General

Science is essential for addressing global
challenges, but it cannot do so in isolation. A wide range of
approaches will be required, including...working with the social
sciences and wider disciplines. …the science infrastructure works
best when it is supported by, and enables, other systems.

Most countries with nuclear power programes have enacted legislation to cover the liability in the event of a nuclear accident and
are also party to one of several international conventions such as the Vienna Convention, the Paris Convention, and the Convention on
Supplementary Compensation (CSC). India stands out with neither a national liability legislation, nor membership in one of the international
conventions. The government is fully responsible for compensation in the event of a nuclear accident in any of the current reactors.

To look back at 2018, we’ve rounded up the CSTEP initiatives that had the greatest impact in policy circles.

This is CSTEP's Annual Report for the year 2013-14.

The variable nature of wind speed and direction affects the critical zones of chemical incidents (spills and effluents). We describe a method to develop a GIS-based “plume rose” using its corresponding wind rose to map the areas that might be affected by a chemical release incident. The plume rose can thus be used in the preparation and response phases of emergency management for an industrial chemical incident. In this study, we examine an industrial region in Bangalore, India and show that seasonal variation in winds significantly change the nature (size and direction) of the plume rose.

With the increase in simulation of urban environments for the purpose of planning, modelling vehicular traffic has become important. While empirical evidence on traffic flow is relatively sparse, models representing the same are being increasingly used for planning urban roads and environments. In this paper, a simple explicit model is proposed to approximate the speed versus density of vehicular traffic flow.

In this article, we suggest the use of the Gini Index to measure the inequality in infrastructure services provided within an urban region. We develop a functional form for the Lorenz Curve, the basis of measurement of the Gini Index. The sparse nature of data available to measure the distribution of infrastructure services within an urban region results in a challenge in estimating the Lorenz Curve.

We analyze the economic trade-offs associated with open-sourcing, the business strategy of releasing free open-source versions of commercial software products. We argue that the effect of the release of open-source versions on the customers' perception of products is an important determinant of open-sourcing outcomes.Open-sourcing is modeled as a strategic option for duopolists that compete in a market for software products. We show that open-sourcing can arise as an equilibrium outcome in our simple two-stage game.

Emergency and disaster management has become a widely researched area in the last decade. The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has been highly advocated for addressing the obstacles and improving decision-making in the event of a disaster. A number of ICT support systems and frameworks, both conceptual and application-based, have evolved over time to support the highly time and collaboration intensive task of emergency and disaster management. The use of ICTs like GIS has helped the relief worker to a great extent.