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- Johansson, Andreas
(författare)
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Deliberating Intractability : Exploring Prospects of Deliberative Democracy in Intractable Natural Resource Management Conflicts
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The increasing prevalence of intractable conflicts over natural resources, which defy technocratic solutions, highlights an urgent need for states, managers, and practitioners to find democratic methods for addressing them. In the normative debate over the optimal approach to managing these conflicts, deliberative democracy has emerged as a leading theoretical framework, sparking a deliberative turn in both political theory and natural resource governance. While the normative value of deliberative democracy—where the public collaboratively shapes collective decisions through reasoned discourse under conditions of equality and fairness—is widely acknowledged, its practical effectiveness in addressing intractable natural resource conflicts, particularly its capacity to foster productive reframing outcomes conducive to legitimate decisions or agreements, remains uncertain. In response to these uncertainties, this thesis explores the potential of deliberative democracy in intractable natural resource conflicts, using Swedish mining governance and its associated intractable conflicts as the empirical setting. It employs a qualitative case study design rooted in an interpretive analytical paradigm to investigate the possibility of achieving deliberation and associated reframing outcomes among disputing actors, examine the extent to which and how the ideal of deliberative democracy has manifested within the governance system entwined with the conflicts, and explore the interplay between contextual factors, deliberation, and associated reframing outcomes.The thesis concludes that while achieving consensus or mutually accepted agreement through deliberation in intractable conflicts may be unlikely, it is possible, given strict adherence to deliberative design principles and significant contextual knowledge, to realize ideal deliberation and the outcome of meta-consensus. This outcome holds substantial value as it can transform intractable conflicts into structured and respectful disagreements, thereby clarifying the conflicts and their dividing lines. Consequently, it makes intractable situations more manageable, facilitating efforts to reach compromises when feasible and make trade-offs when they are not. Furthermore, the thesis shows that meta-consensus can endure amid ongoing conflict and heightened polarization. However, the thesis also concludes that ideal deliberation and meta-consensus may not be attainable in all conflict scenarios due to contextual barriers. Factors, including strained pre-conflict community relations rooted in historical state decisions, a lack of prior foundation for inter-group engagement, entrenched affiliations among participants, and obstacles within the institutional design of the governance system, were identified as impediments to the realization of ideal deliberation and its associated outcomes. The thesis also reaffirms the challenges of extending deliberative democracy beyond isolated forums to pre-existing governance systems. Notably, while the investigated governance system has demonstrated an increasing commitment to deliberative norms and practices, a discernible gap exists between the system's current state and the principles of deliberative democracy, suggesting a "business as usual" scenario rather than a transition toward a deliberative democratic governance system.In light of these findings, this thesis provides several suggestions for aligning the system and other comparable governance systems with the deliberative democratic norms they aspire to achieve. It also proposes several directions for future research. These include exploring how deliberative processes can be optimally tailored to meet the unique demands of different contexts, continuing efforts to identify and address institutional and other contextual enablers and barriers to deliberation at both the micro and system levels. Addressing system-level barriers is particularly important if deliberation is to flourish beyond isolated forums. Furthermore, recognizing that meta-consensus does not provide a direct resolution to conflicts and cannot be enabled under all conditions, it is essential to identify mechanisms for trade-offs or outcomes that are deemed fair and acceptable even by those who do not get their preferences realized. Additionally, acknowledging the possibility of harnessing long-term democratization effects of conflicts, more research to determine when and under what conditions conflicts and various non-democratic actions yield positive effects is crucial.
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| 2. |
- Johansson, Andreas
(författare)
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Nonlinear observers with applications in the steel industry
- 2001
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Access to measurements is a necessity in most technical applications, in order to detect faults, monitor performance, or exercise control. In some cases, however, installing measurement equipment is very expensive or even impossible. In such a case, estimates can be produced instead. In an observer, this is done by combining process knowledge, in the form of an analytical process model, with information, in the form of indirect measurements. If the process model is in the form of a system of linear differential equations, then the problem of constructing an observer is essentially solved by the Kalman filter and the Luenberger observer. For a system of nonlinear differential equations, however, there is no generic solution, which is the reason for extensive research in this area for the past decades. This thesis treats the development and analysis of nonlinear observers for three applications in the steel industry. The first application is the detection of gas leakages in a pulverized coal injection plant. An observer whose residual is sensitive to the gas leakage flow, has been designed for a nonlinear process model. A Generalized Likelihood Ratio test was applied to the residual to distinguish between different types of leakages. The method has been implemented in the plant and tested successfully with actual leakages. Furthermore, a Laguerre spectrum representation of the residual was utilized, to reduce disturbances and computational effort. The second application is the detection of clogging in pulverized coal injection lines. An observer, with a state variable that represents clogging, has been designed for a time-varying process model. An adaptive threshold for the estimated clogging variable was calculated. In experiments with data from the plant, the method was shown to detect clogging successfully, without producing false alarms. The third application is the estimation of metal analysis in the steel converter process. A nonlinear, physical process model was utilized and an observer was proposed, whose feedback is weighted by the sensitivity of the output with respect to the state. Experiments with data from a converter plant show that this strategy provides accurate estimates of the carbon content in the converter. Furthermore, a generalization of the proposed observer structure has been analyzed in terms of asymptotic stability and region of attraction.
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| 3. |
- Lucchese, Riccardo
(författare)
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Cooling Control Strategies in Data Centers for Energy Efficiency and Heat Recovery
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Data centers are facilities dedicated to the processing, storage, and relay of large amounts of digital information. As a whole, it is an energy intensive industry, characterized by a sizable carbon footprint and a short-term exponential growth rate. At a macroscopic level, their operation requires balancing the offer and demand of computational, cooling, and electrical power resources. The computational workload is influenced by external factors such as the end-users’ activity, while the overall run-time costs depend on the weather conditions and the fluctuating pricing of electricity. In this context, the adoption of optimizing control strategies and co-design methodologies that address simultaneously both the mechanical and control aspects, has the potential to unlock more sustainable designs. Improvements in the overall energetic efficiency open to larger-scale deployments in less favorable geographical locations. Recovery systems addressing the vast amounts of by-product heat can support other heat intensive processes such as district networks, wood drying, greenhouses, and food processing. This work focuses on how to adapt the provisioning of the cooling resources to the cooling demand, without negotiating the computational throughput. We devise top-down designs, that address unexplored control possibilities in existing deployments. We moreover apply a bottomup perspective, by modeling and studying co-designed cooling setups which bring significant simplifications to data center level optimal provisioning problems. The analysis aims at the different levels of the data center infrastructure hierarchy, and provides answers to centerpiece questions such as i) what are the optimal flow provisioning policies at different levels of the data centers?; ii) how to design simple but effective control strategies that address the complexity induced by the large scales?; iii) what are the exhaust heat properties that can be expected in air-cooled and liquid-cooled data centers?. Exploiting a model-centric approach we demonstrate the effectiveness of tailored control strategies in both achieving better cooling efficiency and a higher quality of the heat harvest. This thesis presents opportunities to simplify data center control structures while retaining or improving their performance. Furthermore, it lays modeling and control methodologies toward the holistic control-oriented treatment of the computing, cooling, and power distribution infrastructures. The results have a practical character and the model-based analysis establishes important development directions, confirming existing trends. Enabling intelligent data center management systems might not need to imply more complex tools; rather, a co-design effort might yield both simpler and effective control systems.
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