The purpose of this dissertation is to provide the means for contingency planners for regional earthquake risk mitigation to systematically determine how much to spend on mitigation versus post-event reconstruction and to prioritize alternative mitigation and reconstruction options. This dissertation is organized into three chapters. The focus of chapter one is the development of a method to estimate earthquake hazard for use in regional loss estimation. The method includes formulation of a linear program that selects a small subset of earthquake scenarios from a library of such events and estimates hazard-consistent annual occurrence probabilities so that their combined effect on the region of interest approximates that described by r-year return period for all possible events. The method is reproducible, computationally tractable, and results in earthquake scenarios, which are easily understood. We apply it to the identification of earthquake scenarios for Tehran, Iran. The second chapter develops an optimization model to help highly seismically active developing countries decide: (1) How much should be spent on pre-earthquake

In order to sort out a comprehensible total picture regarding needs assessment and to develop a useful conceptual frameWork for this area, a comprehensive review of the needs assessment literature pertinent to the concerns of postsecondary education was conducted. The review found that needs assessment is a viable tool for input to planning * but serious problems exist. These include: (1) lack of a good definition of need; (2) difticulty in separating real need from wants and demands; (3) lack of valid and reliable measures and indicators of met and unmet need; (4) lack of useful taxonomies of needs; (5) tendency of many _ need assessors to be impreciSt'about whose needs are of concert, and to not consider different groups Separately; (6) tendency to focus on goals in needs assessment rather than let needs data help the institution evaluate and reformulate its goals; (7) tendency to be impreci.se concerning which decisiormakers will use the needs data, and le-wl (8) failure to make use of relevant secondary data and to overcome the possible pitfalls inherent in such data;-(9) difficulty cf integrating "soft" with "herd " data; and (10) the tendency to make decisions using over- simplified decision rules; This information,- provides a framework to assist in overcoming such problems and for evaluating needs assessment mcdelS. (Author/JMD)

that are delivered within a deadline. The key insight is to treat DTN routing as a resource allocation problem that translates the routing metric into per-packet utilities which determine how packets should be replicated in the system. We evaluate rapid rigorously through a prototype deployed over a vehicular DTN

Information flow in a telecommunication network is accomplished through the interaction of mechanisms at various design layers with the end goal of supporting the information exchange needs of the applications. In wireless networks in particular, the different layers interact in a nontrivial manner in order to support information transfer. In this text we will present abstract models that capture the cross-layer interaction from the physical to transport layer in wireless network architectures including cellular, ad-hoc and sensor networks as well as hybrid wireless-wireline. The model allows for arbitrary network topologies as well as traffic forwarding modes, including datagrams and virtual circuits. Furthermore the time varying nature of a wireless network, due either to fading channels or to changing connectivity due to mobility, is adequately captured in our model to allow for state dependent network control policies. Quantitative performance measures that capture the quality of service requirements in these systems depending on the supported applications are discussed, including throughput maximization, energy consumption minimization, rate utility function maximization as well as general performance functionals. Cross-layer control algorithms with optimal or suboptimal performance with respect to the above measures are presented and analyzed. A detailed exposition of the related analysis and design techniques is provided. 1

Resources, such as processors and network bandwidth, are allocated to application and common services. In long-running systems, it is common to re-allocate these resources, due to changing mission requirements or to changing resource availability. Two patterns of resource allocation are described

to the presented pattern. If the network performs well on a presented pattern, then the network parameters are updated using standard LMS gradient descent. We have obtained good results with our resource-allocating network (RAN). For predicting the Mackey Glass chaotic time series, our network learns much faster

In wireless data networks the optimal routing of data depends on the link capacities which, in turn, are determined by the allocation of communications resources (such as transmit powers and bandwidths) to the links. The optimal performance of the network can only be achieved by simultaneous

The article discusses the question of whether there is an effective interdependence between a performance-oriented resource allocation and the concept of a strategic research promotion. Starting with a theoretical discussion of the two concepts their empirical interaction is analyzed on the basis

The main difficulty in resource allocation is the enormous number of tasks and resources which have to be handled. This makes resource allocation a good candidate for proving the usefulness of abstraction methods, which summarize large amount of details and simplify problem solving. In this paper

Resource allocation is a difficult constraint satisfaction problem that has many practical applications. Fully automatic systems are often rejected by the ultimate users because, in many real-world environments, constraints cannot be formalized completely. On the other hand, humans are overwhelmed