Comparative life cycle assessment of lighting systems and road pavements in an Italian twin- tube road tunnel

This work calculates and discusses the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of four scenarios composed of two types of road pavements and two types of lighting systems to be built in an Italian twin-tube road tunnel. A 20-year time horizon is adopted to assess the burdens of construction and maintenance of both flexible and rigid pavements and high-pressure sodium (HPS) and lightemitting diode (LED) lamps, traffic, and switching on of lamps. All considered scenarios are comparable with each other in terms of technical performances, but significantly differ regarding their environmental consequences. The geometrical and technical characteristics of the examined scenarios comply with current Italian standards for highways. In all the examined cases, LCA is carried out according to the European standard, EN 15804, and includes 19 impact categories (IC). The analysis demonstrates that the use of more reflecting surface pavement materials (i.e., concrete vs. asphalt) and more performing lighting systems (i.e., LED vs. HPS) can effectively mitigate the deleterious burdens related to road construction, maintenance, and use. For most of the examined ICs, the most environment-friendly scenario has LED lamps and concrete pavement

Applying the Open Source Development Model to Knowledge Work

This paper introduces a distinction between two different types of information goods in order to analyse the processes governing the review and integration of multi-authored contributions to information goods such as those produced through collaborations using the Internet as well as modular information goods such as open source software. It is argued that these distinctions are important because they suggest different organisational arrangements for producing such information goods. This method of analysing the nature of the information goods is employed to examine different organisational arrangements using the analogy of collaboration for traditional publication to identify actors and processes. The analysis of 'contributors' is extended from authorship to collectors and researchers. The paper examines a small survey of the governance procedures employed in projects that employ open source methods for collecting various types of information. We noted the prime role of the recruitment process in the relative success of the examples that we examined (ODP, Wikipedia, Nupedia, MathLearning, VRoma, and Web of Life). For these 'collection' efforts, the role of hierarchy in editing and review of project submissions appears to be important than in open source communities and may be an impediment to recruitment and project development. A number of directions for further research are identified.open source software, collaboration, hierarchies, trust, teams, co-operation

SLAng: A language for defining service level agreements

Application or web services are increasingly being used across organisational boundaries. Moreover, new services are being introduced at the network and storage level. Languages to specify interfaces for such services have been researched and transferred into industrial practice. We investigate end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and highlight that QoS provision has multiple facets and requires complex agreements between network services, storage services and middleware services. We introduce SLAng, a language for defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that accommodates these needs. We illustrate how SLAng is used to specify QoS in a case study that uses a web services specification to support the processing of images across multiple domains and we evaluate our language based on it

Requirements traceability in model-driven development: Applying model and transformation conformance

The variety of design artifacts (models) produced in a model-driven design process results in an intricate relationship between requirements and the various models. This paper proposes a methodological framework that simplifies management of this relationship, which helps in assessing the quality of models, realizations and transformation specifications. Our framework is a basis for understanding requirements traceability in model-driven development, as well as for the design of tools that support requirements traceability in model-driven development processes. We propose a notion of conformance between application models which reduces the effort needed for assessment activities. We discuss how this notion of conformance can be integrated with model transformations

Environmental, human health and socio-economic effects of cement powders: The multicriteria analysis as decisional methodology

The attention to sustainability-related issues has grown fast in recent decades. The experience gained with these themes reveals the importance of considering this topic in the construction industry, which represents an important sector throughout the world. This work consists on conducting a multicriteria analysis of four cement powders, with the objective of calculating and analysing the environmental, human health and socio-economic effects of their production processes. The economic, technical, environmental and safety performances of the examined powders result from official, both internal and public, documents prepared by the producers. The Analytic Hierarchy Process permitted to consider several indicators (i.e., environmental, human health related and socio-economic parameters) and to conduct comprehensive and unbiased analyses which gave the best, most sustainable cement powder. As assumed in this study, the contribution of each considered parameter to the overall sustainability has a different incidence, therefore the procedure could be used to support on-going sustainability efforts under different conditions. The results also prove that it is not appropriate to regard only one parameter to identify the ‘best’ cement powder, but several impact categories should be considered and analysed if there is an interest for pursuing different, often conflicting interests

Exploration of a novel bootstrap technique for estimating the distribution of outstanding claims reserves in general insurance

This is a report on an exploration of the effectiveness of a novel non-parametric bootstrap method for estimating claims reserves, which we call the local chain ladder bootstrap technique. The method is simple and can readily be implemented in a spreadsheet. In addition analytic estimates of the first few moments of reserves are shown to the readily evaluated, obviating the need for simulation if desired. The behaviour of the method on three datasets is presented and compared to published predictions of some other stochastic methods. In addition, a small study of the method using simulated claims triangles is presented and compared with other stochastic models

A common reference model for environmental science research infrastructures

Independent development of research infrastructures leads to unnecessary replication of technologies and solutions whilst the lack of standard definitions makes it difficult to relate experiences in one infrastructure with those of oth-ers. The ENVRI Reference Model, www.envri.eu/rm, uses the Open Distributed Processing standard framework in order to model the "archetypical" environmental research infrastructure. The use of the ENVRI-RM to illustrate common characteristics of European ESFRI environmental infrastructures from a number of different perspectives provides a common language for and understanding of environmental research infrastructures, promote technology and solution sharing between infrastructures, and improve interoperability between implemented services

Ontology Analysis Based on Ontology Design Patterns

The so-called Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs), which have been defined as solutions to ontological design problems, are of great help to developers when modelling ontologies since these patterns provide a development guide and improve the quality of the resulting ontologies. However, it has been demonstrated that, in many cases, developers encounter difficulties when they have to reuse ontology design patterns and include errors in the modelling. Thus, to avoid errors in ontology modelling, this paper proposes classifying errors into two types: (1) errors related to existing ODPs, called anti-patterns, and (2) errors not related to existing ODPs, called worst practices. This classification is the result of analysing a set of ontologies which come from an academic experiment. In addition, the paper presents a general classification of the worst practices found and a set of worst practice examples. Finally, the paper shows an example of how the aforementioned worst practices could be related among them