Marketing Risk Management of Palm Oil Based Biodiesel Agroindustry

Biodiesel is fuel generates from vegetable oils that have properties similar to diesel oil. The advantages of biodiesel compared to diesel is an environmentally friendly fuel because it produces much lower emissions (sulfur free, low smoke number) in accordance with global issues, higher cetane number (> 57) so that the combustion efficiency is better than diesel, lubrication properties of the piston engine; biodegradable, a renewable energy because it is made from natural materials, and improve the independence of fuel supply because it can be produced locally. The purpose of this research is to design the risk management decision support system for agro-industry development biodiesel of oil palm-based. Determination of objectives and risk management strategies using the used to obtain an alternative value in the aspect of marketing. This research resulted in a decision support system that is useful to help decision makers in addressing the risk of agro-bio-diesel. Risk management model is designed in a decision support system  (DSS), can be used by industrial users and investors in the field of biodiesel. DSS software development using Microsoft Visual Basic Version 6.0 consists of three main components namely database management system, knowledge base management system and model base management system. Model base management system consists of risk marketing analysis

Modelling data of an urban drainage design using a Geographic Information System (GIS)database

This paper describes the development of a model to interface a planned urban drainage system with Geographic Information System (GIS)through the introduction of open-source tools; Auto Numbering and Get Elevation to extract essential data from GIS and Excel2GIS to bridge the output data between GIS and the drainage design program. Creating a range of essential data from digital database repositories aids the development of decision-support tools for urban planners in a simulation of different urban drainage scheme scenarios and moderates the interference with other infrastructure utilities. These tools, modelled with design software and GIS platform, are tested in two case studies; the results revealing essential improvements in accuracy of output, time taken to prepare and run the model and model presentation which visualised the hydraulic design results and global location of the drainage layout on an urban master plan. © 2019 Elsevier B.V

ZenStates: Easy-to-Understand Yet Expressive Specifications for Creative Interactive Environments

International audienceMuch progress has been made on interactive behavior development tools for expert programmers. However, little effort has been made in investigating how these tools support creative communities who typically struggle with technical development. This is the case, for instance, of media artists and composers working with interactive environments. To address this problem, we introduce ZenStates: a new specification model for creative interactive environments that combines Hierarchical Finite-States Machines, expressions, off-the-shelf components called Tasks, and a global communication system called the Blackboard. Our evaluation is three-folded: (a) implementing our model in a direct manipulation-based software interface; (b) probing ZenStates' expressive power through 90 exploratory scenarios; and (c) performing a user study to investigate the understandability of ZenStates' model. Results support ZenStates viability, its expressivity, and suggest that ZenStates is easier to understand-in terms of decision time and decision accuracy-compared to two popular alternatives

Hospital Administrators and Technology as Determinants for Successful IT-Usage in Public Sector Hospitals of Developing Countries

The impact assessment of IT on decision making process has now become a global issue and thereby gaining interest of researchers of both developed and developing societies (see for example Ahlan, 2005; Adebayo, 2007; Bradley, 2006). However, empirical studies have been conducted to evaluate the impacts of IT on health-related decision making by healthcare professionals in Pakistan. To fill the existing gap in the literature the study at hand is undertaken to evaluate the factors affecting the use of IT in public health organizations in KPK, Pakistan. This paper assesses the effects of two key factors (hospital administrators and technology) to see their influence on the adoption and use of IS (information system) development in hospitals of Pakistan especially public sector hospitals. The current research asserts that hospital administrators’/executives’ interest and support for implementation and use of IT and available technology are the primary determinants for successful implementation and use of the IT in public hospitals. The healthcare organizations supported by the administrators and effective hardware and software solutions can materialize successful adoption and use of IT in healthcare organizations anywhere including developing states. Key words: Hospital Administrators, Technology, and IT-usage

Living Earth:Implementing national standardised land cover classification systems for Earth Observation in support of sustainable development

Earth Observation (EO) has been recognised as a key data source for supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Advances in data availability and analytical capabilities have provided a wide range of users access to global coverage analysis-ready data (ARD). However, ARD does not provide the information required by national agencies tasked with coordinating the implementation of SDGs. Reliable, standardised, scalable mapping of land cover and its change over time and space facilitates informed decision making, providing cohesive methods for target setting and reporting of SDGs. The aim of this study was to implement a global framework for classifying land cover. The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s Land Cover Classification System (FAO LCCS) provides a global land cover taxonomy suitable to comprehensively support SDG target setting and reporting. We present a fully implemented FAO LCCS optimised for EO data; Living Earth, an open-source software package that can be readily applied using existing national EO infrastructure and satellite data. We resolve several semantic challenges of LCCS for consistent EO implementation, including modifications to environmental descriptors, inter-dependency within the modular-hierarchical framework, and increased flexibility associated with limited data availability. To ensure easy adoption of Living Earth for SDG reporting, we identified key environmental descriptors to provide resource allocation recommendations for generating routinely retrieved input parameters. Living Earth provides an optimal platform for global adoption of EO4SDGs ensuring a transparent methodology that allows monitoring to be standardised for all countrie

Sacramento model calibration using different methodologies : application to the Itabapoana-MG river basin

Despite the considerable progresses in computational hydraulics the calibration of hydrological models still requires a meticulous and laborious effort. However, the development of model calibration supporting tools has facilitated that work and improved the obtained results. The objective of this paper, developed under a R&D project, is to evaluate the performance achieved by using different calibration techniques for the rainfall-runoff Sacramento model of the Itabapoana-MG river basin. Bom Jesus do Itabapoana, a flood prone city, is located about 35 km downstream of Rosal hydropower plant. The limited capacity of Rosal reservoir implies that it cannot be used to mitigate flooding at downstream cities. However, flood forecasting can be used to avoid potential downstream damages and support decision making to defend and mitigate the undesirable effects. There should be a balance between the models performance and their computational times. It is important consider sufficiently precise results for sound decision-making outcomes, as well as results fast enough to be used in an operational decision support system environment. SOBEK software was chosen for prediction of flood events and Sacramento hydrological model was selected as rainfall- runoff model. SOBEK does not offer a module for automatic calibration of their hydrological models. Thus, for the quantification of Sacramento parameters, it is possible to make use of external algorithms for automatic calibration based on global optimization techniques. This paper assesses the eficiency of using results of automatic calibration using the Rainfall Runoff Library (RRL) within SOBEK hydrological module. In general, the results for RRL were better than the ones reached by SOBEK. Despite differences, the use of RRL as a tool to accelerate the parameters determination process for the Sacramento model has obtained satisfactory results

Collaborative Supply Chain Decision Support And Multi-Attribute Supply Chain Scenarios

Todays Global economy is putting a premium on the ability of companies and their professional employees to rapidly evaluate a broad range of decisions in collaboration with both existing and prospective supply chain partners. This includes the development, evaluation and refinement of product designs, the evaluation of alternatives sourcing options, the evaluation of requests for bids, etc. A key difficulty in supporting the collaborative development, evaluation and refinement of alternative courses of action across different organizations lies in the complexity of the solutions involved (e.g. complex production schedules spanning multiple organizations, complex product designs or configurations involving large numbers of parts and components that are procured from a number of suppliers, etc.). Given a growing and ongoing need to revitalize the accounting curriculum and explore eclectic methods to teach accounting information systems, real challenges and opportunities exist to import this material into the accounting systems classroom.The Business Process Integration Lab at Saint Josephs University has developed a prototype environment for collaborative development, evaluation and refinement of supply chain management scenarios (e.g. requests for bids, product designs, sourcing options). The environment relies on the use of Enterprise Resource Planning software, using SAP R/3 to streamline and integrate the supply chain. Through the use of application scenarios, students are able to develop a total understanding of the power of the ERP technology tool as a decision maker and problem-solver, while enhancing their knowledge of the system in modules such as Production Planning and Customer Order Management. It is possible to support powerful workflow management functionality in the context of both interactive and highly automated decision making processes. This functionality has been operational for some three years and is coordinated by senior level graduate and undergraduate students who develop and test the scenarios and assist other students as they navigate through the R/3 system