Search

Geohazards pose an essential role to the preservation of cultural and natural heritage areas, given their valuable significance in terms of scenic, natural, and cultural characteristics, forming unique landscapes that require proactive action to achieve sustainable environmental management. To address these challenges, a methodological framework focusing on geohazard prevention, emphasizing the importance of a pre-management stage that enables stakeholders to prioritize resources and implement landscape planning strategies, is proposed in this paper. In this framework, an integrated set of geospatial, geological, meteorological, and other relevant environmental factors to quantify cumulative geohazard zones in heritage areas is utilized. Implementing advanced tools such as geographic information systems (GISs), remote sensing techniques, and geospatial data analysis, a clustering and characterization of various geohazards is obtained, providing a comprehensive understanding of their cumulative impacts. The introduction of a cumulative geohazard index is proposed in this paper to better understand and then assess the impacts of environmental-driven geohazards that may affect cultural and natural heritage areas to be embedded into the impact assessment process. The validation of the proposed geohazard framework and index is performed in the Parrhasian Heritage Park in Peloponnese, Greece. The outcomes of the analysis highlight the need to mitigate geohazard impacts through early and in situ targeted actions to facilitate the decision-making process and contribute to the protection of evolving landscapes with cultural and natural elements for future generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable management and conservation of natural and cultural heritage has become a priority for governments in order to mitigate environmental degradation. This paper aims to identify a gap in Greek legislation relating to the non-inclusion of the country’s cultural and natural heritage sites in the national network of protected areas. The proposed institutional framework aims at filling this gap by redefining the meaning of protected landscape. This process outlines the relevant administrative level and specifies the procedure for designating these areas. The Parrhasian Heritage Park illustrates the concept and the benefits of protecting and managing of such areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2007.11.715 Byline: Theodore Andronikos (a), Florina M. Ciorba (b), Panayiotis Theodoropoulos (b), Dimitrios Kamenopoulos (b), George Papakonstantinou (b) Keywords: General loops; Dynamic scheduling; Code generation; Shared and distributed memory architectures Abstract: This paper describes Cronus, a platform for parallelizing general nested loops. General nested loops contain complex loop bodies (assignments, conditionals, repetitions) and exhibit uniform loop-carried dependencies. The novelty of Cronus is twofold: (1) it determines the optimal scheduling hyperplane using the QuickHull algorithm, which is more efficient than previously used methods, and (2) it implements a simple and efficient dynamic rule (successive dynamic scheduling) for the runtime scheduling of the loop iterations along the optimal hyperplane. This scheduling policy enhances data locality and improves the makespan. Cronus provides an efficient runtime library, specifically designed for communication minimization, that performs better than more generic systems, such as Berkeley UPC. Its performance was evaluated through extensive testing. Three representative case studies are examined: the Floyd-Steinberg dithering algorithm, the Transitive Closure algorithm, and the FSBM motion estimation algorithm. The experimental results corroborate the efficiency of the parallel code. The tests show speedup ranging from 1.18 (out of the ideal 4) to 12.29 (out of the ideal 16) on distributed-systems and 3.60 (out of 4) to 15.79 (out of 16) on shared-memory systems. Cronus outperforms UPC by 5-95% depending on the test case. Author Affiliation: (a) Department of Informatics, Ionian University, 7, Tsirigoti Square, 49100 Corfu, Greece (b) Computing Systems Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Zografou Campus, 15773 Athens, Greece Article History: Received 6 August 2007; Revised 31 October 2007; Accepted 2 November 2007

As knowledge-based techniques are introduced in supervision and control applications, the need for a structured, methodological approach in the development of these systems increases. Current knowledge-based systems development methodologies are founded on individualistic models of expertise, and cannot face the challenge of interacting with humans or other systems in dynamic application environments. This article introduces a development method that combines models of expertise with interaction-based distributed artificial intelligence. The applicability of the method is demonstrated on an example of supervision of a power transmission network. The analysis of the proposed system is based on the KADS methodology. The design phase is structured in a series of steps: first, the domain description is used to select a model of distributed problem solving. Then, problem constraints and a set of design rules guide the mapping of the analysis' entities to a design solution. Design decisions are justified at every step. Alternative design proposals are experimentally compared with the aid of a multi-agent platform and a simulator. The experimental results indicate possible design refinements. Finally, the generality of the approach is discussed and future research directions are indicated.