Ecology-based planning. Italian and French experimentations

This paper examines some French and Italian experimentations of green infrastructures’ (GI) construction in relation to their techniques and methodologies. The construction of a multifunctional green infrastructure can lead to the generation of a number of relevant bene fi ts able to face the increasing challenges of climate change and resilience (for example, social, ecological and environmental through the recognition of the concept of ecosystem services) and could ease the achievement of a performance-based approach. This approach, differently from the traditional prescriptive one, helps to attain a better and more fl exible land-use integration. In both countries, GI play an important role in contrasting land take and, for their adaptive and cross-scale nature, they help to generate a res ilient approach to urban plans and projects. Due to their fl exible and site-based nature, GI can be adapted, even if through different methodologies and approaches, both to urban and extra-urban contexts. On one hand, France, through its strong national policy on ecological networks, recognizes them as one of the major planning strategies toward a more sustainable development of territories; on the other hand, Italy has no national policy and Regions still have a hard time integrating them in already existing planning tools. In this perspective, Italian experimentations on GI construction appear to be a simple and sporadic add-on of urban and regional plans

Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202

プレイス・ブランディングの開発を目的としたソーシャルネットワークデータを介した公園訪問者の認識調査に関する研究

Place branding refers to the development of brands for geographical locations. City of Bandung Indonesia has its own approach to build city\u27s image. This city creates its image trough the development of public city parks to the thematic park concept. The provision of thematic park become a key attraction at the city service scale and provide entertainment and recreation for urban communities through their new physical design and attractive facilities. Therefore, assessments on the perceptions of parks\u27 visitors are needed to determine if the parks are well-known to the wider community. The assessment can also be utilized to measure to what extent the influence of thematic parks for place branding. Social networks data by online reviews is used to identify whether a certain branding is successful or not by looking at the user\u27s opinion. The aims of this study are to investigate parks visitors\u27 perceptions using social networks data to develop place branding and to evaluate if the existing parks correlates to other determinant factors in the place branding. Study found that, social network data shows great promise in assessing visitors\u27 perceptions. Assessments provide an overview of the attractiveness of thematic parks and how they are known to wider community as a type of place branding for the city of Bandung.北九州市立大

The role of recruitment, training and development in achieving employees' effectiveness in the banking sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Employees’ effectiveness is a long-term goal for organisations that seek to succeed and continue in the business world, which has become since the last decade of the twentieth century a world where there is no place except for the strong, because of intense competition on the local and international levels. This position has been imposed on business organisations by many factors, headed by globalization, economic and cultural openness and the global financial crisis.Human capital as a key success factor of business organisations receives the greatest attention especially in service organisations such as hospitals, universities, banks, restaurants etc. This is because the customer does not purchase a commodity directly, but receives goods as a supplement to the service. Therefore, customers are likely to assess the benefit they received through dealing with a certain organisation to get the service, and paying the cost of these benefits.Banks, as service organisations, rely on effective staff to achieving their strategic goals in terms of competitive advantage, customer service and achieving customer satisfaction through providing a high quality of banking services in an attractive manner. Therefore, the main challenge that faces human resource management is how to practise the related activities in order to gain the most effective employees. The main objective of this thesis is to identify the role of the HRM activities, recruitment and training methods, and employees' development, in achieving employees' effectiveness in Saudi banks. When studying a social phenomenon, focus often exceeds the known variables, to include cultural factors dominant in the research society, and because this study concerns the banking sector in Saudi Arabia, which is governed by Islamic culture, cultural factors will have important effects on HRM activities, especially, recruitment and training in terms of the prevalence of nepotism and cronyism in employment affairs. Therefore, the variables of this study comprised employees' recruitment and employees’ training and development, in addition to social culture and business culture as independent variables, and employees’ effectiveness as the output variable. This study was conducted upon a sample of four banks (two national banks, and two foreign banks) operating in Riyadh city. Data was collected from 512 employees, via a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with senior officials in HR departments in the four banks. The results of qualitative data analysis were fully consistent with the results of analysing quantitative data. The findings showed that the best strategy for employees’ recruitment is one based on using multiple methods of recruitment from all sources. Recruiting employees through coordination with universities was ranked first among recruitment methods, although it can be considered as response to the Saudization Policy, and simulation-based training is the most common in Saudi banks, ranking first among training methods

Resident Perspectives of the Resident-Tourist Relationship: Examining Tourist Attractiveness and Social Determinants Affecting Jeju Residents’ Satisfaction and Commitment towards Chinese Tourists

Successful tourism is based on a good relationship between tourists and the residents. To date, the resident-tourist relationship has been understood through two major approaches. The studies emphasizing the industrial aspects of tourism consider tourists as customers who bring economic benefits to a destination, while seeing residents as beneficiaries of the tourists’ expenditure during their trip. Other studies that see the resident-tourist relationship in terms of a host-guest relationship assume that residents, as hosts, should treat their guests with respect, while disregarding the industrial aspects of tourism. These two approaches have amplified the skewed and incomplete understanding of the resident-tourist relationship, while disregarding the importance of reciprocity and the merchandized purpose of the exchanges in this relationship. This dissertation explored the resident perspective in the resident-tourist relationship throughout three journal articles using a case study of Jeju Island, South Korea. In Study One, the concepts of tourist attractiveness, resident satisfaction, and resident commitment were explored and operated through a mixed-method approach in order to examine the resident perception of tourists and their attitude towards relationships with tourists. This study posited that tourist attractiveness includes five sub-dimensions: tourist familiarity, tourist financial capacity, tourist responsibility, positive tourist influence, and negative tourist influence. Using the constructs established in Study One, Study Two examined the relationship among the variables in order to examine the mechanism of residents’ sequential decision making process in the resident-tourist relationship: how their perception of and their relationship with tourists predict their reactions. The structural equation model (SEM) showed the statistically significant relationships between the variables, indicating tourist attractiveness is a crucial predictor of resident satisfaction with relationships with tourists and resident satisfaction leads to resident commitment to a future relationship with tourists. Study Three adopted and operated a theoretical framework of the social determinants suggested by Urry (2002) in order to explore the social-contextual factors influencing the resident-tourist relationship. Of the nine determinants of the original framework, seven remained after the purification of the factors: ratio of tourist to resident; tourist’s level of involvement in tourist attractions; organization of the tourism industry (primary and second industry; tertiary industry); economic and social differences; needs of standard services (restaurant and food service; travel service); tourism-friendly government and policies; and the extent to which tourists are blamed for local problems. In addition, the SEM analysis of the seven dimensions showed that six of these social determinants — the exception being tourism-friendly government and policy — had significant influences on the resident-tourist relationship. The approach used in this research is consistent with the sustainable tourism paradigm, which emphasizes community participation as a way to express the needs of residents as well as to improve tourist satisfaction, given that the resident is part of the tourist experience and an important stakeholder. These studies also provided an opportunity to rethink our traditional understanding of the relationship between residents and tourists, one that has often been described in terms of a host-guest relationship, by reminding us that it is business-like relationship pursuing rewards or benefits from each other

Environmental and territorial modelling for planning and design

Between 5th and 8th September 2018 the tenth edition of the INPUT conference took place in Viterbo, guests of the beautiful setting of the University of Tuscia and its DAFNE Department. INPUT is managed by an informal group of Italian academic researchers working in many fields related to the exploitation of informatics in planning. This Tenth Edition pursed multiple objectives with a holistic, boundary-less character, to face the complexity of today socio-ecological systems following a systemic approach aimed to problem solving. In particular, the Conference will aim to present the state of art of modeling approaches employed in urban and territorial planning in national and international contexts. Moreover, the conference has hosted a Geodesign workshop, by Carl Steinitz (Harvard Graduate School of Design) and Hrishi Ballal (on skype), Tess Canfield, Michele Campagna. Finally, on the last day of the conference, took place the QGIS hackfest, in which over 20 free software developers from all over Italy discussed the latest news and updates from the QGIS network. The acronym INPUT was born as INformatics for Urban and Regional Planning. In the transition to graphics, unintentionally, the first term was transformed into “Innovation”, with a fine example of serendipity, in which a small mistake turns into something new and intriguing. The opportunity is taken to propose to the organizers and the scientific committee of the next appointment to formalize this change of the acronym. This 10th edition was focused on Environmental and Territorial Modeling for planning and design. It has been considered a fundamental theme, especially in relation to the issue of environmental sustainability, which requires a rigorous and in-depth analysis of processes, a theme which can be satisfied by the territorial information systems and, above all, by modeling simulation of processes. In this topic, models are useful with the managerial approach, to highlight the many aspects of complex city and landscape systems. In consequence, their use must be deeply critical, not for rigid forecasts, but as an aid to the management decisions of complex systems

Applications of biased-randomized algorithms and simheuristics in integrated logistics

Transportation and logistics (T&L) activities play a vital role in the development of many businesses from different industries. With the increasing number of people living in urban areas, the expansion of on-demand economy and e-commerce activities, the number of services from transportation and delivery has considerably increased. Consequently, several urban problems have been potentialized, such as traffic congestion and pollution. Several related problems can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem (COP). Since most of them are NP-Hard, the finding of optimal solutions through exact solution methods is often impractical in a reasonable amount of time. In realistic settings, the increasing need for 'instant' decision-making further refutes their use in real life. Under these circumstances, this thesis aims at: (i) identifying realistic COPs from different industries; (ii) developing different classes of approximate solution approaches to solve the identified T&L problems; (iii) conducting a series of computational experiments to validate and measure the performance of the developed approaches. The novel concept of 'agile optimization' is introduced, which refers to the combination of biased-randomized heuristics with parallel computing to deal with real-time decision-making.Las actividades de transporte y logística (T&L) juegan un papel vital en el desarrollo de muchas empresas de diferentes industrias. Con el creciente número de personas que viven en áreas urbanas, la expansión de la economía a lacarta y las actividades de comercio electrónico, el número de servicios de transporte y entrega ha aumentado considerablemente. En consecuencia, se han potencializado varios problemas urbanos, como la congestión del tráfico y la contaminación. Varios problemas relacionados pueden formularse como un problema de optimización combinatoria (COP). Dado que la mayoría de ellos son NP-Hard, la búsqueda de soluciones óptimas a través de métodos de solución exactos a menudo no es práctico en un período de tiempo razonable. En entornos realistas, la creciente necesidad de una toma de decisiones "instantánea" refuta aún más su uso en la vida real. En estas circunstancias, esta tesis tiene como objetivo: (i) identificar COP realistas de diferentes industrias; (ii) desarrollar diferentes clases de enfoques de solución aproximada para resolver los problemas de T&L identificados; (iii) realizar una serie de experimentos computacionales para validar y medir el desempeño de los enfoques desarrollados. Se introduce el nuevo concepto de optimización ágil, que se refiere a la combinación de heurísticas aleatorias sesgadas con computación paralela para hacer frente a la toma de decisiones en tiempo real.Les activitats de transport i logística (T&L) tenen un paper vital en el desenvolupament de moltes empreses de diferents indústries. Amb l'augment del nombre de persones que viuen a les zones urbanes, l'expansió de l'economia a la carta i les activitats de comerç electrònic, el nombre de serveis del transport i el lliurament ha augmentat considerablement. En conseqüència, s'han potencialitzat diversos problemes urbans, com ara la congestió del trànsit i la contaminació. Es poden formular diversos problemes relacionats com a problema d'optimització combinatòria (COP). Com que la majoria són NP-Hard, la recerca de solucions òptimes mitjançant mètodes de solució exactes sovint no és pràctica en un temps raonable. En entorns realistes, la creixent necessitat de prendre decisions "instantànies" refuta encara més el seu ús a la vida real. En aquestes circumstàncies, aquesta tesi té com a objectiu: (i) identificar COP realistes de diferents indústries; (ii) desenvolupar diferents classes d'aproximacions aproximades a la solució per resoldre els problemes identificats de T&L; (iii) la realització d'una sèrie d'experiments computacionals per validar i mesurar el rendiment dels enfocaments desenvolupats. S'introdueix el nou concepte d'optimització àgil, que fa referència a la combinació d'heurístiques esbiaixades i aleatòries amb informàtica paral·lela per fer front a la presa de decisions en temps real.Tecnologies de la informació i de xarxe

Environmental and territorial modelling for planning and design

[English]: Between 5th and 8th September 2018 the tenth edition of the INPUT conference took place in Viterbo, guests of the beautiful setting of the University of Tuscia and its DAFNE Department. INPUT is managed by an informal group of Italian academic researchers working in many fields related to the exploitation of informatics in planning. This Tenth Edition pursed multiple objectives with a holistic, boundary-less character, to face the complexity of today socio-ecological systems following a systemic approach aimed to problem solving. In particular, the Conference will aim to present the state of art of modeling approaches employed in urban and territorial planning in national and international contexts. Moreover, the conference has hosted a Geodesign workshop, by Carl Steinitz (Harvard Graduate School of Design) and Hrishi Ballal (on skype), Tess Canfield, Michele Campagna. Finally, on the last day of the conference, took place the QGIS hackfest, in which over 20 free software developers from all over Italy discussed the latest news and updates from the QGIS network. The acronym INPUT was born as INformatics for Urban and Regional Planning. In the transition to graphics, unintentionally, the first term was transformed into “Innovation”, with a fine example of serendipity, in which a small mistake turns into something new and intriguing. The opportunity is taken to propose to the organizers and the scientific committee of the next appointment to formalize this change of the acronym. This 10th edition was focused on Environmental and Territorial Modeling for planning and design. It has been considered a fundamental theme, especially in relation to the issue of environmental sustainability, which requires a rigorous and in-depth analysis of processes, a theme which can be satisfied by the territorial information systems and, above all, by modeling simulation of processes. In this topic, models are useful with the managerial approach, to highlight the many aspects of complex city and landscape systems. In consequence, their use must be deeply critical, not for rigid forecasts, but as an aid to the management decisions of complex systems.[Italiano]:Dal 5 all’8 settembre 2018 l’Università della Tuscia e il Dipartimento di Scienze Agrarie e Forestali - DAFNE hanno ospitato la decima edizione del Congresso Internazionale INPUT. INPUT è un gruppo informale di ricercatori accademici italiani che operano in molti settori connessi all’uso dell’informatica nella pianificazione. Questa decima edizione del Congresso ha perseguito obiettivi multipli con un carattere olistico, senza confini, per affrontare la complessità degli attuali sistemi socio-ecologici seguendo un approccio sistemico finalizzato alla risoluzione dei problemi. In particolare, la conferenza è stata orientata a presentare lo stato dell'arte degli approcci di modellazione impiegati nella pianificazione urbana e territoriale in contesti nazionali e internazionali. Inoltre, la conferenza ha ospitato un seminario di Geodesign, di Carl Steinitz (Harvard Graduate School of Design) e Hrishi Ballal (via skype), Tess Canfield e Michele Campagna. Infine, l'ultimo giorno della conferenza, si è svolto l’hackfest di QGIS, in cui oltre 20 sviluppatori di software open source provenienti da tutta Italia hanno discusso le ultime novità e gli aggiornamenti dalla rete QGIS. L'acronimo “INPUT” è nato come “INformatics per Urban and Regional Planning”. Nella transizione alla grafica, involontariamente, il primo termine è stato trasformato in "Innovazione", con un bell'esempio di serendipità, in cui un piccolo errore si trasforma in qualcosa di nuovo e intrigante