Aligning technological and institutional change: maritime transport in West Mediterranean Sea

Within the area of study of infrastructure, various works have addressed the issue of the development of technological and institutional systems of network industries. In a dynamic perspective, issues arise about how technology and institutions co-evolve, what stimulates improvement of infrastructure performance, and how formal institutions should be designed in order to facilitate technological and institutional co-evolution. Building on the coherence framework for performance in network industries, this study aims to contribute to the development of an improved theory of technological and institutional change in network industries. The theoretical developments are illustrated through the case of technological and institutional changes of the maritime transport industry in West Mediterranean Sea. The results suggest that more attention should be placed on the variety of private and public dimensions of performance of the network industry and by the mutual interaction between status quo conditions in the technological and institutional systems

A comparative history of Department of Defense Management reform from 1947 to 2005

MBA Professional ReportThe purpose of this MBA Project is to document and analyze the history of management reform within the Department of Defense from 1947 through the present day based on the annual reports of the Secretaries of Defense to the Congress. Since its inception in 1947, the Department of Defense has undergone nearly constant management reforms. It appears that each administration attempts to introduce some type of management reform agenda to improve the Department of Defense business processes and incorporate recent management ideas from the business community. Some of the changes are real and significant; others are changes in name only. Through analysis of annual reports of the Secretaries of Defense, a compilation of significant management reforms was created for each secretary. These reforms were analyzed and compared to one another to identify both general trends and truly unique changes in management practices. Ultimately, this analysis will help distinguish the relative significance in the management reform effort of both the individual secretaries and the specific reform initiatives.http://archive.org/details/acomparativehist1094510068US Marine Corps (USMC) authors.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Smart Manufacturing

This book is a collection of 11 articles that are published in the corresponding Machines Special Issue “Smart Manufacturing”. It represents the quality, breadth and depth of the most updated study in smart manufacturing (SM); in particular, digital technologies are deployed to enhance system smartness by (1) empowering physical resources in production, (2) utilizing virtual and dynamic assets over the Internet to expand system capabilities, (3) supporting data-driven decision-making activities at various domains and levels of businesses, or (4) reconfiguring systems to adapt to changes and uncertainties. System smartness can be evaluated by one or a combination of performance metrics such as degree of automation, cost-effectiveness, leanness, robustness, flexibility, adaptability, sustainability, and resilience. This book features, firstly, the concepts digital triad (DT-II) and Internet of digital triad things (IoDTT), proposed to deal with the complexity, dynamics, and scalability of complex systems simultaneously. This book also features a comprehensive survey of the applications of digital technologies in space instruments; a systematic literature search method is used to investigate the impact of product design and innovation on the development of space instruments. In addition, the survey provides important information and critical considerations for using cutting edge digital technologies in designing and manufacturing space instruments

Supply Chain

Traditionally supply chain management has meant factories, assembly lines, warehouses, transportation vehicles, and time sheets. Modern supply chain management is a highly complex, multidimensional problem set with virtually endless number of variables for optimization. An Internet enabled supply chain may have just-in-time delivery, precise inventory visibility, and up-to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities. Technology advances have enabled supply chains to become strategic weapons that can help avoid disasters, lower costs, and make money. From internal enterprise processes to external business transactions with suppliers, transporters, channels and end-users marks the wide range of challenges researchers have to handle. The aim of this book is at revealing and illustrating this diversity in terms of scientific and theoretical fundamentals, prevailing concepts as well as current practical applications

Advances in the Convergence of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence

Blockchain (BC) and artificial intelligence (AI) are currently two of the hottest computer science topics and their future seems bright. However, their convergence is not straightforward, and more research is needed in both fields. Thus, this book presents some of the latest advances in the convergence of BC and AI, gives useful guidelines for future researchers on how BC can help AI and how AI can become smarter, thanks to the use of BC. This book specifically analyzes the past of BC through the history of Bitcoin and then looks into the future: from massive internet-of-things (IoT) deployments, to the so-called metaverse, and to the next generation of AI-powered BC-based cyber secured applications

What if we could travel without passport? First sight to blockchain-based identity management in tourism

Blockchain technology, as a distributed digital ledger, enables users to control their credentials without being breached by third parties. From a tourism perspective, it allows tourists to pass through checkpoints and/or bookings without waiting and having to go through third-party transactions. Hence, this paper aims to discuss traditional identity management (IdM) system challenges and what blockchain might offer as a counterpoint to conventional travel experiences within th

From printed to "wikified" encyclopedias: sociological aspects of an incipient cultural revolution

1. Introductory remarks; 2. The new "asymmetric competition" between open source networks and conventional bureaucratic organizations; 3. The Wikipedia as an encyclopedic project; 4. “Wikis” as tools for focused and cumulative intellectual productions; 5. Six Dimensions of WP growth and evolution; 5.1 Worldwide multilingual diffusion; 5.2 Staff expansion; 5.3 Diversification; 5.4 Elaboration; 5.5. Increases in internal cohesion; 5.6. External Embedment; 6. On the potentials and limits of wiki-based open source encyclopedias: some preliminary conclusions after six years of experience; 6.1 Free self-recruitment of collaborators; 6.2 Extensive and efficient exploitation of intrinsic motivations; 6.3 Low needs for capital and organization; 6.4 Multicultural segmentation; 6.5 Flexible polymorphic organization; 6.6 Community embedment; 6.7 Keeping pace with current events and discoveries; 6.8 Changing usage patterns and user roles; 6.9 Public visibility of production processes and resilient adaptation; 5.10 Unguided incrementalism and unplanned “memetic evolution”; 6.11 "WP-Notability" as a new digital divide; 7. Conclusive remarks; Reference

Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

This book presents the collection of fifty two papers which were presented on the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY ’08 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments, held in Ofir, Portugal, from 25th to 27th of June, 2008. The main motive of the meeting was the growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily the companies and their businesses. From this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Concerning the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participativeness, the Conference Organisation provided the broadcasting over Internet of the Conference sessions, dialogical and formal presentations, for all authors’ and participants’ institutions, as an innovative Conference feature. In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 97 authors from 10 countries, namely from Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Sweden and United Kingdom. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope and would like that this book will be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the second of which is planned for year 2011.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Risk Assessment and Collaborative Information Awareness for Plan Execution

Joint organizational planning and plan execution in risk-prone environment, has seen renewed research interest given its potential for agility and cost reduction. The participants are often asked to quickly plan and execute tasks in partially known or hostile environments. This requires advanced decision support systems for situational response whereby state-of-the-art technologies can be used to handle issues such as plan risk assessment, appropriate information exchange, asset localization and adaptive planning with risk mitigation. Toward this end, this thesis contributes innovative approaches to address these issues, focusing on logistic support over risk-prone transport network as many organizational plans have key logistic components. Plan risk assessment involves property evaluation for vehicle risk exposure, cost bounds and contingency options assessment. Appropriate information exchange involves participant specific shared information awareness under unreliable communication. Asset localization mandates efficient sensor network management. Adaptive planning with risk mitigation entails limited risk exposure replanning, factoring potential vehicle and cargo loss. In this pursuit, this thesis first investigates risk assessment for asset movement and contingency valuation using probabilistic model-checking and decision trees, followed by elaborating a gossip based protocol for hierarchy-aware shared information awareness, also assessed via probabilistic model-checking. Then, the thesis proposes an evolutionary learning heuristic for efficiently managing sensor networks constrained in terms of sensor range, capacity and energy use. Finally, the thesis presents a learning based heuristic for cost effective adaptive logistic planning with risk mitigation. Instructive case studies are also provided for each contribution along with benchmark results evaluating the performance of the proposed heuristic techniques