Synergies between app-based car-related shared mobility services for the development of more profitable business models

Purpose: Emerging shared mobility services are an opportunity for cities to reduce the number of car single trips to both improve traffic congestion and the environment. Users of shared mobility services, such as carsharing, ridesharing and singular and shared ride-hailing services, often need to be customers of more than one service to cover all their transport needs, since few mobility providers offer more than one of these services from a single platform. On the other hand, providers offering these services separately do not optimize costly resources and activities, such as the vehicles or the technology. Hence, the aim of this paper is to find synergies between the different app-based car-related shared mobility services that foster the development of new business models, to increase the profitability of these services. Design/methodology/approach: The research approach is built on the literature of car-related shared mobility services business models, supported by the review of certain outstanding services websites, and face-to-face interviews with users and drivers of these transport services. The analysis is presented by means of the Business Model Canvas methodology. Findings: Based on the synergies found, this paper suggests a few different approaches for services to share some resources and activities. Originality/value: This study identifies the common features of carsharing, ridesharing and singular and shared ride-hailing services to develop more profitable business models, based on providing the services in aggregated form, or outsourcing activities and resources. In addition, the implications of these proposals are discussed as advantages and drawbacks from a business perspectivePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Background and approach to a definition of smart buildings

There is no possibility of finding a single reference about domotics in the first half of the 20th century. The best known authors and those who have documented this discipline, set its origin in the 1970’s, when the x-10 technology began to be used, but it was not until 1988 when Larousse Encyclopedia decided to include the definition of "Smart Building". Furthermore, even nowadays, there is not a single definition widely accepted, and for that reason, many other expressions, namely "Intelligent Buildings" "Domotics" "Digital Home" or "Home Automation" have appeared to describe the automated buildings and homes. The lack of a clear definition for "Smart Buildings" causes difficulty not only in the development of a common international framework to develop research in this field, but it also causes insecurity in the potential user of these buildings. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a definition of the expression “Smart Buildings” that satisfactorily describes the meaning of this discipline. To achieve this aim, a thorough review of the origin of the term itself and the historical background before the emergence of the phenomenon of domotics was conducted, followed by a critical discussion of existing definitions of the term "Smart Buildings" and other similar terms. The extent of each definition has been analyzed, inaccuracies have been discarded and commonalities have been compared. Throughout the discussion, definitions that bring the term "Smart Buildings" near to disciplines such as computer science, robotics and also telecommunications have been found

Development of the university image positioning methods in the context of its marketing strategy

Purpose: The note aims to study the steps actions algorithm in the positioning of university image, based on the method of using official media sites and searching systems and social networks. Design/Methodology/Approach: Today in the digital economy, higher educational establishments should take advantage of the opportunities arising from the involvement of the digital infrastructure in the process of their functioning. The positioning of an existing service or product usually takes the form of repositioning. The basis of the methodic apparatus of this study is the method of using official media sites and searching systems and social networks, which is used in the preparation of the steps algorithm in the university’s image positioning. Findings: The steps algorithm in the university image positioning is based on the method of using official media sites and searching systems and social networks. This method is developed by the authors and substantiated for the implementation in the sphere of higher educational establishments. Practical implications: In practice, we are talking about the formation of a mechanism function to provide the basic steps necessary to build an algorithm of the higher educational establishment image positioning. Originality/value: The concept "positioning" is the most often associated with persons (politicians, "stars") and companies engaged in the production or promotion of goods or services and positioning themselves to create their image, but not about the university positioning.peer-reviewe

Pharmaceuticals Delivery in Ireland. Getting a Bigger Bang for the Buck

Ireland

A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantics

This paper presents a novel ontology-driven software engineering approach for the development of industrial robotics control software. It introduces the ReApp architecture that synthesizes model-driven engineering with semantic technologies to facilitate the development and reuse of ROS-based components and applications. In ReApp, we show how different ontological classification systems for hardware, software, and capabilities help developers in discovering suitable software components for their tasks and in applying them correctly. The proposed model-driven tooling enables developers to work at higher abstraction levels and fosters automatic code generation. It is underpinned by ontologies to minimize discontinuities in the development workflow, with an integrated development environment presenting a seamless interface to the user. First results show the viability and synergy of the selected approach when searching for or developing software with reuse in mind.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2015 (arXiv:1601.00877), Stefan Zander, Georg Heppner, Georg Neugschwandtner, Ramez Awad, Marc Essinger and Nadia Ahmed: A Model-Driven Engineering Approach for ROS using Ontological Semantic

Bridging End Users' Terms and AGROVOC Concept Server Vocabularies

The AGROVOC is a multilingual structured thesaurus in the agricultural domain. It has already been mapped with several vocabularies, for example AGROVOC-CAT, AGROVOC-NALT , AGROVOC-SWD. Although these vocabularies already contained a good portion of non-preferred terms, the terms are collected under the literary warrant and institutional warrant principles; which means vocabularies were collected based on the documents and publications rather than user‟s queries. It is still very common that end users would use different terms to express the same concept. In light of above discussion, we need to bridge these vocabularies and the users‟ terms Backgroun

PROJECT OPTIMA: optimisation of policies for transport integration in metropolitan areas

The overall objectives of Project OPTIMA were: (i) to identify optimal urban transport and land use strategies for a range of urban areas within the EU; (ii) to compare the strategies which are specified as optimal in different cities, and to assess the reasons for these differences; (iii) to assess the acceptability and feasibility of implementation of these strategies both in nine case study cities (Edinburgh, Merseyside, Vienna, Eisenstadt, Tromsø, Oslo, Helsinki, Torino and Salerno) and more widely in the EU; and (iv) to use the results to provide more general guidance on urban transport policy within the EU

Economics and Engineering for Preserving Digital Content

Progress towards practical long-term preservation seems to be stalled. Preservationists cannot afford specially developed technology, but must exploit what is created for the marketplace. Economic and technical facts suggest that most preservation ork should be shifted from repository institutions to information producers and consumers. Prior publications describe solutions for all known conceptual challenges of preserving a single digital object, but do not deal with software development or scaling to large collections. Much of the document handling software needed is available. It has, however, not yet been selected, adapted, integrated, or deployed for digital preservation. The daily tools of both information producers and information consumers can be extended to embed preservation packaging without much burdening these users. We describe a practical strategy for detailed design and implementation. Document handling is intrinsically complicated because of human sensitivity to communication nuances. Our engineering section therefore starts by discussing how project managers can master the many pertinent details.

HIGH SCHOOL QUALITY AND STUDENT SATISFACTION OF SEMESTA BOARDING SCHOOL

In light of the imminent rise in tuition fees, High School funding cuts and fears of declining student numbers, gaining a sustainable competitive advantage in the higher education (Secondary Education ) sector is at the forefront of many high schools’ agendas. In what can be categorised as an extremely intangible service sector, one way that a High School can differentiate their service offering from the competition is through the provision of excellent service quality. This study investigates perceptions of service quality by Importance Performance Analysis method (IPA) at the Semesta Bilingual Boarding High School of Semarang Central Java, collecting viewpoints from 9, 10, 11 and 12 grade students from different academic year groups. This study provides High School (Secondary School) service management with a ‘snapshot’ of the current provision of service quality at the Semesta Bilingual Boarding School. It also offers suggestions that could be implemented to improve service quality, given the limited resources available to management. Due to the dynamic nature of service quality, it is essential to conduct further research to build on this study, in order to ensure that the Semesta High School remains competitive in what is an increasingly turbulent environmen

Survey of Federal, National, and International standards applicable to the NASA applications data services

An applications data service (ADS) was developed to meet the challenges in the data access and integration. The ADS provides a common service to locate and access applications data electronically and integrate the cross correlative data sets required by multiple users. Its catalog and network services increase data visibility as well as provide the data in a more rapid manner and a usable form