841 research outputs found

    Natural and Technological Hazards in Urban Areas

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    Natural hazard events and technological accidents are separate causes of environmental impacts. Natural hazards are physical phenomena active in geological times, whereas technological hazards result from actions or facilities created by humans. In our time, combined natural and man-made hazards have been induced. Overpopulation and urban development in areas prone to natural hazards increase the impact of natural disasters worldwide. Additionally, urban areas are frequently characterized by intense industrial activity and rapid, poorly planned growth that threatens the environment and degrades the quality of life. Therefore, proper urban planning is crucial to minimize fatalities and reduce the environmental and economic impacts that accompany both natural and technological hazardous events

    Applications of Genetic Algorithm and Its Variants in Rail Vehicle Systems: A Bibliometric Analysis and Comprehensive Review

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    Railway systems are time-varying and complex systems with nonlinear behaviors that require effective optimization techniques to achieve optimal performance. Evolutionary algorithms methods have emerged as a popular optimization technique in recent years due to their ability to handle complex, multi-objective issues of such systems. In this context, genetic algorithm (GA) as one of the powerful optimization techniques has been extensively used in the railway sector, and applied to various problems such as scheduling, routing, forecasting, design, maintenance, and allocation. This paper presents a review of the applications of GAs and their variants in the railway domain together with bibliometric analysis. The paper covers highly cited and recent studies that have employed GAs in the railway sector and discuss the challenges and opportunities of using GAs in railway optimization problems. Meanwhile, the most popular hybrid GAs as the combination of GA and other evolutionary algorithms methods such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), ant colony optimization (ACO), neural network (NN), fuzzy-logic control, etc with their dedicated application in the railway domain are discussed too. More than 250 publications are listed and classified to provide a comprehensive analysis and road map for experts and researchers in the field helping them to identify research gaps and opportunities

    Data ethics : building trust : how digital technologies can serve humanity

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    Data is the magic word of the 21st century. As oil in the 20th century and electricity in the 19th century: For citizens, data means support in daily life in almost all activities, from watch to laptop, from kitchen to car, from mobile phone to politics. For business and politics, data means power, dominance, winning the race. Data can be used for good and bad, for services and hacking, for medicine and arms race. How can we build trust in this complex and ambiguous data world? How can digital technologies serve humanity? The 45 articles in this book represent a broad range of ethical reflections and recommendations in eight sections: a) Values, Trust and Law, b) AI, Robots and Humans, c) Health and Neuroscience, d) Religions for Digital Justice, e) Farming, Business, Finance, f) Security, War, Peace, g) Data Governance, Geopolitics, h) Media, Education, Communication. The authors and institutions come from all continents. The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, business, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and building trust! The book is a continuation of the volume “Cyber Ethics 4.0” published in 2018 by the same editors

    Circular Economy and Sustainable Development: A Systematic Literature Review

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    Circular Economy put forth as an alternative to traditional linear model of extract-use-dispose along with the concept of Sustainable Development encompassing economic, environmental, and social aspects have garnered tremendous impetus among academics, practitioners and policymakers alike. The UN Sustainable Development Goals embraced by the member nations in 2015 based on the preceding Millenium Development Goals have been placed as the targets to be achieved as a part of holistic human development. In this backdrop, this paper examines the intersection of sustainability and circular economy with a focus on the three aspects of sustainable development, first the economic aspect by examining the relationship between GDP and circular economy, second the social economic aspect within the interaction of Circular Economy with Sustainable development and third the environmental-economical aspect by examining circularity and sustainability in waste management and waste valorisation. This paper achieves its objective through a systematic literature review of 1748 journal articles collected from Web of Science and SCOPUS database following PRISMA standards, network analysis of keywords, and manual review of texts. Four Research Questions are formulated: RQ1: What are the major emergent topics in Circular Economy and Sustainable Development and how are they related? RQ2: What is the relationship among CE and GDP in the CE and Sustainability? RQ3: What are the relationships between CE and Sustainability? RQ4: What are different use cases of valorisation of waste as CE tool, and can valorisation be sustainable? RQ1 is answered by presenting hotspot of research on Circular Economy and Sustainable Development through keywords occurrence network analysis using VosViewer. This study identifies three clusters and seven thematic areas of research, along with 25 most used keywords. RQ2 is attended through review of the relationship between economic growth (Gross Domestic Product) and Circular Economy and proposes based on the review that CE is still at its infancy. The paper also discusses the appropriateness of using GDP as a measure of sustainable development. This paper addresses RQ3 by examining the relationship between Circular Economy and Sustainable Development through review of literatures. The indicators used to measure CE and SD are also discussed and summarised. This review finds that achieving SDGs require greater effort, and that the present status of achievement is a bleak picture. Further, the role of waste management and potentiality of waste valorisation to aid in circular economy and sustainable development is analysed to answer RQ4. Though there are ample potential, however the recycle rate is very minimal to quench the required level of circularity. While CE and SD are related, CE cannot be a universal panacea to global challenges like emissions reduction, energy consumption, climate change, gender equality, poverty, well-being, environmental protection etc. even though the impact of CE to achieve SD can be substantial. The paper recommends avenues for future research and presents the conclusion of the study

    Effectual Urban Governance: The Effectuation of Cities for Systems Change Under Uncertainty

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    Three key drivers create the imperative for a new approach to urban governance. Firstly, scientists around the world agree that global ecological systems are at risk of collapse if current development trajectories continue. Secondly, decision-makers are facing a heightened level of uncertainty, due to factors including climate risk, ecosystem changes and geopolitical tensions – and since 2020, the COVID-19 global pandemic. And thirdly, given these complexities, current models of forecasting and prediction for strategic decision-making are increasingly constrained and unreliable, particularly for informing urban infrastructure governance decisions with multi-decade legacies. While urban infrastructure decision-makers find uncertainty challenging, for entrepreneurs uncertainty is the basis for opportunity. Entrepreneurs are agents of systems change, especially under conditions of heightened uncertainty. As a result, this thesis turns to the entrepreneurship domain to inform a new approach to urban governance, specifically the entrepreneurial decision-making logic of ‘effectuation’ developed by Saras Sarasvathy through her study of expert entrepreneurs’ approaches to new venture creation. Effectual urban governance includes establishing design principles, beginning with available means, establishing partnerships, and taking effectual action to iteratively increasing the structuration of innovations. In Part 1 - the thesis develops this model by reviewing and synthesizing the literature on sustainability transitions, urban governance, and entrepreneurship, with a historical analysis illustrating the role of entrepreneurship in industrial systems change. Building on a novel taxonomy of urban governance along the axes of uncertainty and systems change, the dynamic model of effectual urban governance combines entrepreneurship theory with sustainability transitions theory and is demonstrated through an illustrative civil infrastructure case study of the Willunga Basin Water Company informed by semi-structured research interviews. Part 2 of the thesis justifies the applicability of this model through focus on four key elements of effectual urban governance with application to urban transport, elaborating the theoretical rationale for each element and providing insights from effectuation literature and supporting complementary academic theories and research conducted during this thesis. In doing so, the thesis makes theoretical and practical contributions to urban governance and the development of civil infrastructure in the 21st century. At a time of heightened uncertainty, when global industrial and economic transformation to avert ecological collapse is imperative, this thesis begins a new conversation by demonstrating how adopting an entrepreneurial approach to civil infrastructure development can help government and civil actors proactively address the world’s shared and complex challenges. Effectual urban governance is this approach.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Architecture and Civil Engineering, 202

    New Concepts for Efficient Consumer Response in Retail Influenced by Emerging Technologies and Innovations

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    The retail industry is continuously confronted with new challenges and experiences a transformation from a supplier’s market to a buyer's market. It is, thus, essential for the retail industry to consequently focus on, anticipate and fulfil consumer’s demands. Technologies and innovative business solutions can help to support to establish a required customer experience and, thereby, gain a competitive advantage. A multitude of new services and products, channels as well as players can already be identified which drive the transformation. Therefore, retailers need to understand current trends and technologies and identify as well as implement relevant solutions for their transformation since otherwise, new players will dominate the market. Hence, this dissertation aims to review and analyse new technologies which are coupled with innovative business activities in order to provide customer-centric retailing. For this purpose, this dissertation consists of five articles and derives four major contributions which introduce different approaches to establishing consumer satisfaction. Firstly, a core technology for retail is artificial intelligence (AI) which can be meaningful applied along the entire value chain and improve retailers’ positions. Two focus areas have been identified in this context which are (i) the optimisation of the entire retail value chain with the help of AI with the aim to derive transparency and (ii) the improvement of consumer satisfaction and relationship. Secondly, focussing on the consumer-retailer relationship in the digital era, a concept with a data architecture is proposed based on a real use case. The outcome was that a specific customer orientation based on data can increase the brand value and sales volume. Thirdly, the work presents that new shopping concepts, named unmanned store concepts, gain continuous growth. Unmanned store concepts employ a variety of new technologies, are characterised by attributes of speed, ease, as well as comfort, and are deemed to be the new ideal of the expectations of modern buyers. Two different directions have been deeper analysed: (i) walk-in stores and (ii) automated vending machines. The critical success factors for the usage of unmanned store solutions are distance as well as high consumer affinity for innovations. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has a huge impact on retail, a continuous innovation capability still needs to be established. Finally, this work introduces a tool for systematic innovation management considering the current circumstances. Taken as a whole, this dissertation with its five articles deals with significant research questions which have not been approached so far. Thereby, the literature is extended by the introduction of novel insights and the provision of a deeper understanding of how retailers can transform their business into a more consumer-oriented way

    Near-Real Time, Semi-Automated Threat Assessment of Information Environments

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    Threat assessment is a crucial process for monitoring and defending against potential threats in an organization’s information environment and business operations. Ensuring the security of information infrastructure requires effective information security practices. However, existing models and methodologies often fall short of addressing the dynamic and evolving nature of cyberattacks. Moreover, critical threat intelligence extracted from the threat agents lacks the ability to capture essential attributes such as motivation, opportunity, and capability (M, O, C). This contribution to knowledge clarification introduces a semi-automatic threat assessment model that can handle situational awareness data or live acquired data stream from networks, incorporating information security techniques, protocols, and real-time monitoring of specific network types. Additionally, it focuses on analysing and implementing network traffic within a specific real-time information environment. To develop the semi-automatic threat assessment model, the study identifies unique attributes of threat agents by analysing Packet Capture Application Programming Interface (PCAP) files and data stream collected between 2012 and 2019. The study utilizes both hypothetical and real-world examples of threat agents to evaluate the three key factors: motivation, opportunity, and capability. This evaluation serves as a basis for designing threat profiles, critical threat intelligence, and assessing the complexity of process. These aspects are currently overlooked in existing threat agent taxonomies, models, and methodologies. By addressing the limitations of traditional threat assessment approaches, this research contributes to advancing the field of cybersecurity. The proposed semi-automatic threat assessment model offers improved awareness and timely detection of threats, providing organizations with a more robust defence against evolving cyberattacks. This research enhances the understanding of threat agents’ attributes and assists in developing proactive strategies to mitigate the risks associated with cybersecurity in the modern information environment

    Internet and Biometric Web Based Business Management Decision Support

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    Internet and Biometric Web Based Business Management Decision Support MICROBE MOOC material prepared under IO1/A5 Development of the MICROBE personalized MOOCs content and teaching materials Prepared by: A. Kaklauskas, A. Banaitis, I. Ubarte Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania Project No: 2020-1-LT01-KA203-07810
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