This article aims at evaluating the historical determinants and implications of Turkey's natural gas import dependency. We implement principle component analysis (PCA) methodology to construct a natural gas import vulnerability index (NGIVI) for the period between 1986 and 2014 using five factors: (1) the share of natural gas in primary energy consumption (2) the share of natural gas in primary energy imports (3) the non-diversification of natural gas import sources (4) the share of LNG in total ...

In this paper a controller design method for underwater vehicles is presented which is based on re-configuration of a sliding-mode controller in case of disturbances caused by shallow water conditions. The disturbance distribution information can be obtained and used to update the corrective gain vector of the sliding-mode controller. This increases the robustness of the controller and hence keeps the system performance within acceptable limits. Proposed method is validated with simulations on a ...

Electricity markets have undergone regulatory reforms since the early 1980s around the world. Technical analyses of these reforms usually pay lip service to the influence of politics over regulatory processes. Existing studies examine certain aspects of the market such as demand pricing and efficiency and they touch upon political issues only passingly when economic models cannot provide sufficient explanation This approach problematically takes politics as an ad hoc variable. This study shows ...

Researchers often identify robust design as one of the most effective engineering design methods for continuous quality improvement. When more than one quality characteristic is considered an important question is how to trade off robust design solutions. In this paper we consider a bi-objective robust design problem for which Pareto solutions of two quality characteristics need to be obtained. In practical robust design applications a second-order polynomial model is adequate to accommodate the ...

Ternary thin films of cerium titanium zirconium mixed oxide were prepared by the sol-gel process and deposited by a spin coating technique at different spin speeds (1000-4000 rpm). Ceric ammonium nitrate ce(NO3)(6)(NH4)(2) titanium butoxide Ti[O(CH2)(3)CH3](4) and zirconium propoxide Zr(OCH2CH2CH3)(4) were used as starting materials. Differential calorimetric analysis (DSC) and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) were carried out on the CeO2-TiO2-ZrO2 gel to study the decomposition and phase transition ...

We examine the impact of ethnic fractionalization and conflict on limiting the educational development in Southeastern Turkey. Our estimates show that although the armed conflict in the region did not directly hinder education investments it reduced school enrolment rates at middle and high school levels while increasing enrolment at the primary school level. Moreover we show that provinces with higher percentages of Kurdish population received less education investment. These results suggest that ...

There has been extensive research on how the Big Five personality traits are related to political orientation and endorsement of moral foundations. However, recent findings suggest that these relationships may not be cross-culturally stable. We argue that how much a culture is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) could moderate how the Big Five is related to political and moral convictions. In a sample of 7263 participants from 30 countries, our results showed that the ...

Saving-based algorithms are commonly used as inner mechanisms of efficient heuristic construction procedures. We present a general mechanism for enhancing the effectiveness of such heuristics based on a two-level genetic algorithm. The higher-level algorithm searches in the space of possible merge lists which are then used by the lower-level saving-based algorithm to build the solution. We describe the general framework and we illustrate its application to three hard combinatorial problems. ...

This paper proposes a methodology to find weakly Pareto optimal solutions to a symmetric multi-objective traveling salesman problem using a memetic random-key genetic algorithm that has been augmented by a 2-opt local search. The methodology uses a target-vector approach" in which the evaluation function is a weighted Tchebycheff metric with an ideal point and the local search is randomly guided by either a weighted sum of the objectives or a weighted Tchebycheff metric. The memetic algorithm has ...

In humanitarian relief operations vehicle routing and supply allocation decisions are critically important. Similar routing and allocation decisions are studied for commercial settings where efficiency in terms of minimizing cost is the primary objective. Humanitarian relief is complicated by the presence of multiple objectives beyond minimizing cost. Routing and allocation decisions should result in quick and sufficient distribution of relief supplies with a focus on equitable service to all aid ...