Dissertation

In this thesis, the reasons behind increased digestibility of Alamo switchgrass after CELF were investigated in comparison to research benchmark dilute sulfuric acid (DSA) pretreatment.

Habitat loss and fragmentation is currently the primary driver of biodiversity decline. Community forest management and wildlife crossing structures are two common conservation strategies applied to mitigate habitat loss and fragmentation.

This dissertation focuses primarily on the system analysis of critical infrastructure systems (CIS), with a particular interest to address the modeling and computational challenges brought by uncertainties, interdependencies and distributed decision making of various components and stakeholders involved in CIS.

The adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) is considered to be a potential solution to reduce transportation-related emissions. People’s vehicle choice and driving behavior will have important implications for the realized emissions reductions from PEVs. Therefore, PEV-related policy studies require good understanding of human behavior. This dissertation proposes data-driven approaches to simulate behavior and provides a discussion of the implications for three PEV-related topics.

In this study, both stationary and comprehensive mobile monitoring platforms were developed to measure PM concentration and traffic conditions on some major highways in Southern California. The main objective is to develop a set of alternative metrics that measure particle concentrations as well as particle size.

This research combines three separate dimensions of modeling the world oil market, dynamic optimization, game theory, and econometrics, to analyze the world petroleum industry, energy subsidies, and air pollution.

The objective of this dissertation is to develop and refine methods of assessing the life cycle environmental impacts and economic costs of electric vehicle technologies and policies.

This dissertation estimates effects on travel behavior of two specific technological innovations – emerging shared mobility services and telecommuting – using publicly available travel surveys.