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Complex and highly interdependent socio-technical systems are necessary for sustaining, governing, entertaining and nourishing human society. Such systems fulfill their objectives by incorporating everimproving technologies. A systematic understanding of technology and the pace of technical change is thus critical for policymakers and stakeholders to make well-informed decisions and avoid costly mistakes and omissions. This work reviews past work on technological forecasting and decision making and builds on new research to introduce a systematic approach to technological decision-making. This document describes why information about technology improvement rates matters to technological decision-making, the theoretical framework for doing so, a repeatable methodology and an online system making available this capability to stakeholders. Despite and somewhat because of the complexity of the "whole" socio-technical system, the regularity of constant annual performance improvement is a very strong empirical fact with substantial theoretical underpinning. This regularity lies at the heart of integrating objective data into overall decision processes concerning items affected by the timing of technological change. The methodology uses a broad, easy to use, database of the rates of technological change that covers almost all technologies. We do this by using prior work (accomplished as part of the effort that enabled this thesis) establishing a correspondence of 97.14% of all patents within the entire US patent system to a set of 1757 technology domains and estimating their rates of improvements.We describe the development of a new web-based technology search tool and apply the methodology to a case study of the automotive industry. We believe these results herald a new era of data-driven technological decision-making. Using this new framework and the tool, stakeholders can make timely and "good enough" technology forecasts available without requiring extensive modelling initiatives.

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The Project- “Guided Pump as Turbine” aims to further research in the field of Pico Hydel Projects. This has been accomplished by building a prototype “Pump as Turbine” apparatus consisting of a centrifugal pump running as turbine to generate power. Along with these apparatus the centrifugal pump is converted to guided-pump where stator is appropriately introduced into the system. The purpose of this is to enhance the efficiency of the system. The project holds tremendous benefit by way of providing power/electricity to small communities dwelling in regions having potential for pico-scale hydel power exploitation. The development of the prototype is accomplished under a controlled environment. Head availability and the flow rate are the two measures against which it is optimized. Furthermore, the effect of introducing guide vanes, hitherto unknown, was investigated and analyzed. Analysis was done first on power and efficiency of produced by technology and then on a dimensionless basis to facilitate scaling up/down of PAT capacity for further research. The project has accomplished a detailed analysis of the characteristics of a pump running as a turbine, over a variety of conditions, with and without guide vanes.