Real robustness

Hotter and Balannec published one of the first real proposals to use SMB as a production tool for the pharmaceutical industry, and thus to scale down a process already used on a production scale [29]. The first commercially available plant (Licosep) SMB system was offered by Separex in 1991 and was exhibited for the first time in June 1991 during the Achema Exhibition. The system consisted of 24 stainless steel columns with adjustable lengths between a few centimeters up to almost 1 meter, HPLC pumps, and mulitpositional valves. To improve the robustness of the system, a rotary valve replaced two-way valves and the pumps were modified. 

Robustness. The relative ordering of the triangular episodes in a trend is invariant to scaling of both the time axis and the function value. It is also invariant to any linear transformation (e.g., rotation, translation). Finally it is quite robust to uncertainties in the real value of the signal (e.g., noise), provided that the extent of a maximal episode is much larger than the period of noise. 

A staggering number of papers are published each year in the literature on various candidate chemical/biological detection systems. Researchers and manufacturers make diverse claims of detection limits, sensitivity, false-alarm rates, and robustness for these systems. The committee believes that in many cases, researchers emphasize the strengths of their particular detection systems while minimizing or ignoring their flaws. This practice makes it virtually impossible to evaluate the likely performance of a detection system in real-world air transportation environments. 

For new analytical techniques to prosper, they must have demonstrated applications to real-world samples, with outstanding figures of merit relative to competing approaches. Table 10.24 opposes the prospects of conventional separation procedures and advanced in situ analyses by the currently most qualifying techniques. Lab-on-a-chip (LOC) devices are unlikely to be robust enough to cope with the moderately complex (i.e. dirty ) matrices that are real-life samples. Industrial chemists need to avoid a lot of work for every analyte and every matrix. Obstacles to solid analysis are relatively poor sensitivities, narrow linear dynamic ranges and unavailability of solid standards. The trend... 

Since most drug discovery projects deal with very sparingly soluble compounds, the usual CE sample concentration would lead to precipitation. The handling of real dmg candidate molecules is poorly developed in CE applications, in comparison to the most robust potentiometric method. 

The placebo effect in asthma is one of the most well-studied and robust placebo effects on physiological function. The wheezing that sufferers of asthma experience is accompanied by a constriction of the bronchial airways that makes it difficult for them to breathe. Asthma medications dilate the bronchial tubes, making it easier to breathe, but a large number of studies have shown that placebos can also affect bronchial dilation. In fact, about two-thirds of the response to real asthma medication is also produced by placebo treatment, leaving about one-third of the effect as a true drug effect.40... 

As it has been shown in this chapter knowing the concentrations of chemicals in the environment is a key aspect in order to carry out meaningful hazard and risk assessment studies. Predicting concentrations of chemicals can serve as a quick and robust way to produce an acceptable screening level assessment however if further precision is desired, the complexity of real environmental scenarios can make it a cumbersome and unaffordable task. Models improvement requires not only refining their computation algorithms but also and more important, implementing new inputs and processes in order to better describe real scenarios. 

A recent study published by Badema et al. in 2011 describes a combined method to investigate the toxicity of an industrial landfill s leachate which is based on a triad approach including chemical analyses, risk assessment, and in vitro assays [17]. Moreover, to verify the applicability and the robustness of the proposed method, the approach was applied on a real case study a controlled, ISO-14001 certified landfill for nonhazardous industrial waste and residual waste from the treatment of MSW in northern Italy for which data on the presence of leachate contaminants are available from the last 11 years. 

Recent advances in instrumentation range from novel (laser) sources and highly compact spectrometers over waveguide technology to sensitive detectors and detector arrays. This, in combination with the progress in electronics, computer technology and chemometrics, makes it possible to realise compact, robust vibrational spectroscopic sensor devices that are capable of reliable real-world operation. A point that also has to be taken into account, at least when aiming at commercialisation, is the price. Vibrational spectroscopic systems are usually more expensive than most other transducers. Hence, it depends very much on the application whether it makes sense to implement IR or Raman sensors or if less powerful but cheaper alternatives could be used. 

Low-cost, robust instruments and measurements for monitoring and analyzing exceptionally small volumes, for real-time control of pro-... 

In order to make the problem solvable, a linearized process model has been derived. This enables the use of standard Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) techniques, for which robust solvers are commercially available. In order to ensure the validity of the linearization approach, the process model was verified with a significant amount of real data, collected from production databases and production (shift) reports. 

PAbs against 2,4,5-TCP have been prepared after theoretical and molecular modeling chemical studies [226]. Competitive direct and indirect ELIS As have been developed, but as before the latter format was shown to be more robust. The indirect immunoassay has an excellent LOD near 0.05 pg L . The selectivity of the assay is high in relation to other chlorophenols frequently present in real samples, but as with the 2,4,6-TCP assay the brominated analogs may also be recognized. The 2,4,5-TCP immunoassay is stable in media with pH... 

To conclude, the 2-phase optimization results in lower average profits. In the real application, planners might also vary the subjective weights for the different scenarios or set alternative minimum profit levels. This way additional information on the robustness of the obtained solution and a better understanding of the complex relationships between volumes and values in a price-volatile commodity business could be gained. This approach can be further extended e.g. by defining a robustness measure to be optimized explicitly (Olieman/Hendrix 2005). 

In real practice, the location m and the variance have to be estimated from real data. An iterative algorithm, similar to the one used in Chapter 10 for the robust covariance estimation, is used to calculate the trust function. The main advantage of using this algorithm is that the convergence is warranted. 

Only the results for the Cauchy and symmetric contaminated distributions are shown in Figs. 13 and 14, respectively. From these figures, it is clearly shown that the robust approach consistently and successfully performs the data reconciliation, regardless of the distributions of the data. This is a very desirable property in real applications, since in most cases the distribution is unknown or known only approximately. 

Section 1.6.2 discussed some theoretical distributions which are defined by more or less complicated mathematical formulae they aim at modeling real empirical data distributions or are used in statistical tests. There are some reasons to believe that phenomena observed in nature indeed follow such distributions. The normal distribution is the most widely used distribution in statistics, and it is fully determined by the mean value p. and the standard deviation a. For practical data these two parameters have to be estimated using the data at hand. This section discusses some possibilities to estimate the mean or central value, and the next section mentions different estimators for the standard deviation or spread the described criteria are fisted in Table 1.2. The choice of the estimator depends mainly on the data quality. Do the data really follow the underlying hypothetical distribution Or are there outliers or extreme values that could influence classical estimators and call for robust counterparts ... 

Demonstrations of the scale-up, development, and integration of hardware with real materials of construction must focus on the robustness of the parallel flow in multiple-cell reactors. The issues of cell blockage, hydrocyclone performance, and NOx reformer performance must be addressed. 

The evolution of cooperation is frequently analysed in terms of the repeated Prisoner s Dilemma game. Computer simulations show that the emergence of cooperation is a robust phenomenon. However, the strategy which eventually gets adopted in the population seems to depend sensitively on fine details of the modelling process, so that it becomes difficult to predict the evolutionary outcome in real populations. 

Milhlberger, F. Wieser, J. Ulrich, A. Zimmermann, R. Single Photon Ionization Via Incoherent VUV-Excimer Light Robust and Compact TOF Mass Spectrome-i t for Real-Time Process Gas Analysis. Anal Chem. 2002, 74, 3790-3801. 

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