Motion Hub, the implementation of an integrated end-to-end journey planner

© AET 2018 and contributorsThe term “eMobility” and been brought into use partly to encourage use of electric vehicles but more especially to focus on the transformation from electric vehicles as products to electrified personal transport as a service. Under the wider umbrella of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) this has accompanied the growth of car clubs in general. The Motion Hub project has taken this concept a step further to include not just the car journey but the end-to-end journey. The booking of multifaceted journeys is well established in the leisure and business travel industries, where flights, car hire and hotels are regularly booked with a single transaction on a website. To complete an end-to-end scenario Motion Hub provides integration of public transport with electric vehicle and electric bike use. Building on a previous InnovateUK funded project that reviewed the feasibility of an integrated journey management system, the Motion Hub project has brought together a Car Club, a University, and EV infrastructure company, a bicycle hire company with electric bicycle capabilities and a municipality to implement a scheme and test it on the ground. At the heart of the project has been the development of a website that integrates the public transport booking with the hire of electric vehicles or bicycles. Taking the implementation to a fully working system accessible to members of the public presents a number of significant challenges. This paper identifies those challenges, details the progress and success of the Motion Hub and sets out the lessons learnt about end-to-end travel. The project was fortunate to have as its municipal partner the Council of a sizeable South East England town, Southend-on-Sea. With a population of 174,800 residents with good road, rail and air links there is considerable traffic in and out of the town. The Council has already shown its commitment to sustainable transport. In the previous six years it had installed a number of electric vehicle charging points for use by the public and latterly had trialled car club activity. An early challenge in the project was the location of physical infrastructure in an already crowded municipal space in order to provide the local ‘spokes’ of the system. In addition to its existing charging points, Southend now has four locations where electric cars can be hired, five where electric bikes are available and the local resources to maintain these assets. Combining a number of web-based services and amalgamating their financial transactions is relatively straightforward. However, introducing the potential for public transport ticketing as well raises additional security, scale and financial constraints. The project has engaged with major players and regulators across the public transport industry.Peer reviewe

Modelling Scenarios for Low Carbon Heating Technologies in the Domestic Sector Towards a Circular Economy

The UK Government’s Net Zero strategy requires strong commitments to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change. The built environment puts major pressure on the natural environment, especially with space heating-related emissions; therefore, transitioning to a circular economy is vital. In this direction, the heat pump market in the UK has been growing gradually whereas the number is still low (43,000 units in 2021). The UK Government aims to reach 600,000 heat pump installations per year by 2028, and according to the Climate Change Committee (CCC), this number should reach 1 million by 2030. In order to accelerate the transition, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme (BUS) has been introduced to provide a £5,000 grant in the UK, and the Scottish Government granted Home Energy Scotland (HES) loan and cashback scheme providing a £7,500 grant and a £2,500 interest-free loan for heat pumps. Islands are facing environmental, economic and social pressure due to the lack of connection to the mainland and dependency on fossil fuel imports. Exploring the benefits of renewable energy and low carbon heating technologies is crucial to overcome these issues. Orkney has a huge potential for renewable energy by producing electricity more than its needs. Therefore, this study chooses Orkney as a case study to explore potential heat pump uptake scenarios in line with government targets towards Circular Economy (CE). The study aims to create a comprehensive holistic approach to evaluate the environmental, energy and economic impacts of heat pump deployment scenarios. The consequences of replacing conventional heating technologies with heat pumps have been assessed through (i) comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of heat pumps with gas boilers in UK houses, (ii) energy systems modelling (ESM) to optimise the performance of a heat pump coupled with thermal energy storage (TES) tank to reduce use phase related impacts in Orkney, (iii) building stock modelling (BSM) of Orkney’s domestic sector to understand the housing condition, (iv) economic modelling to analyse life cycle cost of an air source heat pump and potential savings when existing conventional heating systems are replaced with heat pumps in Orkney, and (v) heat pump diffusion model to quantify hourly electric load curves of variable heat pump operation optimised by the energy model. The integrated methodology creates a more holistic and life cycle-wide approach to both demand, supply and end-user side of the system; therefore, the results are illustrated in both individual house archetypes level to provide guidance to the end-users and at the Orkney level to calculate cumulative savings for the policymakers. The results show that the use phase is the major contributor to the environmental impacts; therefore, increasing the renewable share in the UK’s electricity mix could help to reduce negative impacts in most of the categories. However, the high deployment of wind farms also creates toxicity and metal depletion problems. The heat pump uptake scenarios in Orkney shows that 82% reductions in energy supply could be achieved when ambitious energy efficiency improvement measures are taken in the CE scenario. The use phase-related emissions could be reduced by 98% when the heat pump becomes the only heating technology in Orkney. However, the life cycle-wide approach suggests that strong commitments are required in the manufacturing stage of these technologies through implementing circular principles such as including the use of secondary materials, eco-design and reusability of all components. Moreover, a market introduction program should be provided before shifting from one technology to another so greener production lines could be achieved. Total heating costs paid by consumers in Orkney could be reduced by 84% in the CE scenario when heat pump uptake is coupled with energy efficiency improvement measures; however, it requires a £130 million investment to insulate the unrefurbished housing stock of Orkney. Therefore, subsidies and incentives are also required for efficiency improvements such as reductions in VAT on equipment and labour costs, grants similar to BUS/HES and interest-free loans for the remaining costs. Future scenarios indicate that decision-making has significant importance on overall results; therefore, CE standards for heat pump manufacturing and deployment are crucial to reduce the negative impacts of fuel poverty and reach the Net Zero target

Emotionalism within furniture design

This thesis explores the question: What are the significant emotional connections between consumers and their furniture, and how do designers engage with this? Due to the nature of the question it has been necessary to explore literature across various different faculties. Therefore the literature review covers a wide spectrum of research and methodologies exploring the significance of the psychological factors (especially emotions) in the designing and consuming of furniture. This has enabled the author to identify the main factors within the thesis; design, the consumer and emotions each are discussed in detail. The relationships and connections between each are also investigated. The research also identified that due to the various types on furniture available, only one could be evaluated for this thesis; therefore the branch of furniture studied is chairs. Using the research carried out, a methodology was created in order to carry out a practical exploratory chair study. This involved identifying five categories of chairs, and selecting one from each, and then staging a suitable environment to carry out the trial. Participants were then asked to interact with each chair, whilst at the same time answering an in-depth verbal questionnaire. The purpose of the trial was to establish if each of the chairs evoked any emotional connections to the participants and if so what types of emotion. The results of the trial were then analysed, from which conclusions were able to be deduced and a consequence of the study was discussed

Self-Supervised and Controlled Multi-Document Opinion Summarization

We address the problem of unsupervised abstractive summarization of collections of user generated reviews with self-supervision and control. We propose a self-supervised setup that considers an individual document as a target summary for a set of similar documents. This setting makes training simpler than previous approaches by relying only on standard log-likelihood loss. We address the problem of hallucinations through the use of control codes, to steer the generation towards more coherent and relevant summaries.Finally, we extend the Transformer architecture to allow for multiple reviews as input. Our benchmarks on two datasets against graph-based and recent neural abstractive unsupervised models show that our proposed method generates summaries with a superior quality and relevance.This is confirmed in our human evaluation which focuses explicitly on the faithfulness of generated summaries We also provide an ablation study, which shows the importance of the control setup in controlling hallucinations and achieve high sentiment and topic alignment of the summaries with the input reviews.Comment: 18 pages including 5 pages appendi

A Penny for Your Words: The Effect of Online Review Reward on Information Richness and Sentiment Expression

Since online customer review has significant impacts on customer\u27s purchase decision and product sales, it has been regarded as a new marketing tool nowadays. Moreover, some online transactional platforms and sellers are trying to encourage customers to provide reviews of high-quality by offering a reward. With the empirical analysis of 1044 samples from a famous C2C e-platform website, results show that reward can significantly improve the information richness of online customer reviews. However, the sentiment customer expressed remains unchanged. More specifically, customers are inclined to provide more information, specially opinionated and positive information. But customers are unlikely to conceal negative information or change their sentiment polarity and intensity

Focal Spot, Winter 1971

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1001/thumbnail.jp

Service users' experiences of a brief intervention service for children and adolescents : a service evaluation

Ten per cent of young people experience mental health difficulties at any one time. Prevention and early intervention leads to better prognosis for young people's mental well-being in the short and long term. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) must be able to provide swift and effective interventions for a range of difficulties to meet this need. This paper presents a service evaluation of the Brief Intervention Service in North Lincolnshire CAMHS. Nine young people and/or their families took part in semi-structured interviews that aimed to explore their experiences of receiving an intervention from the service. Template analysis was carried out to draw out themes from the interview transcripts. The three a priori themes were treatment outcomes, areas for potential improvement, and things that are working well; and an additional two emergent themes were emotional experience and managing practical barriers. In addition, all participants were asked about their satisfaction with the service and whether they would recommend the service to others. One hundred per cent reported feeling respected by their clinician when asked directly, and all felt that the service would be helpful for other young people and families. Overall, families were satisfied with the service and reported outcomes including improvements in symptomatology and family functioning. Specific recommendations as to how the service could be improved were made, which related to difficulties accessing the service, the content of the sessions, and communication within the service and with other services

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management