A proposed assessment scheme for smart sustainable urban development

The twenty-first century belongs to the cities. For the first time in history, more than 50% of the world\u27s population now lives in a city and the urban population is expected to double by 2050. The opportunities created by new technologies challenge the way in which we conceive our cities, how we plan, design and construct them and how we will live in them. The current large gap between smart city and sustainable city frameworks implies that there is a need for developing their frameworks further or re-defining the smart sustainable city concept, which is relatively new and can be seen as a successor of information city, digital city and sustainable city. Furthermore, rating standards like LEED and (GPRS) do not cover all the topics behind the Smart Sustainable City Concept. The aim of this study is to conduct and perform qualitative and comparative analysis of International Standards and case studies, to provide a foundation for developing a framework for the planning of a Smart Sustainable City based on rigorous criteria and sub-criteria. This framework, can be used to assess the smart sustainable urban development of the new administrative capital of Egypt. The criteria have been selected according to international standards via ISO37120 and the Focus Group of Smart Sustainable Cities of International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T FGSSC), as a base for the framework. The framework developed in this study is more oriented towards achieving aspects of urban life at the design and planning stage versus other models existing in the literature that are more oriented towards progress in International Communication Technology (ICT) as a dimension by itself and as means to transform already built cities to smart cities. The proposed study is intended to build up and complement key dimensions that were developed by ITU-TFGSSC, by adding sub-dimensions and key indicators filling this gap in research. The outcome of this study could be used to generate a framework and develop recommendations that has been tailored for urban planners, owners, operators and occupiers, to successfully and cost effectively adopt smart sustainable solutions as they plan, design, construct, and manage future cities. City assessment tools can be used as support for decision making in urban development as they provide assessment methodologies for cities to show the progress towards defined targets

Carbon Free Boston: Social equity report 2019

OVERVIEW: In January 2019, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission released its Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report, identifying potential options for the City of Boston to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The report found that reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 requires three mutually-reinforcing strategies in key sectors: 1) deepen energy efficiency while reducing energy demand, 2) electrify activity to the fullest practical extent, and 3) use fuels and electricity that are 100 percent free of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Summary Report detailed the ways in which these technical strategies will transform Boston’s physical infrastructure, including its buildings, energy supply, transportation, and waste management systems. The Summary Report also highlighted that it is how these strategies are designed and implemented that matter most in ensuring an effective and equitable transition to carbon neutrality. Equity concerns exist for every option the City has to reduce GHG emissions. The services provided by each sector are not experienced equally across Boston’s communities. Low-income families and families of color are more likely to live in residences that are in poor physical condition, leading to high utility bills, unsafe and unhealthy indoor environments, and high GHG emissions.1 Those same families face greater exposure to harmful outdoor air pollution compared to others. The access and reliability of public transportation is disproportionately worse in neighborhoods with large populations of people of color, and large swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods, from East Boston to Mattapan, do not have ready access to the city’s bike network. Income inequality is a growing national issue and is particularly acute in Boston, which consistently ranks among the highest US cities in regards to income disparities. With the release of Imagine Boston 2030, Mayor Walsh committed to make Boston more equitable, affordable, connected, and resilient. The Summary Report outlined the broad strokes of how action to reach carbon neutrality intersects with equity. A just transition to carbon neutrality improves environmental quality for all Bostonians, prioritizes socially vulnerable populations, seeks to redress current and past injustice, and creates economic and social opportunities for all. This Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report provides a deeper equity context for Carbon Free Boston as a whole, and for each strategy area, by demonstrating how inequitable and unjust the playing field is for socially vulnerable Bostonians and why equity must be integrated into policy design and implementation. This report summarizes the current landscape of climate action work for each strategy area and evaluates how it currently impacts inequity. Finally, this report provides guidance to the City and partners on how to do better; it lays out the attributes of an equitable approach to carbon neutrality, framed around three guiding principles: 1) plan carefully to avoid unintended consequences, 2) be intentional in design through a clear equity lens, and 3) practice inclusivity from start to finish

Sustainable reverse logistics for household plastic waste

Summary of the thesis titled “Sustainable Reverse Logistics for Household Plastic Waste” PhD Candidate: Xiaoyun Bing Recycled plastic can be used in the manufacturing of plastic products to reduce the use of virgin plastics material. The cost of recycled plastics is usually lower than that of virgin plastics. Therefore, it is environmentally and economically beneficial to improve the plastic recycling system to ensure more plastic waste from households is properly collected and processed for recycling. Plastic waste has a complex composition and is polluted, thus requires a substantial technical effort to separate the plastics from the waste and to sort these into recyclable materials. There are several alternatives in the existing collection methods (curb-side and drop-off) and separation methods (source separation and post-separation). It is challenging to select a suitable combination of these methods and to design a network that is efficient and sustainable. It is necessary to build a suitable, efficient and sustainable recycling network from collection to the final processor in order to provide solutions for different future scenarios of plastics household waste recycling. Decision support is needed in order to redesign the plastic waste reverse logistics so that the plastic waste recycling supply chain can be improved towards a more sustainable direction. To improve the efficiency in the recycling of plastic packaging waste, insights are required into this complex system. Insights solely on a municipal level are not sufficient, as the processing and end market are important for a complete network configuration. Therefore, we have investigated the problem at three levels: municipal, regional, and global. Decision support systems are developed based on optimization techniques to explore the power of mathematical modelling to assist in the decision-making process. This thesis investigates plastic waste recycling from a sustainable reverse logistics angle. The aim is to analyse the collection, separation and treatments systems of plastic waste and to propose redesigns for the recycling system using quantitative decision support models. We started this research project by identifying research opportunities. This was done through a practical approach that aimed to find future research opportunities to solve existing problems (Chapter 2). We started from a review of current municipal solid waste recycling practices in various EU countries and identified the characteristics and key issues of waste recycling from waste management and reverse logistics point of view. This is followed by a literature review regarding the applications of operations research. We conclude that waste recycling is a multi-disciplinary problem and that research opportunities can be found by considering different decision levels simultaneously. While analyzing a reverse supply chain for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) recycling, a holistic view and considering characteristics of different waste types are necessary. Municipal Level In Chapter 3, we aim to redesign the collection routes of household plastic waste and compare the collection options at the municipal level using eco-efficiency as a performance indicator. The collection problem is modeled as a vehicle routing problem. A tabu search heuristic is used to improve the routes. Scenarios are designed according to the collection alternatives with different assumptions in collection method, vehicle type, collection frequency, and collection points, etc. The results show that the source-separation drop-off collection scenario has the best performance for plastic collection, assuming householders take the waste to the drop-off points in a sustainable manner. In Chapter 4, we develop a comprehensive cost estimation model to further analyze the impacts of various taxation alternatives on the collection cost and environmental impact. This model is based on such variables as fixed and variable costs per vehicle, personnel cost, container or bag costs, as well as emission costs (using imaginary carbon taxes). The model can be used for decision support when strategic changes to the collection scheme of municipalities are considered. The model, which considers the characteristics of municipalities, including degree of urbanization and taxation schemes for household waste management, was applied to the Dutch case of post-consumer plastic packaging waste. The results showed that post-separation collection generally has the lowest costs. Curb-side collection in urban municipalities without residual waste collection taxing schemes has the highest cost. These results were supported by the conducted sensitivity analysis, which showed that higher source-separation responses are negatively related to curb-side collection costs. Regional Level Chapter 5 provides decision support for choosing the most suitable combination of separation methods in the Netherlands. Decision support is provided through an optimized reverse logistics network design that makes the overall recycling system more efficient and sustainable, while taking into account the interests of various stakeholders (municipalities, households, etc.). A mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model, which minimizes both transportation cost and environmental impact, is used to design this network. The research follows the approach of a scenario study; the baseline scenario is the current situation and other scenarios are designed with various strategic alternatives. Comparing these scenarios, the results show that the current network settings of the baseline situation is efficient in terms of logistics, but has the potential to adapt to strategic changes, depending on the assumptions regarding availability of the required processing facilities to treat plastic waste. In some of the tested scenarios, a separate collection channel for polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles is cost-efficient and saves carbon emission. Although the figures differ depending on the choices in separation method made by municipalities, our modeling results of all the tested scenarios show a reduction in carbon emissions of more than 25 percent compared to the current network. Chapter 6 studies a plastic recycling system from a reverse logistics angle and investigates the potential benefits of a multimodality strategy to the network design of plastic recycling. The aim was to quantify the impact of multimodality in the network in order to provide decision support for the design of more sustainable plastic recycling networks in the future. A MILP model is developed in order to assess different plastic waste collection, treatment, and transportation scenarios. A baseline scenario represents the optimized current situation, while other scenarios allow multimodality options (barge and train) to be applied. With our input parameter settings, results show that transportation costs contribute to approximately 7 percent of the total costs, and multimodality can help reduce transportation costs by almost 20 percent (CO_2-eq emissions included). In our illustrative case with two plastic separation methods, the post-separation channel benefits more from a multimodality strategy than the source-separation channel. This relates to the locations and availability of intermediate facilities and the quantity of waste transported on each route. Global Level After the regional network redesign, Chapter 7 shows a global network redesign. The aim of this chapter was to redesign a reverse supply chain from a global angle based on a case study conducted on household plastic waste distributed from Europe to China. Emissions trading restrictions are set on processing plants in both Europe and China. We used a mixed-integer programming model in the network optimization to decide on location reallocation of intermediate processing plants under such restrictions, with the objective of maximizing total profit under Emission Trading Schemes (ETS). Re-locating facilities globally can help reduce the total cost. Once carefully set, ETS can function well as incentive to control emissions in re-processors. Optimization results show that relocating re-processing centers to China reduces total costs and total transportation emissions. ETS applied to re-processors further helps to reduce emissions from both re-processors and the transportation sector. Carbon caps should be set carefully in order to be effective. These results give an insight in the feasibility of building a global reverse supply chain for household plastic waste recycling and demonstrate the impact of ETS on network design. The results also provide decision support for increasing the synergy between the policy for global shipping of waste material and the demand of recycled material. Conclusions Chapter 8 summarizes the findings from chapters 2 to 7 and provides brief answers to the research questions. Beyond that, the integrated findings combine the results from different decision levels and elaborate the impacts of various system characteristics and external factors on the decision making in order to achieve an improved sustainable performance. Main findings are: Regarding the impact of carbon cost, the results from different chapters are consistent in terms that emission cost is only a small part of the total cost, even when carbon cost is set at its historically highest figure. When carbon price is set to a different value, impact of carbon cost on the change of optimization results is higher on the upstream of the reverse supply chain for plastic waste than the downstream.In Emission Trading scheme (ETS), carbon cap has a larger impact on eco-efficiency performance of the global network than carbon price.On one decision level, models can help to find the ``best option". For example, in the collection phase, the average total collection costs per ton of plastic waste collected for source-separation municipalities are more than twice of the post-separation municipalities' collection costs due to the frequent stops made and idling time at each stop. From the regional network perspective, post-separation scenarios have higher costs and environmental impact than source separation due to the limited number of separation centers compared to the numerous cross-docking sites for source-separation. When combining decision levels, however, it is difficult to find one ``best option" that fits all, as there are contradictory results when looking at the same factor from different decision levels. Through decision support models, we provided clear insights into the trade-offs and helped to quantify the differences and identify key factors to determine the differences.Population density differences in various municipalities influence the performance of curbside collection more than drop-off collection. This information is valuable for decision makers to consider in the decision making process. Finally, managerial insights derived from sustainable reverse logistics for household plastic waste are summarized in conclusion section.</p

Urban transport governance reform in Barcelona

The unusual mixed public-private structure of the urban bus market in the metropolitan area of Barcelona provides an interesting context in which to analyze the management challenges and opportunities of the partial privatization of public services. Initiatives used by the public regulator to promote competition for contracts, such as short term concessions to private contractors and the removal of entry barriers, have considerable potential for improving efficiency and quality. The growth in the share of routes managed by private firms in recent years shows that privatization is a credible threat that may well stimulate improved performance among public managers. The type of reform implemented in Barcelona is of interest to all metropolitan areas large enough to operate under constant returns to scale regimes, and suitable for potential concessions of routes in segregated areas inside the metropolitan area, so as not to miss out on the benefits of economies of density.Privatization, mixed public-private, regulation, competition JEL classification:

Integrated optimization of sustainable supply chains and transportation networks for multi technology bio-based production:A decision support system based on fuzzy ε-constraint method

Developing and employing effective design methodologies can significantly improve the economic and environmental viability of renewable production processes. This study contributes by presenting a novel bi-level decision support system (DSS) to aid modelling and optimization of multi technology, multi product supply chains and co-modal transportation networks for biomass based (bio-based) production combining two multi-objective mathematical models. Considering the supply chain configuration optimized by the first level of the DSS, in the second level, the transportation network is designed specifying the most appropriate transportation mode and related transportation option under transfer station availability limitations. A hybrid solution methodology that integrates fuzzy set theory and ε-constraint method is proposed. This methodology handles the system specific uncertainties addressing the economic and environmental sustainability aspects by capturing trade-offs between conflicting objectives in the same framework. To explore the viability of the proposed models and solution methodology, a regional supply chain and transportation network is designed using the entire West Midlands (WM) region of the UK as a testing ground. Additionally, scenario and sensitivity analyses are conducted to provide further insights into design and optimization of the biomass based supply chains

Circular economy implementation in waste management network design problem: a case study

The paper presents a new approach to support the strategic decision-making in the area of municipal solid waste management applying modern circular economy principles. A robust two-stage integer non-linear program is developed. The primary goal tends to reduce the waste production. The generated waste should be preferably recycled as much as possible and the resultant residual waste might be used for energy recovery. Only some waste residues are appropriate for landfilling. The aim is to propose the near-optimal waste allocation for its suitable processing as well as waste transportation plan at an operational level. In addition, the key strategical decisions on waste treatment facilities location must be made. Since waste production is very often hard to predict, it is modeled as an uncertain decision-dependent quantity. To support the circular economy ideas, advertising and pricing principles are introduced and applied. Due to the size of available real-world data and complexity of the designed program, the presented model is linearized and uncertainty is handled by a robust optimization methodology. The model, data, and algorithm are implemented in MATLAB and Julia, using the state-of-the-art solvers. The computational result is a set of decisions providing a trade-off between the average performance and the immunization against the worst-case conditions. © 2019, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature

Electrification of Urban Waste Collection: Introducing a Simulation-Based Methodology for Feasibility, Impact and Cost Analysis

We introduce a multi-agent-based simulation methodology to investigate the feasibility and evaluate environmental and economic sustainability of an electrified urban waste collection. Electrification is a potential solution for transport decarbonization and already widely available for individual and public transport. However, the availability of electrified commercial vehicles like waste collection vehicles is still limited, despite their significant contribution to urban emissions. Moreover, there is a lack of clarity whether electric waste collection vehicles can persist in real word conditions and which system design is required. Therefore, we present a synthetic model for waste collection demand on a per-link basis, using open available data. The tour planning is solved by an open-source algorithm as a capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). This generates plausible tours which handle the demand. The generated tours are simulated with an open-source transport simulation (MATSim) for both the diesel and the electric waste collection vehicles. To compare the life cycle costs, we analyze the data using total cost of ownership (TCO). Environmental impacts are evaluated based on a Well-to-Wheel approach. We present a comparison of the two propulsion types for the exemplary use case of Berlin. And we are able to generate a suitable planning to handle Berlin’s waste collection demand using battery electric vehicles only. The TCO calculation reveals that the electrification raises the total operator cost by 16-30 %, depending on the scenario and the battery size with conservative assumptions. Furthermore, the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) can be reduced by 60-99%, depending on the carbon footprint of electric power generation.DFG, 398051144, Analyse von Strategien zur vollständigen Dekarbonisierung des urbanen Verkehr

Network modelling for road-based Faecal Sludge Management

Improvements in the collection and treatment of sewage are critical to reduce health and environmental hazards in rapidly-urbanising informal settlements. Where sewerage infrastructure is not available, road-based Fecal Sludge Management options are often the only alternative. However, the costs of fecal sludge transportation are often a barrier to their implementation and operation and thus it is desirable to optimise travel time from source to treatment to reduce costs. This paper presents a novel technique, employing spatial network analysis, to optimise the spatio-topological configuration of a road-based fecal sludge transportation network on the basis of travel time. Using crowd-sourced spatial data for the Kibera settlement and the surrounding city, Nairobi, a proof-of-concept network model was created simulating the transport of waste from the 158 public toilets within Kibera. The toilets are serviced by vacuum pump trucks which move fecal sludge to a transfer station from where a tanker transports waste to a treatment plant. The model was used to evaluate the efficiency of different network configurations, based on transportation time. The results show that the location of the transfer station is a critical factor in network optimisation, demonstrating the utility of network analysis as part of the sanitation planning process

Local Government Size and Efficiency in Capital Intensive Services: What Evidence is There of Economies of Scale, Density and Scope? Services: Evidence from Local Educational Authorities in England

No abstract is available for this item

MODELLING THE URBAN SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT BY USING FUZZY SETS

The sustainable urban development is a subject of interest for regional policy makers and it needs appropriate assessment based on futile instruments for research, and for practical reasonsl (planning and decision making). Even if the sustainability’s attainment is a research topic field for academia and urban planners and managers and, as well, an ambitious goal for any resource administrator, yet there is no precise way of defining and measuring it. The sustainability of the urban development policy implies multiple and diversified aspects from rational exploitation of the local resources and well-structured workforce to environmental issues, endowment of modern urban facilities and infrastructure elements. As the urban sustainability is measured using a multitude of basic indicators, needing proper information to make long term management decision and planning, the subject is treated with fuzzy setsseen as an appropriate manner to deal with ambiguity, subjectivity and imprecision in the human reasoning when processing large volumes of data, eventually unstructured and complex. The paper proposed a modeling approach based on fuzzy sets inspired by the SAFE (Sustainability Assessment by Fuzzy Evaluation), a model which provides a mechanism for measuring development sustainability. The papers intends presenting a quantitative methodology in assessing the potential sustainability of urban development (in terms of adequacy) by pointing the failures in pursuing trends that are associated to a robust growth in the urban areas. The advantages of such approach are derived from taking into account the multi-criteria and uncertainty facets of the phenomenon; also, having in mind that the sustainability remains a non-straight-cut concept, being vaguely defined it implies a non-deterministic character by using the fuzzy set logic. The proposed model is designed to assess the divergence from desired trajectories, the weak point in reaching indicators’ target (as they are commonly regardedd as appropriate in what is understood as a good practices), it may then be addressed for policy makers in indicating some action measures in urban administration as they intendenly strive towards increasingly sustainable development on the long term.sustainability, urban management, indicators, fuzzy approach.