The survival of rare animals is an important concern in an environmental impact assessment. However, it is very difficult to quantitatively predict the possible effect that a development project has on rare animals, and there is a heavy reliance on expert knowledge and judgment. In order to improve the credibility of expert judgment, this study uses Bayesian belief networks (BBN) to visually represent expert knowledge and to clearly explain the inference process. For the case study, the primary difficulty is in determining a large amount of conditional probabilities in the BBN, because there is a lack of sufficient data concerning rare animals. Therefore, a new method that uses fuzzy logic to systematically generate these probabilities is proposed. The combination of the BBN and the fuzzy logic system is used to assess the possible future population status of the Pheasant-tailed jacana and the associated probabilities, which have been affected by the construction of the Taiwan High-Speed Rail. The analysis shows that a restoration program would successfully preserve the species, because in the restoration area, the BBN model predicts that there is a 75.49 % probability that the species will flourish in the future.
Traditional dynamic shading systems are usually driven by electricity for continuously controlling the angle of blind slats to minimize the indoor solar heat gain over times. This paper proposed a novel design of buoyancy driven dynamic shading system, using only minimum amount of electricity. The energy performance and the improved thermal comfort induced by the system were simulated by EnergyPlus for a typical office space under the context of Taiwanese climate. The design processes are composed of three parts: an alterable angle of blind slats that raises the energy performance to be suitable for every orientation, the buoyancy driven transmission mechanism, and a humanized controller that ensures its convenience. The environmental friendly design aspects and control mechanisms to fulfill demands for manufacturing, assembling, maintenance and recycling, etc., were also presented as readily for building application. Besides, the effectiveness of cooling energy saving and thermal comfort enhancing were compared against the cases without exterior blinds and with traditional fixed blinds installed. The results show that the cooling energy is drastically reduced over times and the blind system is effectively enhancing the indoor thermal comfort.
OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2015, 8 2359
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