E-Learning tools for Public Awareness Programme Education in Disaster Risk Management: case study of the City of Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre

Disaster occurrence around the world has in the past few decades increased at an alarming rate necessitating an urgent need for mitigation strategies. As a result, research has indicated the usefulness of Information Communication Technology (ICT) in disaster risk management. Furthermore, ICT generally plays a critical role in all aspects of disaster risk management such as: early warning prediction; informing and circulating information relating to disasters to communities especially those at risk as promptly as possible and providing communication structures immediately after a disaster occurrence. As part of its planning and precautionary measures in responding to disasters, the City of Cape Town Disaster Risk Management Centre (CoCTDRMC) implements public awareness programmes across the city. The most acclaimed is an annual awareness programme especially for high school learners selected from various schools across the city. The learner participants are expected to act as change agents in their communities. In 2012, learners from twelve different schools across the city benefited from this programme. They were expected to educate families, friends, schoolmates and communities generally on the topical issues surrounding disaster risk management. This study uses a case study approach. Since the target audience of the programme is the youth, there is need to shift towards utilising ICT. The aim of this paper is to look at how eLearning as an ICT tool can be integrated in the implementation of Public Awareness Education Programme (PAEP), so as to target broader audience and create an increased capacity building across the City of Cape Town (CoCT). The examination considers providing tools that are accessible, dependable, resilient and flexible among the residents so as to reach the grassroots levels where communities are mostly affected. The paper considers a combination of tools so as to support behavioural change. Some of the research findings are that, the 2012 programme was very beneficial and successful. Henceforth there is need to target a broader audience, and although the CoCTDRMC does make use of some relevant ICTs, there is need for additional and upgraded technological resources. Also pertinent is the fact that eLearning can play a major role in making sure that a broader audience is reached if applied effectively. The findings of the research are of relevance to the CoCTDRMC and other municipalities across South Africa. The Centre for Innovative Educational and Communication Technologies (CIECT) at the University of the Western Cape can also use these findings to develop and implement an eLearning course for both employees of CoCTDRMC and other interested community members. This will guide them on how eLearning can assist in fostering a successful implementation of PAEP across the city.Web of Scienc

Resilience-oriented control and communication framework for cyber-physical microgrids

Climate change drives the energy supply transition from traditional fossil fuel-based power generation to renewable energy resources. This transition has been widely recognised as one of the most significant developing pathways promoting the decarbonisation process toward a zero-carbon and sustainable society. Rapidly developing renewables gradually dominate energy systems and promote the current energy supply system towards decentralisation and digitisation. The manifestation of decentralisation is at massive dispatchable energy resources, while the digitisation features strong cohesion and coherence between electrical power technologies and information and communication technologies (ICT). Massive dispatchable physical devices and cyber components are interdependent and coupled tightly as a cyber-physical energy supply system, while this cyber-physical energy supply system currently faces an increase of extreme weather (e.g., earthquake, flooding) and cyber-contingencies (e.g., cyberattacks) in the frequency, intensity, and duration. Hence, one major challenge is to find an appropriate cyber-physical solution to accommodate increasing renewables while enhancing power supply resilience. The main focus of this thesis is to blend centralised and decentralised frameworks to propose a collaboratively centralised-and-decentralised resilient control framework for energy systems i.e., networked microgrids (MGs) that can operate optimally in the normal condition while can mitigate simultaneous cyber-physical contingencies in the extreme condition. To achieve this, we investigate the concept of "cyber-physical resilience" including four phases, namely prevention/upgrade, resistance, adaption/mitigation, and recovery. Throughout these stages, we tackle different cyber-physical challenges under the concept of microgrid ranging from a centralised-to-decentralised transitional control framework coping with cyber-physical out of service, a cyber-resilient distributed control methodology for networked MGs, a UAV assisted post-contingency cyber-physical service restoration, to a fast-convergent distributed dynamic state estimation algorithm for a class of interconnected systems.Open Acces

A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing

Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives: resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journa

Relational quality: Managing trust in corporate alliances

The management literature has often argued that "trust" plays a key role in economic exchanges, particularly when one or another party is subject to the risk of opportunistic behaviour and incomplete monitoring, or when problems due to moral hazard or asymmetric information arise. These conditions are almost always present in the case of corporate alliances and joint ventures. We propose that one aspect of trust, what we call "relational quality", is fundamental to the maintenance of good working conditions in two-party alliances where past experience and the shadow of the future play important roles. Relying on a growing body of theory and a number of case studies, we develop a framework for thinking about trust in dynamic and practical terms. We conclude that a reservoir of relational quality exists in any such relationship, and that the level of trust implied in such a reservoir will not only influence whether and how future conflicts are resolved, but also is itself affected by the positive (or negative) resolution of such conflicts. Finally, we identify three elements that contribute to the relational quality reservoir in alliances: 1) the initial conditions surrounding the alliance formation; 2) the cumulative experience of the parties with each others' behaviours as the alliance unfolds; and 3) the impact that external events or behaviours outside the alliance's context have on the perceptions and attitudes the parties have about each other's trustworthiness. We conclude with some recommendations for more effective management of corporate alliances.corporate alliances; economic exchanges; monitoring;