Resilience of Water Supply in Practice

Water Resilience in Practice is co-edited by two experienced water sector professionals and reviews resilience in water supply service delivery in the form of a series of case studies from different economic contexts – ranging from low-income and fragile states to upper-income countries. It documents real experiences and reflects on the initiatives different service providers apply to strengthen resilience in practice. It describes how service providers respond, adapt, innovate and learn on an ongoing basis, and how they endeavour to meet challenges and provide water supply to users equitably and sustainably. In recent years climate resilience in water supply has been a new emerging paradigm. In response it is helpful to document and record some up-to-date experiences, which can be consolidated in one place. However, it is also necessary to recognise the multiple pressures that water resources face, such as: population growth, increased water demands, existing climatic variability as well as climate change. These pressures are having a profound impact on water supply service delivery. In this context service providers and development professionals must take active measures to respond to these risks. This book is primarily addressed to organisations and practitioners involved in planning, designing, managing and financing water supply programmes in urban and rural settings

Resilience of Water Supply in Practice

Water Resilience in Practice is co-edited by two experienced water sector professionals and reviews resilience in water supply service delivery in the form of a series of case studies from different economic contexts – ranging from low-income and fragile states to upper-income countries. It documents real experiences and reflects on the initiatives different service providers apply to strengthen resilience in practice. It describes how service providers respond, adapt, innovate and learn on an ongoing basis, and how they endeavour to meet challenges and provide water supply to users equitably and sustainably. In recent years climate resilience in water supply has been a new emerging paradigm. In response it is helpful to document and record some up-to-date experiences, which can be consolidated in one place. However, it is also necessary to recognise the multiple pressures that water resources face, such as: population growth, increased water demands, existing climatic variability as well as climate change. These pressures are having a profound impact on water supply service delivery. In this context service providers and development professionals must take active measures to respond to these risks. This book is primarily addressed to organisations and practitioners involved in planning, designing, managing and financing water supply programmes in urban and rural settings

Strengthening Resilience of Supply with Essential Goods through Public-Private Emergency Collaborations: Challenges and Incentives

Private actors ensure the supply of essential goods such as food, drinking water, and medicine to the population. However, crises such as natural disasters, human-caused conflicts, or pandemics can cause disruptions of private supply chains and, subsequently, supply shortages in the market. In this case, public actors need to become active and responsible for supplying the population with essential goods. Nevertheless, the ability of public actors to provide essential goods in a crisis is constrained due to limited resources and a lack of knowledge about the relevant commercial supply chains. Therefore, companies that produce, distribute, or sell essential goods can be valuable partners but must be adequately motivated to participate in crisis management. A promising form of collaboration to strengthen resilience lies in the concept of public-private emergency collaborations (PPECs), elaborated in different studies within the dissertation. The necessity of PPECs and their public acceptance depends on the attitude and preparation of the population, which is why the empirical investigation of these accompanying questions is another central part of the dissertation. Five studies published as companion articles address necessary prerequisites and approaches to the design of collaborations in crises: Study A examines the PPEC concept and puts it into a more specific framework, considering logistical requirements in a game-theoretic model. The model addresses private actors’ incentives to collaborate, such as a positive reputation or learning effects for internal processes. Both can provide a substantial —- not least financial —- advantage for the company in the long run. Study B investigates crises and PPECs from a company perspective by evaluating an empirical study with 398 responses from essential goods and logistics companies. The results show companies’ high interest in participating in PPECs. Nevertheless, the data reveals that certain conditions, such as adequate compensation or consideration of companies’ operational procedures, must be fulfilled for collaboration with public actors. Study C addresses the attitude of the population in a survey of 402 randomly selected participants and finds that the population highly values companies’ involvement in PPECs. The companies’ communication strategy and the population’s risk perception affect the attitude. Study D analyzes the stockpiling behavior of the population in two door-to-door surveys, the first with 330 participants and the second with 402. The timing of the before-and-after survey provides a special value: The study considers possible changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results show low stockpiling levels and that stockpiling has only marginally increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study E examines an economic experiment with 262 participants in 13 sessions to clarify the importance of safety-stock levels for companies’ reputation in a failure-prone supply chain. The design made it possible to disentangle indirect losses due to customer churn and direct losses due to disruptions, thus quantifying firm reliability and customer loyalty. Four general recommendations for the stakeholders in crisis management, public actors, private actors, and the population, are derived: First, all stakeholders must adapt their behavior and improve current protection measures and strategies against global crises and supply chain disruptions. Second, humanitarian crisis management is a team effort involving many actors. Therefore, understanding synergies, mutual attitudes, and the incentive constellation of the actors involved is a crucial prerequisite for success. Third, crisis management also includes the right communication strategy. It is not only important to contribute but also to communicate it in a successful and convincing way. Fourth, collaborative approaches, as in PPECs, where each stakeholder brings his or her strengths into the collaboration, are beneficial for all parties involved, and increase society’s overall resilience. Consequently, this dissertation provides valuable insights into the status of humanitarian crisis management from the perspective of different stakeholders. It offers the potential to improve this field of research through collaborative approaches, as in PPECs, addressing the strengths and incentives of stakeholders accordingly

A Scalable Trust Management scheme for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks MANETs, have special resource requirements and different topology features, they establish themselves on fly without reliance on centralized or specialized entities such as base stations. All the nodes must cooperate with each other in order to send packets, forwarding packets, responding to routing messages, sending recommendations, among others, Cooperating nodes must trust each other. In MANETs, an untrustworthy node can wreak considerable damage and adversely affect the quality and reliability of data. Therefore, analyzing the trust level of a node has a positive influence on the confidence with which an entity conducts transactions with that node. This thesis presents a new trust management scheme to assign trust levels for spaces or nodes in ad hoc networks. The scheme emulates the human model which depends on the previous individual experience and on the intercession or recommendation of other spaces in the same radio range. The trust level considers the recommendation of trustworthy neighbors and their own experience. For the recommendation computation, we take into account not only the trust level, but also its accuracy and the relationship maturity. The relationship rationality -maturity-, allows nodes to improve the efficiency of the proposed model for mobile scenarios. We also introduce the Contribution Exchange Protocol (CEP) which allows nodes to exchange Intercessions and recommendation about their neighbors without disseminating the trust information over the entire network. Instead, nodes only need to keep and exchange trust information about nodes within the radio range. Without the need for a global trust knowledge. Different from most related works, this scheme improves scalability by restricting nodes to keep and exchange trust information solely with direct neighbors, that is, neighbors within the radio range. We have developed a simulator, which is specifically designed for this model, in order to evaluate and identify the main characteristics of the proposed system. Simulation results show the correctness of this model in a single-hop network. Extending the analysis to mobile multihop networks, shows the benefits of the maturity relationship concept, i.e. for how long nodes know each other, the maturity parameter can decrease the trust level error up to 50%. The results show the effectiveness of the system and the influence of main parameters in the presence of mobility. At last, we analyze the performance of the CEP protocol and show its scalability. We show that this implementation of CEP can significantly reduce the number messages

Resilience of Water Supply in Practice

Water Resilience in Practice is co-edited by two experienced water sector professionals and reviews resilience in water supply service delivery in the form of a series of case studies from different economic contexts – ranging from low-income and fragile states to upper-income countries. It documents real experiences and reflects on the initiatives different service providers apply to strengthen resilience in practice. It describes how service providers respond, adapt, innovate and learn on an ongoing basis, and how they endeavour to meet challenges and provide water supply to users equitably and sustainably. In recent years climate resilience in water supply has been a new emerging paradigm. In response it is helpful to document and record some up-to-date experiences, which can be consolidated in one place. However, it is also necessary to recognise the multiple pressures that water resources face, such as: population growth, increased water demands, existing climatic variability as well as climate change. These pressures are having a profound impact on water supply service delivery. In this context service providers and development professionals must take active measures to respond to these risks. This book is primarily addressed to organisations and practitioners involved in planning, designing, managing and financing water supply programmes in urban and rural settings

Two Cases in High Reliability Organizing: A Hermeneutic Reconceptualization.

In view of the primacy of organizational reliability, an exploration of what contextual and structural organization dimensions contribute to high reliability is a pertinent research issue. This dissertation attempts to answer this question in case of the incident management process of the IT department of a financial institution and of a nuclear power plant. By means of constructs stemming from research in so-called High Reliability Organizations (HRO) and SenseMaking, and by taking a hermeneutic research approach, building on quantitative as well as qualitative techniques, existing HRO literature is reconceptualized. It is this reconceptualization that allows for a confirmation of the assumption that not only the nuclear power plant – as an archetypical HRO – but also the financial institution – as a mainstream organization – are bearing genuine HRO hallmarks. However, the answer to what constitutes high reliability is less univocal. As a general observation, a high score on HRO constructs does not necessarily contribute to high reliability. Hence the conclusion that the poison makes the dose. On the other hand, starting from the reconceptualized framework, newly introduced HRO constructs like Team Orientation, Threat Flexibility and Efficiency do univocally influence high reliability. Therefore – notwithstanding the absence of an ideal reliability cocktail – there are strong indications that a reconceptualized HRO theory has the potential of offering valuable advice regarding organizing for high reliability.

Big Data and Its Applications in Smart Real Estate and the Disaster Management Life Cycle: A Systematic Analysis

Big data is the concept of enormous amounts of data being generated daily in different fields due to the increased use of technology and internet sources. Despite the various advancements and the hopes of better understanding, big data management and analysis remain a challenge, calling for more rigorous and detailed research, as well as the identifications of methods and ways in which big data could be tackled and put to good use. The existing research lacks in discussing and evaluating the pertinent tools and technologies to analyze big data in an efficient manner which calls for a comprehensive and holistic analysis of the published articles to summarize the concept of big data and see field-specific applications. To address this gap and keep a recent focus, research articles published in last decade, belonging to top-tier and high-impact journals, were retrieved using the search engines of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science that were narrowed down to a set of 139 relevant research articles. Different analyses were conducted on the retrieved papers including bibliometric analysis, keywords analysis, big data search trends, and authors’ names, countries, and affiliated institutes contributing the most to the field of big data. The comparative analyses show that, conceptually, big data lies at the intersection of the storage, statistics, technology, and research fields and emerged as an amalgam of these four fields with interlinked aspects such as data hosting and computing, data management, data refining, data patterns, and machine learning. The results further show that major characteristics of big data can be summarized using the seven Vs, which include variety, volume, variability, value, visualization, veracity, and velocity. Furthermore, the existing methods for big data analysis, their shortcomings, and the possible directions were also explored that could be taken for harnessing technology to ensure data analysis tools could be upgraded to be fast and efficient. The major challenges in handling big data include efficient storage, retrieval, analysis, and visualization of the large heterogeneous data, which can be tackled through authentication such as Kerberos and encrypted files, logging of attacks, secure communication through Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS), data imputation, building learning models, dividing computations into sub-tasks, checkpoint applications for recursive tasks, and using Solid State Drives (SDD) and Phase Change Material (PCM) for storage. In terms of frameworks for big data management, two frameworks exist including Hadoop and Apache Spark, which must be used simultaneously to capture the holistic essence of the data and make the analyses meaningful, swift, and speedy. Further field-specific applications of big data in two promising and integrated fields, i.e., smart real estate and disaster management, were investigated, and a framework for field-specific applications, as well as a merger of the two areas through big data, was highlighted. The proposed frameworks show that big data can tackle the ever-present issues of customer regrets related to poor quality of information or lack of information in smart real estate to increase the customer satisfaction using an intermediate organization that can process and keep a check on the data being provided to the customers by the sellers and real estate managers. Similarly, for disaster and its risk management, data from social media, drones, multimedia, and search engines can be used to tackle natural disasters such as floods, bushfires, and earthquakes, as well as plan emergency responses. In addition, a merger framework for smart real estate and disaster risk management show that big data generated from the smart real estate in the form of occupant data, facilities management, and building integration and maintenance can be shared with the disaster risk management and emergency response teams to help prevent, prepare, respond to, or recover from the disasters

Medición del impacto en la confianza de marca de un sistema descentralizado de confianza para la marca Heincke : estudio cuantitativo para consumidores de panela en Bogotá.

El presente trabajo simuló un sistema descentralizado de confianza y evaluó el efecto que este tiene sobre la percepción de transparencia, la intención de compra, el precio a pagar, el voz a voz y la confianza de marca en un producto. Para desarrollar el estudio se trabajó junto a la marca de panela HEINCKE, reconocida por su compromiso tanto ambiental como social, y se hizo un análisis comparativo entre la simulación de un sistema descentralizado de confianza y un sistema centralizado de confianza –sellos y certificaciones. Para probar qué efectos tenían estos sistemas sobre las variables mencionadas, se siguió una metodología experimental cuantitativa en la que 3 grupos de consumidores fueron expuestos a tratamientos diferenciados. El análisis de la información muestra que un sistema descentralizado de confianza incrementa la percepción de transparencia, la intención de compra por parte del consumidor y el precio que este está dispuesto a pagar.1. Resumen ; 2. Palabras Clave ; 3. Planteamiento del problema ; 4. Marco teórico ; 5. Metodología ; Tipo de estudio ; Población ; Variables ; Procedimiento ; Análisis de datos ; 6. Resultados ; 7. Conclusiones .Magíster en Dirección de Marketing, CESA

Information Refinement Technologies for Crisis Informatics: User Expectations and Design Implications for Social Media and Mobile Apps in Crises

In the past 20 years, mobile technologies and social media have not only been established in everyday life, but also in crises, disasters, and emergencies. Especially large-scale events, such as 2012 Hurricane Sandy or the 2013 European Floods, showed that citizens are not passive victims but active participants utilizing mobile and social information and communication technologies (ICT) for crisis response (Reuter, Hughes, et al., 2018). Accordingly, the research field of crisis informatics emerged as a multidisciplinary field which combines computing and social science knowledge of disasters and is rooted in disciplines such as human-computer interaction (HCI), computer science (CS), computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), and information systems (IS). While citizens use personal ICT to respond to a disaster to cope with uncertainty, emergency services such as fire and police departments started using available online data to increase situational awareness and improve decision making for a better crisis response (Palen & Anderson, 2016). When looking at even larger crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it becomes apparent the challenges of crisis informatics are amplified (Xie et al., 2020). Notably, information is often not available in perfect shape to assist crisis response: the dissemination of high-volume, heterogeneous and highly semantic data by citizens, often referred to as big social data (Olshannikova et al., 2017), poses challenges for emergency services in terms of access, quality and quantity of information. In order to achieve situational awareness or even actionable information, meaning the right information for the right person at the right time (Zade et al., 2018), information must be refined according to event-based factors, organizational requirements, societal boundary conditions and technical feasibility. In order to research the topic of information refinement, this dissertation combines the methodological framework of design case studies (Wulf et al., 2011) with principles of design science research (Hevner et al., 2004). These extended design case studies consist of four phases, each contributing to research with distinct results. This thesis first reviews existing research on use, role, and perception patterns in crisis informatics, emphasizing the increasing potentials of public participation in crisis response using social media. Then, empirical studies conducted with the German population reveal positive attitudes and increasing use of mobile and social technologies during crises, but also highlight barriers of use and expectations towards emergency services to monitor and interact in media. The findings led to the design of innovative ICT artefacts, including visual guidelines for citizens’ use of social media in emergencies (SMG), an emergency service web interface for aggregating mobile and social data (ESI), an efficient algorithm for detecting relevant information in social media (SMO), and a mobile app for bidirectional communication between emergency services and citizens (112.social). The evaluation of artefacts involved the participation of end-users in the application field of crisis management, pointing out potentials for future improvements and research potentials. The thesis concludes with a framework on information refinement for crisis informatics, integrating event-based, organizational, societal, and technological perspectives