Selecting Indicators for Assessing Neighbourhood Sustainability:The Metropolitan Lagos Workflow

Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment Frameworks (NSAFs) are increasingly touted as crucial in planning and designing sustainable urban neighbourhoods. Ostensibly, NSAFs ensure that sustainability concerns are duly addressed following the recognition that neighbourhoods are key building blocks of urban areas. While the NSAF discourse has largely involved developed countries, the selection of appropriate indicators to use in an NSAF has remained a problem often because of little robust evidence to support the selected indicators. Also, as develoing countries are largely absent in this discourse, this paper presents an exemplar approach and workflow for selecting NSAF indicators for a Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) context. Positivist techniques (weighted average, co-efficiency of variation, and content validity in ratio) are used to rank the significance of the stakeholders’ indicated perceptions and preferences collected using questionnaire surveys from metropolitan Lagos. This paper’s significance lies in showcasing the robust methodological approach and sound evidence-base for selecting the indicators based on input form diaparate stakeholders: including data requirements and workflow that SSA countries can easily adopt

How to Select Knowledge Management Systems: A Framework to Support Managers

The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodological framework which could support managers in the selection of Knowledge Management Systems. The framework is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process approach. Several aspects should draw the attention of an organization’s upper level of management seeking to implement a Knowledge Management System and many specific issues have to be considered. As such, the framework has been built by making use of an ad‐hoc hierarchical structure, where each singular specificity is described and compared, second‐order criteria are studied and analysed, and optional decisions are highlighted and evaluated. This methodological framework offers a good applicability to different business contexts, since its hierarchical arrangement suits most of the needs of numerous organizations. Consequently, it can be regarded as a holistic approach able to assist decision makers in their Knowledge Management System selection process

Transdisciplinary Evaluation of Simulation Software for Industry 4.0 Assembly Lines

Industry 4.0 is driving the revolution of manufacturing processes by combining innovative technologies and new interaction paradigms among systems and operators. In particular, the layout, tasks and work sequences of assembly lines are designed according to several transdisciplinary Design Principles (DPs), such as process efficiency, product quality, ergonomics, safety and operators’ workload. A large variety of simulation software can be employed for evaluations. However, the related ability to assess multidisciplinary factors must be evaluated. The paper aims to provide a framework for guiding the assessment of simulation software in the context of Industry 4.0 assembly lines. Process requirements are first analyzed and mapped to select DPs, prioritized according to design goals by an analytical hierarchy process. Then, suitable simulation software is determined accordingly, and the virtual model is realized. Finally, the possibility of the software to provide meaningful elaborations for the selected DPs is assessed. The framework has been tested on a prototypal Industry 4.0 assembly line composed of automated logistic systems, cobots and systems to guide the execution of tasks. The line has been modeled in Siemens Process Simulate, analyzing the completeness and appropriateness of the functionalities of this software according to the defined DPs

Risk mitigation decisions for it security

Enterprises must manage their information risk as part of their larger operational risk management program. Managers must choose how to control for such information risk. This article defines the flow risk reduction problem and presents a formal model using a workflow framework. Three different control placement methods are introduced to solve the problem, and a comparative analysis is presented using a robust test set of 162 simulations. One year of simulated attacks is used to validate the quality of the solutions. We find that the math programming control placement method yields substantial improvements in terms of risk reduction and risk reduction on investment when compared to heuristics that would typically be used by managers to solve the problem. The contribution of this research is to provide managers with methods to substantially reduce information and security risks, while obtaining significantly better returns on their security investments. By using a workflow approach to control placement, which guides the manager to examine the entire infrastructure in a holistic manner, this research is unique in that it enables information risk to be examined strategically. © 2014 ACM