volcanic eruptions contribute to climate variability, but quantifying these contributions has been limited by inconsistencies in the timing of atmospheric volcanic aerosol loading determined from ice cores and subsequent cooling from climate proxies such as tree rings. Here we resolve these inconsistencies and show that large eruptions in the tropics and high latitudes were primary drivers of interannual-to-decadal temperature variability in the Northern Hemisphere during the past 2,500 years. Our results are based on new records of atmospheric aerosol loading developed from high-resolution, multi-parameter measurements from an array of Greenland and Antarctic ice cores as well as distinctive age markers to constrain chronologies. Overall, cooling was proportional to the magnitude of volcanic forcing and persisted for up to ten years after some of the largest eruptive episodes. Our revised timescale more firmly implicates volcanic eruptions as catalysts in the major sixth-century pandemics, famines, and socioeconomic disruptions in Eurasia and Mesoamerica while allowing multi-millennium quantification of climate response to volcanic forcing.