How Ready a Municipality is for Zero-Emission City Logistics? Development and Application of Maturity Model for Dutch Municipalities

The number of activities in city logistics is growing rapidly causing an increase in emissions, and a decline in accessibility and safety in cities. Therefore, the Dutch government has introduced GreenDeal Zero-emission city logistics. The goal of this deal is to have 30-40 of the biggest municipalities in the Netherlands have zero-emission city logistics in 2025. The goal for 2025 is clear, but it lacks a way for municipalities to see their progress and a way to find improvements in their city logistics. This research is focused on developing a maturity model as a tool to assess the maturity level of a municipality for its performance-related city logistics process management to achieve its aim of reaching zero emissions. The City Logistics Maturity Model for Municipality (CL3M) requires a domain-specific, multidimensional model to assess city logistics from a municipal point of view. The model includes six levels (0-5) and a PCDA cycle is embedded throughout the levels. The model is populated through three focus fields (Technical, Social and Corporate, and Policy), branching out into six areas of development: Information and communication technology, urban logistics planning, Stakeholder communication, Public-Private Partnerships, Subsidization and incentivization, and Regulations. The CL3M model was tested for three municipalities, namely, the municipality of Deventer, Zwolle, and Nijmegen. The assessment pointed out that CL3M is yet in its juvenile stage and with further development, the model can reach its full potential in usefulness, reliability, and adaptationTransport and Logistic

Morphometrics of regmaglypts based on a 3D Model of the fusion-crusted ordinary chondrite Broek in Waterland (L6)

Regmaglypts are shallow depressions on meteorite surfaces formed by ablation processes during atmospheric entry. These features can potentially offer insights in breakup events. However, quantitative methods to analyse regmaglypts have not yet been proposed to date. Here we present the results of a study to evaluate breakup processes during the luminous flight by analysing regmaglypt morphometrics. We developed a novel approach based on a 3D shape model of the Broek in Waterland meteorite that was generated using photogrammetry. We converted sections of the 3D model into a smoothed Digital Elevation Model (DEM) that contained the fracture surfaces adorned with regmaglypts. Lending techniques from terrain analyses, we extracted Land Surface Parameters (LSP) and delineated regmaglypts based on the mean curvature inflection point. The outliers of the regmaglypt population were discarded based on mean and total curvature scatter plots. The mean, profile, tangential, total and Gaussian curvatures were found to be most descriptive of regmaglypt morphologies. Various other curvature types were tested and found to be consistent across the studied regmaglypt population. Using this initial framework, we found that the two regmaglypted surfaces of the Broek in Waterland meteorite appear to be similar. This would reflect similar formative conditions, which we interpret to be most consistent with formation from the same breakup event. Future studies will aim to expand the presented method to regmaglypt populations of other L6 meteorites to understand how surface characteristics can inform us on ablation and breakup processes.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Planetary Exploratio

Identifying patterns and recommendations of and for sustainable open data initiatives: A benchmarking-driven analysis of open government data initiatives among European countries

Open government and open (government) data are seen as tools to create new opportunities, eliminate or at least reduce information inequalities and improve public services. More than a decade of these efforts has provided much experience, practices, and perspectives to learn how to better deal with them. This paper focuses on benchmarking of open data initiatives over the years and attempts to identify patterns observed among European countries that could lead to disparities in the development, growth, and sustainability of open data ecosystems. To do this, we studied benchmarks and indices published over the last years (57 editions of 8 artifacts) and conducted a comparative case study of eight European countries, identifying patterns among them considering different potentially relevant contexts such as e-government, open government data, open data indices and rankings, and others relevant for the country under consideration. Using a Delphi method, we reached a consensus within a panel of experts and validated a final list of 94 patterns, including their frequency of occurrence among studied countries and their effects on the respective countries. Finally, we took a closer look at the developments in identified contexts over the years and defined 21 recommendations for more resilient and sustainable open government data initiatives and ecosystems and future steps in this area.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication TechnologyEngineering, Systems and Service

Design of a Thermal Protection System for a Mars Entry Vehicle with Ceramic Matrix Composites

Advancements in the space sector have driven the democratization of planetary exploration. As a longstanding target of scientific interest, Mars will consequently witness an increasing demand for surface missions of various sizes. Its thin atmosphere, however, is a challenging environment for entry, descent, and landing (EDL). An incoming spacecraft will encounter extreme heating while experiencing low levels of atmospheric deceleration. This atmospheric constraint places limitations on payload mass. Lightweight approaches to entry vehicle design beyond current technologies are critical to allow safe and precise landings for a variety of Mars missions. Thermal protection systems (TPS) constructed from low-density structural materials with high-temperature capabilities are a promising solution for rigid aeroshells. This is because the need for a separate load-bearing carrier structure can be reduced, thus conserving vehicle mass and internal volume. Among the materials currently available, ceramic matrix composites (CMC) such as C/C and C/SiC are essential to the realization of thermally-resistant lightweight structures. They have attracted international interest for Mars entry applications and offer potential versatility for components within various EDL architectures. Novel ultra-high temperature ceramic matrix composites (UHTCMCs) also emerge as good candidates as their capabilities extend beyond the operational temperature limits of traditional ceramic matrix composites. This thesis explores the use of (UHT)CMCs in the design of a demonstrator heat shield for a low-mass Mars mission delivering a wind-driven spherical rover. Five CMC-based TPS concepts were proposed. Based on a high-level trade-off, a hot structure solution with internal lightweight insulation was selected due to its mission suitability and potential for minimal weight. A ballistic entry trajectory model was used to define the thermomechanical loads. These loads were used as inputs for thermal and structural simulations using the FEA package Ansys Workbench. The TPS layers were sized for minimum mass and appropriate temperature limits, and thermomechanical stress responses were analyzed.Based on mass and stress margins of safety, a comparison between sized heat shields utilizing a baseline CMC and a UHTCMC was made across two aeroshells with different size configurations. It was found that a traditional CMC provides a heat shield that does not only save mass, but shows a noticeably higher thermostructural performance compared to a UHTCMC; it is better suited for Mars entry unless a degree of reusability and longer entry times are involved. Within a limitation of vehicle mass and base diameter, heat shields with higher vertex angles are noticeably lighter. This work aims to provide a first step towards the exploration of novel structures for Mars entry, enabling a range of robotic and human missions to the red planet.Aerospace Engineerin

Technosocial disruption, enactivism, & social media: On the overlooked risks of teenage cancel culture

In a world undergoing rapid, large-scale technological change, the phenomenon of technosocial disruption is receiving increasing scholarly and societal attention. While the phenomenon is most actively delineated in philosophy of technology, it is also receiving growing attention within a different area of philosophy, namely the so-called “4E Cognition” approach to philosophy of mind. Despite this shared interest in technosocial disruption, there is relatively little exchange between the theorizing going on in these two different areas of philosophy. One of our paper's two main aims is programmatic: to motivate the fruitfulness of such an exchange. We do this by turning to a specific case of technosocial disruption, namely Teenage Cancel Culture [TCC]. TCC cannot be disentangled from the introduction of social media platforms [SMPs] into modern day social life. Hence, we will speak of SMP-Afforded TCC. SPM-afforded TCC is a phenomenon fretted over by societal actors but strikingly ignored in academic research. In our effort to narrow this knowledge gap, we analyze SMP-afforded TCC from a perspective of technosocial disruption enriched by insights from 4E-Cognition. This brings out a specific worry about the role of SMPs in the social lives of teenagers. We argue that SMP-afforded TCC disrupts the social relational domains within which teenagers develop, maintain, and express their precarious social identities, by creating social affordances that are hostile to healthy risky interpersonal identity-exploration. As such, SMP-afforded TCC not only cancels particular individuals for particular acts; it may also pre-emptively cancel a certain way of being a social self, namely a healthy social risk-taker. We conclude the paper by proposing several potential routes for mitigating the perniciously disruptive effects of SMP-afforded TCC and identifying future areas for research.Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

The Chvátal–Gomory procedure for integer SDPs with applications in combinatorial optimization

In this paper we study the well-known Chvátal–Gomory (CG) procedure for the class of integer semidefinite programs (ISDPs). We prove several results regarding the hierarchy of relaxations obtained by iterating this procedure. We also study different formulations of the elementary closure of spectrahedra. A polyhedral description of the elementary closure for a specific type of spectrahedra is derived by exploiting total dual integrality for SDPs. Moreover, we show how to exploit (strengthened) CG cuts in a branch-and-cut framework for ISDPs. Different from existing algorithms in the literature, the separation routine in our approach exploits both the semidefinite and the integrality constraints. We provide separation routines for several common classes of binary SDPs resulting from combinatorial optimization problems. In the second part of the paper we present a comprehensive application of our approach to the quadratic traveling salesman problem ( QTSP ). Based on the algebraic connectivity of the directed Hamiltonian cycle, two ISDPs that model the QTSP are introduced. We show that the CG cuts resulting from these formulations contain several well-known families of cutting planes. Numerical results illustrate the practical strength of the CG cuts in our branch-and-cut algorithm, which outperforms alternative ISDP solvers and is able to solve large QTSP instances to optimality.Discrete Mathematics and Optimizatio

An integrated approach to quantitative resilience assessment in process systems

Chemical process systems are becoming more automated and complex, which leads to increased interaction and interdependence between the human and technical elements of process systems. This urges the need for updating the safety assessment method by treating “safety” as an emergent property of a system. Uncertainty comes together with complexity. To enhance system ability of dealing with uncertain disruptions, this paper proposes a quantitative resilience assessment method by modeling the failure propagation (initiated by a disruption) across the functional units of a system. The Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) is utilized to model the system operation to represent the relationship among its function units and to consider the interactions among human-technical factors. Then, a Cascading Failure Propagation Model (CFPM) is developed to quantify the fault propagation process and reflect the system functionality changes over time for resilience assessment. The proposed method is applied to a propane-feeding control system. The results show that it can help practitioners understand the process of fault propagation and risk increase, identify potential ways to design a more resilient system to respond to uncertain disruptions/attacks, and provide a real-time dynamic resilience profile to support decision-making.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Safety and Security Scienc

Exploring the effects of interactive interfaces on user search behaviour

Interactive information retrieval (IIR) is a user-centered approach to information seeking and retrieval. In this paradigm, the search process is not confined to a single query and a static set of results. Instead, it emphasises the active involvement of users in refining their information needs, iteratively modifying queries, and exploring retrieved content. IIR studies research how to facilitate a more tailored and practical search experience, adapting to the evolving requirements and preferences of users. In this thesis, we focus on four distinct yet interrelated areas in the domain of IIR to have a better understanding of the interaction between the user and the information retrieval system. How users interact with a search system depends on several things, including, but not limited to, the device on which they search, the interface, the task at hand, their prior expertise and so on. In Chapter 2, we explore the role of search interface layout and task complexity on user search behaviour and their task effectiveness. We aim to reproduce the setup of two IIR studies conducted a decade back that explored the effect of the search interface and task complexity on user behaviour. As search interfaces have kept on evolving, we ask the question of whether user search behaviour has remained the same. Our goal is to observe to what extent the findings from those two studies still hold today. Next, we focus on a specific aspect of IIR, called Search as Learning (SAL), where users participate in learning-oriented search tasks. These search tasks are exploratory, involving multiple iterations that require cognitive processing and sensemaking. It often requires the searchers to spend time scanning, viewing, comparing and understanding documents. Prior studies have shown that, in offline classroom learning scenarios, active reading tools like highlighting and note-taking tools help learners better process what they read and consequently help their learning outcomes. In Chapter 3, we explore to what extent highlighting and note-taking tools, when we implement and incorporate them into the interface of a standard search engine, affect search behaviour and users’ learning outcomes. We intend to explore if they are also beneficial in the online SAL scenario.While designing and incorporating widgets (e.g. a note-taking tool) in a search interface, researchers face numerous design decisions regarding where to place the widgets, what they should look like, what functionalities they must have and so on. Due to budget constraints, it is not feasible to run A/B tests on all possible options. Thus, next in Chapter 4, we build a user model leveraging Search Economic Theory (SET), where we, for the first time, incorporate positional information of widgets. SET is based on micro-economic theory that assumes that users are rational agents—they aim to maximise profit and minimise cost. Previous work has utilised SET to develop models for predicting user interaction under various circumstances where widgets on the SERP are typically considered fixed, and their position is not part of the user model definition. Thus, in this thesis, we explore if we can derive a sensible hypothesis of user behaviour using our user model that incorporates positional information of widgets.Finally, having so far dealt with documents in text modality of presentation, in Chapter 5 we look into the voice modality of presentation in the context of collecting relevance judgments for building test collections by employing crowdworkers. Previous studies have explored to what extent various factors like document length, topic difficulty, cognitive aspects of crowdworkers, etc., affect their relevance judgement effectiveness. However, none of them considered the presentation modality of the documents to be judged. Audio-only devices are getting popular, and leveraging these devices can increase the scope of collecting relevance judgements. For example, crowdworkers can judge document on-the-go, those with visual disabilities can also participate in the judgement task and so on. Thus, we observe how the presentation modality of documents, that is, representing them as text or voice, affects the relevance judgement effectiveness of crowdworkers. We also explore to what extent there is an interplay of document length and cognitive aspects of crowdworkers with the presentation modality.With the studies conducted in this thesis, we make scientific contributions to the field by providing novel insights covering a breadth of topics and advancing our understanding of the field. We hope our contributions pave the way for further research and exploration in the field of IIR with the ultimate goal of enhancing the web search experience and performance of users.Web Information System

Fishermen landscape-From water to land: Develop resilient principles to rebuild gradient-landscape in PRD

The Pearl River Delta (PRD) has always been one of the centers of gravity for China's economic development. Over the past few decades, the PRD has been undergoing urban development at an astonishing rate, but this development momentum has begun to wane in recent years. The development dividend initially gained from the manufacturing industry is gradually diminishing, and the whole region is facing a transformation. To meet the needs of the manufacturing industry, many rural villages have rented out their land to factories, and the living space for farmers and fishermen has been continuously reduced. Pollution brought about by the establishment of factories has also seriously affected the water system of the Pearl River, bringing about the extinction of aquatic organisms.Not all groups of people have enjoyed the dividends of economic development in the Pearl River Delta. Especially the fishermen among the marginalized people, their living space and production sources are threatened by urban expansion. However, fishermen, as the first to settle in the Pearl River Delta and have lived on the land for thousands of years, have their unique wisdom about the land and the water system. Therefore, the project hopes to help the region achieve sustainable development from the perspective of the fishermen while ensuring their livelihoods.The project has developed a core fishermen's habitat framework through theoretical research. Firstly, based on this framework, the project collected data and information on typical fishing villages classified the fishing villages in the Pearl River Delta (PRD), and summarized their specific elements. Secondly, the project selected one of the fishing villages for design exploration, exploring specific habitat modifications and area-specific planning strategies. Finally, the design logic implemented in the design exploration was utilized to examine the principles of the other two types of fishing villages, and a relatively feasible way of application was proposed.Landscape has always embodied the mutual compromise between man and nature. In the past, humans have forced nature to make compromises, leading to the increasingly severe ecological degradation problems today. It is time to think differently about the relationship between man and nature, so the project hopes to help the residents of the Pearl River Delta, and nature reach a new coexistence through the means of landscape modification, which will no longer be a relationship of forcing one party to compromise, but rather a relationship of balanced development.Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences | Landscape Architectur

Rivers as Connectors of Culture and Nature

Taking an integrated approach to problems involving water, culture, heritage, and sustainable development can be especially complicated depending on the water body at stake. Oceans, lakes, rivers and canals all require specific approaches. This issue of Blue Papers takes particular interest in rivers as agents of interaction between water and land, culture and nature, and as carriers and connectors of multiple, often very different challenges.History, Form & Aesthetic