Reducing cost is a critical challenge facing environmental remediation today. One of the most effective ways of reducing costs is to improve decision-making. This can range from choosing more cost- effective remediation alternatives (for example, determining whether a groundwater contamination...

As part of measuring the impact of government programs on improving the energy efficiency of the nation`s building stock, the Department of Energy Office of Building Technology, State and Community Programs (BTS) is interested in assessing the economic impacts of its portfolio of programs,...

Transportation-related decisions of people often depend on what everybody else is doing. For example, decisions about mode choice, route choice, activity scheduling, etc., can depend on congestion, caused by the aggregated behavior of others. From a conceptual viewpoint, this consistency problem...

Sandia National Laboratories is investing in projects that aim to develop computational modeling and simulation applications that explore human cognitive and social phenomena. While some of these modeling and simulation projects are explicitly research oriented, others are intended to support or...

Managers are often required to quickly and accurately estimate resource needs. At times, additional work can be absorbed without additional resources. At other times, threshold resource boundaries are exceeded requiring an additional quantum of a specific resource. Cost savings` estimates,...

The macromolecular structure of coal is essential to understand the mechanisms occurring during coal liquefaction. Many attempts to model coal structure can be found in the literature. More specifically for high volatile bituminous coal, the subject of interest the most commonly quoted models...

The objective of GSAM development is to create a comprehensive, non-proprietary, microcomputer model of the North American natural gas system. GSAM explicitly evaluates the key components of the system, including the resource base, exploration and development practices, extraction technology...

This paper describes a face validation process developed to assess computer models used in Phase I of the Theater Missile Defense (TMD) Cost and Operational Effectiveness Analysis (COEA) and to aid the COEA Study Director in making accreditation decisions for those models. The process was...

Decision Support Software (DSS) continues to be developed to support analysis of decisions pertaining to environmental management. Decision support systems are computer-based systems that facilitate the use of data, models, and structured decision processes in decision making. The optimal DSS...

Many building simulation computer programs, originally developed on mainframe computers for research purposes, can now run on the powerful workstation and personal computers that are available to most architectural and engineering firms. Major efforts have been underway during the last decade to...