Eco‐Holonic 4.0 Circular Business Model to Conceptualize Sustainable Value Chain Towards Digital Transition

The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize a circular business model based on an Eco-Holonic Architecture, through the integration of circular economy and holonic principles. A conceptual model is developed to manage the complexity of integrating circular economy principles, digital transformation, and tools and frameworks for sustainability into business models. The proposed architecture is multilevel and multiscale in order to achieve the instantiation of the sustainable value chain in any territory. The architecture promotes the incorporation of circular economy and holonic principles into new circular business models. This integrated perspective of business model can support the design and upgrade of the manufacturing companies in their respective industrial sectors. The conceptual model proposed is based on activity theory that considers the interactions between technical and social systems and allows the mitigation of the metabolic rift that exists between natural and social metabolism. This study contributes to the existing literature on circular economy, circular business models and activity theory by considering holonic paradigm concerns, which have not been explored yet. This research also offers a unique holonic architecture of circular business model by considering different levels, relationships, dynamism and contextualization (territory) aspects

Governance and Creativity on Urban Regeneration Processes

Governance has become a central topic among policymakers. There is an international consensus that policymaking is evolving from a traditional top-down government approach towards a system of governing that focuses on engaging the citizens within an area (Cabus, 2003). New forms of governance targeting urban competitiveness are increasingly oriented to vertical (between lower and high levels of government and cooperation forms between entities and firms along the production chain) and horizontal (between firms or different municipalities or public and private entities) cooperation (OEDC, 2005). Based on a study research methodology, this article seeks to contribute to answer to the following research questions: i) what is the role of governance in the processes of urban regeneration?; ii) what is the role of governance in the development of creative processes for urban regeneration? and iii) what is the potential of governance to support urban regeneration strategies based on creativity and creative industries?Territorial governance, Creativity, Urban regeneration.

Knowledge Discovery in the SCADA Databases Used for the Municipal Power Supply System

This scientific paper delves into the problems related to the develop-ment of intellectual data analysis system that could support decision making to manage municipal power supply services. The management problems of mu-nicipal power supply system have been specified taking into consideration modern tendencies shown by new technologies that allow for an increase in the energy efficiency. The analysis findings of the system problems related to the integrated computer-aided control of the power supply for the city have been given. The consideration was given to the hierarchy-level management decom-position model. The objective task targeted at an increase in the energy effi-ciency to minimize expenditures and energy losses during the generation and transportation of energy carriers to the Consumer, the optimization of power consumption at the prescribed level of the reliability of pipelines and networks and the satisfaction of Consumers has been defined. To optimize the support of the decision making a new approach to the monitoring of engineering systems and technological processes related to the energy consumption and transporta-tion using the technologies of geospatial analysis and Knowledge Discovery in databases (KDD) has been proposed. The data acquisition for analytical prob-lems is realized in the wireless heterogeneous medium, which includes soft-touch VPN segments of ZigBee technology realizing the 6LoWPAN standard over the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and also the segments of the networks of cellu-lar communications. JBoss Application Server is used as a server-based plat-form for the operation of the tools used for the retrieval of data collected from sensor nodes, PLC and energy consumption record devices. The KDD tools are developed using Java Enterprise Edition platform and Spring and ORM Hiber-nate technologies

Managing ubiquitous eco cities: the role of urban telecommunication infrastructure networks and convergence technologies

A successful urban management system for a Ubiquitous Eco City requires an integrated approach. This integration includes bringing together economic, socio-cultural and urban development with a well orchestrated, transparent and open decision making mechanism and necessary infrastructure and technologies. Rapidly developing information and telecommunication technologies and their platforms in the late 20th Century improves urban management and enhances the quality of life and place. Telecommunication technologies provide an important base for monitoring and managing activities over wired, wireless or fibre-optic networks. Particularly technology convergence creates new ways in which the information and telecommunication technologies are used. The 21st Century is an era where information has converged, in which people are able to access a variety of services, including internet and location based services, through multi-functional devices such as mobile phones and provides opportunities in the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities. This paper discusses the recent developments in telecommunication networks and trends in convergence technologies and their implications on the management of Ubiquitous Eco Cities and how this technological shift is likely to be beneficial in improving the quality of life and place. The paper also introduces recent approaches on urban management systems, such as intelligent urban management systems, that are suitable for Ubiquitous Eco Cities

Decision Support System for Urbanization of the Northern Part of the Volga-Akhtuba Floodplain (Russia) on the Basis of Interdisciplinary Computer Modeling

There is a computer decision support system (CDSS) for urbanization of the northern part of the Volga-Akhtuba floodplain. This system includes subsystems of cognitive and game-theoretic analysis, geoinformation and hydrodynamic simulations. The paper presents the cognitive graph, two-level and three-level models of hierarchical games for the cases of uncontrolled and controlled development of the problem situation. We described the quantitative analysis of the effects of different strategies for the spatial distribution of the urbanized territories. For this reason we conducted the territory zoning according to the level of negative consequences of urbanization for various agents. In addition, we found an analytical solution for games with the linear dependence of the average flooded area on the urbanized area. We numerically computed a game equilibrium for dependences derived from the imitational geoinformation and hydrodynamic modeling of flooding. As the result, we showed that the transition to the three-level management system and the implementation of an optimal urbanization strategy minimize its negative consequences.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures; Conference: Creativity in Intelligent Technologies and Data Science. CIT&DS 201

The impact of resources on decision making

Decision making is a significant activity within industry and although much attention has been paid to the manner in which goals impact on how decision making is executed, there has been less focus on the impact decision making resources can have. This article describes an experiment that sought to provide greater insight into the impact that resources can have on how decision making is executed. Investigated variables included the experience levels of decision makers and the quality and availability of information resources. The experiment provided insights into the variety of impacts that resources can have upon decision making, manifested through the evolution of the approaches, methods, and processes used within it. The findings illustrated that there could be an impact on the decision-making process but not on the method or approach, the method and process but not the approach, or the approach, method, and process. In addition, resources were observed to have multiple impacts, which can emerge in different timescales. Given these findings, research is suggested into the development of resource-impact models that would describe the relationships existing between the decision-making activity and resources, together with the development of techniques for reasoning using these models. This would enhance the development of systems that could offer improved levels of decision support through managing the impact of resources on decision making

A framework for deriving semantic web services

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario

e-Report Generator Supporting Communications and Fieldwork: A Practical Case of Electrical Network Expansion Projects

In this piece of work we present a simple way to incorporate Geographical Information System tools that have been developed using open source software in order to help the different processes in the expansion of the electrical network. This is accomplished by developing a novel fieldwork tool that provides the user with automatically generated enriched e-reports that include information about every one of the involved private real estates in a specific project. These reports are an eco-friendly alternative to paper format, and can be accessed by clients using any kind of personal device with a minimal set of technical requirements

An agent-based fuzzy cognitive map approach to the strategic marketing planning for industrial firms

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Industrial Marketing Management. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2013 Elsevier B.V.Industrial marketing planning is a typical example of an unstructured decision making problem due to the large number of variables to consider and the uncertainty imposed on those variables. Although abundant studies identified barriers and facilitators of effective industrial marketing planning in practice, the literature still lacks practical tools and methods that marketing managers can use for the task. This paper applies fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) to industrial marketing planning. In particular, agent based inference method is proposed to overcome dynamic relationships, time lags, and reusability issues of FCM evaluation. MACOM simulator also is developed to help marketing managers conduct what-if scenarios to see the impacts of possible changes on the variables defined in an FCM that represents industrial marketing planning problem. The simulator is applied to an industrial marketing planning problem for a global software service company in South Korea. This study has practical implication as it supports marketing managers for industrial marketing planning that has large number of variables and their cause–effect relationships. It also contributes to FCM theory by providing an agent based method for the inference of FCM. Finally, MACOM also provides academics in the industrial marketing management discipline with a tool for developing and pre-verifying a conceptual model based on qualitative knowledge of marketing practitioners.Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (Korea