We consider the problem to evacuate several regions due to river flooding, where sufficient time is given to plan ahead. To ensure a smooth evacuation procedure, our model includes the decision which regions to assign to which shelter, and when evacuation orders should be issued, such that roads do not become congested. Due to uncertainty in weather forecast, several possible scenarios are simultaneously considered in a robust optimization framework. To solve the resulting integer program, we apply a Tabu search algorithm based on decomposing the problem into better tractable subproblems. Computational experiments on random instances and an instance based on Kulmbach, Germany, data show considerable improvement compared to an MIP solver provided with a strong starting solution.

In this thesis we extend the worst-case modeling approach as first introduced by Hua and Wilmott (1997) (option pricing in discrete time) and Korn and Wilmott (2002) (portfolio optimization in continuous time) in various directions. In the continuous-time worst-case portfolio optimization model (as first introduced by Korn and Wilmott (2002)), the financial market is assumed to be under the threat of a crash in the sense that the stock price may crash by an unknown fraction at an unknown time. It is assumed that only an upper bound on the size of the crash is known and that the investor prepares for the worst-possible crash scenario. That is, the investor aims to find the strategy maximizing her objective function in the worst-case crash scenario. In the first part of this thesis, we consider the model of Korn and Wilmott (2002) in the presence of proportional transaction costs. First, we treat the problem without crashes and show that the value function is the unique viscosity solution of a dynamic programming equation (DPE) and then construct the optimal strategies. We then consider the problem in the presence of crash threats, derive the corresponding DPE and characterize the value function as the unique viscosity solution of this DPE. In the last part, we consider the worst-case problem with a random number of crashes by proposing a regime switching model in which each state corresponds to a different crash regime. We interpret each of the crash-threatened regimes of the market as states in which a financial bubble has formed which may lead to a crash. In this model, we prove that the value function is a classical solution of a system of DPEs and derive the optimal strategies.

The Internet has fallen prey to its most successful service, the World-Wide Web. The networksdo not keep up with the demands incurred by the huge amount of Web surfers. Thus, it takeslonger and longer to obtain the information one wants to access via the World-Wide Web.Many solutions to the problem of network congestion have been developed in distributed sys-tems research in general and distributed file and database systems in particular. The introduc-tion of caching and replication strategies has proven to help in many situations and thereforethese techniques are also applied to the WWW. Although most problems and associated solu-tions are known, some circumstances are different with the Web, forcing the adaptation ofknown strategies. This paper gives an overview about these differences and about currentlydeployed, developed, and evaluated solutions.

We have developed a middleware framework for workgroup environments that can support distributed software development and a variety of other application domains requiring document management and change management for distributed projects. The framework enables hypermedia-based integration of arbitrary legacy and new information resources available via a range of protocols, not necessarily known in advance to us as the general framework developers nor even to the environment instance designers. The repositories in which such information resides may be dispersed across the Internet and/or an organizational intranet. The framework also permits a range of client models for user and tool interaction, and applies an extensible suite of collaboration services, including but not limited to multi-participant workflow and coordination, to their information retrievals and updates. That is, the framework is interposed between clients, services and repositories - thus "middleware". We explain how our framework makes it easy to realize a comprehensive collection of workgroup and workflow features we culled from a requirements survey conducted by NASA.

Crowd condition monitoring concerns the crowd safety and concerns business performance metrics. The research problem to be solved is a crowd condition estimation approach to enable and support the supervision of mass events by first-responders and marketing experts, but is also targeted towards supporting social scientists, journalists, historians, public relations experts, community leaders, and political researchers. Real-time insights of the crowd condition is desired for quick reactions and historic crowd conditions measurements are desired for profound post-event crowd condition analysis. This thesis aims to provide a systematic understanding of different approaches for crowd condition estimation by relying on 2.4 GHz signals and its variation in crowds of people, proposes and categorizes possible sensing approaches, applies supervised machine learning algorithms, and demonstrates experimental evaluation results. I categorize four sensing approaches. Firstly, stationary sensors which are sensing crowd centric signals sources. Secondly, stationary sensors which are sensing other stationary signals sources (either opportunistic or special purpose signal sources). Thirdly, a few volunteers within the crowd equipped with sensors which are sensing other surrounding crowd centric device signals (either individually, in a single group or collaboratively) within a small region. Fourthly, a small subset of participants within the crowd equipped with sensors and roaming throughout a whole city to sense wireless crowd centric signals. I present and evaluate an approach with meshed stationary sensors which were sensing crowd centric devices. This was demonstrated and empirically evaluated within an industrial project during three of the world-wide largest automotive exhibitions. With over 30 meshed stationary sensors in an optimized setup across 6400m2 I achieved a mean absolute error of the crowd density of just 0.0115 people per square meter which equals to an average of below 6% mean relative error from the ground truth. I validate the contextual crowd condition anomaly detection method during the visit of chancellor Mrs. Merkel and during a large press conference during the exhibition. I present the approach of opportunistically sensing stationary based wireless signal variations and validate this during the Hannover CeBIT exhibition with 80 opportunistic sources with a crowd condition estimation relative error of below 12% relying only on surrounding signals in influenced by humans. Pursuing this approach I present an approach with dedicated signal sources and sensors to estimate the condition of shared office environments. I demonstrate methods being viable to even detect low density static crowds, such as people sitting at their desks, and evaluate this on an eight person office scenario. I present the approach of mobile crowd density estimation by a group of sensors detecting other crowd centric devices in the proximity with a classification accuracy of the crowd density of 66 % (improvement of over 22% over a individual sensor) during the crowded Oktoberfest event. I propose a collaborative mobile sensing approach which makes the system more robust against variations that may result from the background of the people rather than the crowd condition with differential features taking information about the link structure between actively scanning devices, the ratio between values observed by different devices, ratio of discovered crowd devices over time, team-wise diversity of discovered devices, number of semi- continuous device visibility periods, and device visibility durations into account. I validate the approach on multiple experiments including the Kaiserslautern European soccer championship public viewing event and evaluated the collaborative mobile sensing approach with a crowd condition estimation accuracy of 77 % while outperforming previous methods by 21%. I present the feasibility of deploying the wireless crowd condition sensing approach to a citywide scale during an event in Zurich with 971 actively sensing participants and outperformed the reference method by 24% in average.