The challenges faced by modern agriculture have never been greater. With feedstock and labour prices increasing and constant pressure from retailers to keep food prices low, profit margins are at a point where farmers cannot grow their business to longer-term economically viable sizes. Recent...

This paper explores a new measure, based on the copula density functions, for image registration, especially for the multimodal image registration. The measure relies on determining the mutual information between images taken at different times from different viewpoints or by different sensors....

This paper analyzes the competitive structure characterizing the Italian Day-Ahead electricity market. The market is organized according to a zone model due to limited transmission capacity. As a result different market clearing prices are defined, when the national market is split into several...

The search for an appropriate approach to pricing capacity access in telecommunication capacity networks has evolved variously in the literature through rate of return regulation, the Efficient Component Pricing Rule, price-cap regulation (RPI-X) and cost-based regulation, based on efficient...

The liberalization of the electricity sector has introduced competition at the generation level and gives incentives to new generating firms to attempt to enter the electricity market. However, due to the complexities related to the electrical energy trade, the newcomers should proceed only...

This paper proposes a new priority scheduling algorithm to maximise site revenue of session-based multi-tier Internet services in a multicluster environment. This research is part of a larger study in support of large-scale online trading systems and, as a result, this case study is chosen as a...

Gaussian process prior models offer a nonparametric approach to modelling unknown nonlinear systems from experimental data. These are flexible models which automatically adapt their model complexity to the available data, and which give not only mean predictions but also the variance of these...

In this thesis, current work carried out on analyzing the strategic behaviours in electricity trading is first reviewed. An intelligent decision-making and support technique, game theory, is often used in the market practice. Game theory is a discipline concerned with how individuals make...

In 1990, Britain became the first developed country to reorganise its electricity industry to run on competitive lines. The British reforms are widely regarded as the benchmark for other reforms and the model used provides the basis for reforms of electricity and other network industries around...

The aim of this thesis is twofold. The first is to develop a comprehensive methodology for assessing performance and then to apply it to the UK electricity distribution network operators (DNOs) to analyse the impact of the regulatory reforms and privatisation introduced in 1990-91 on their...