Environmental assessment of certain plans and programmes as contribution to sustainable spatial development

Cities and urban regions especially in the West German agglomerations are characterised by an unbroken dynamic development, connected with changes in land use from undeveloped land into settlement areas and traffic zones up to the rural districts far from the cities. Environmental loads, e.g. negative environmental effects on air quality and noise, and adverse affects on valuable habitats are negative consequences of the growing of urban regions. On the other hand, cities and urban regions shall contribute to a sustainable spatial development as agreed to in the Agenda 21 and prescribed by the Regional Planning Law and the Federal Building Code. In order to turn the spatial development of cities and urban regions towards a sustainable spatial development, adequate planning and management instruments are required. The Directive of the European Union on the assessment of the effects of certain plans and programmes on the environment contains a framework, how the member states will have to take into consideration environmental aspects while drawing up or complementing certain plans and programmes. An environmental assessment shall be carried out for plans and programmes, which are likely to have significant environmental effects, e.g. for town and country planning and land use planning, and which set the framework for future development for projects submitted to an environmental impact assessment. The environmental assessment shall take into consideration reasonable alternatives including the zero-alternative. It shall contain a "screening" (necessity-check), a "scoping" (agreement on the scope of investigations), an "environmental report" and consultations of the public. The environmental report shall contain the analyse and evaluation of likely significant positive and negative effects on biodiversity, population and human health, fauna, flora, soil, water, air, climatic factors, material assets, cultural heritage including architectural and archaeological heritage. The Member States shall bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply the Directive up to 2004. The discussion on the implementation of the EU Directive is in full swing. In Germany, each drawing up of a new land use plan or regional plan will require an environmental assessment. In the case of changes or amendments of those plans, it will depend a.o. on the extent and amount of environmental effects of the plan, whether an environmental assessment has to be carried out or not. Whether and how an environmental assessment can be integrated into spatial planning, and whether the landscape plans already carry out environmental assessments or have to be developed further is under discussion controversially. Further questions are e.g. how the subjects of the assessment shall be defined in detail, how results of the environmental assessment can be monitored, how the environmental assessment can be integrated into the planning procedures without taking many financial and personal resources, and how and at which extent the public shall be consulted. The lecture will focus on how the Directive can be realised by spatial and landscape planning, especially which methodical questions spatial and landscape planning will have to solve in order to implement an environmental assessment for plans and programmes according to the EU Directive.

Enhanced lepton flavour violation in the supersymmetric inverse seesaw

In minimal supersymmetric seesaw models, the contribution to lepton flavour violation from Z-penguins is usually negligible. In this study, we consider the supersymmetric inverse seesaw and show that, in this case, the Z-penguin contribution dominates in several lepton flavour violating observables due to the low scale of the inverse seesaw mechanism. Among the observables considered, we find that the most constraining one is the muon to electron conversion rate which is already restricting the otherwise allowed parameter space of the model. Moreover, in this framework, the Z-penguins exhibit a non-decoupling behaviour, which has previously been noticed in lepton flavour violating Higgs decays.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, Proceedings of Discrete 2012, Published under licence in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS) by IOP Publishing Ltd, v2 includes a preprint numbe

Optimal Hankel Norm Model Reduction by Truncation of Trajectories

We show how optimal Hankel-norm approximations of dynamical systems allow for a straightforward interpretation in terms of system trajectories. It is shown that for discrete time single-input systems optimal reductions are obtained by cutting 'balanced trajectories', i.e., by disconnecting the past and future in the input-output pairs relating to left- and right singular vectors of the system. A self-contained proof of optimality is given, and formulas are derived in terms of Faddeev sequences. Some parallels with the literature are briefly indicated.Optimal Hankel norm approximation;Balancing;Linear systems;l2-systems;Faddeev sequences

Robust Fault Diagnosis by Optimal Input Design for Self-sensing Systems

This paper presents a methodology for model based robust fault diagnosis and a methodology for input design to obtain optimal diagnosis of faults. The proposed algorithm is suitable for real time implementation. Issues of robustness are addressed for the input design and fault diagnosis methodologies. The proposed technique allows robust fault diagnosis under suitable conditions on the system uncertainty. The designed input and fault diagnosis techniques are illustrated by numerical simulation.Comment: Accepted in IFAC World Congress 201

Lepton Universality in Kaon Decays

In the Standard Model extended by sterile neutrinos, modified W-l-nu couplings arise, which are able to induce a tree-level enhancement to lepton flavour universality violation in kaon decays. The additional mixing between the active neutrinos and the sterile ones can generate deviations from unitarity in the leptonic mixing matrix for charged currents. We reconsidered this idea in the context of the inverse seesaw and evaluated its impact on the well measured ratio $R_K$. We show that the current experimental bound can be saturated in agreement with the different experimental and observational constraints. Similar results can be obtained when considering the ratio $R_\pi$.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure (2 plots), Proceedings of the Moriond 2013 EW session, v2 includes a preprint numbe

Nonlinear three wave interaction in pair plasmas

It is shown that nonlinear three-wave interaction, described by vector-product type nonlinearities, in pair plasmas implies much more restrictive conditions for a double energy transfer, as compared to electron-ion plasmas

Enhanced Higgs-Mediated Lepton-Flavour-Violating Processes in the Supersymmetric Inverse Seesaw Model

We study the impact of the inverse seesaw mechanism on several leptonic and hadronic low-energy flavour-violating observables in the context of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. Indeed, the contributions of the light right-handed sneutrinos from the inverse seesaw significantly enhance the Higgs-mediated penguin diagrams. We find that this can increase the different branching ratios by as much as two orders of magnitude.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Proceedings of the International School of Physics "E. Fermi", Course CLXXXII, Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, Varenna 2011. The original publication is available at http://www.sif.it/journals. The online version is distributed by IOS Press and is available on the IOS Press websit

Stochastic disturbance rejection in model predictive control by randomized algorithms

In this paper we consider model predictive control with stochastic disturbances and input constraints. We present an algorithm which can solve this problem approximately but with arbitrary high accuracy. The optimization at each time step is a closed loop optimization and therefore takes into account the effect of disturbances over the horizon in the optimization. Via an example it is shown that this gives a clear improvement of performance although at the expense of a large computational effort