The EDEM methodology for housing upgrade analysis, carbon and energy labelling and national policy development

The ESRU Domestic Energy Model (EDEM) has been developed in response to demand from policy makers for a tool to assist in analysis of options for improving carbon and energy performance of housing across a range of possible future technologies, behaviours and environmental factors. A major challenge is to comprehend the large variation in fabric, systems (heating, hot water, lighting and appliances) and behaviours across the housing stock as well as uncertainty over future trends. Existing static models have limited ability to represent dynamic behaviour while use of detailed simulation has been based on modelling only a small number of representative designs. To address these challenges, EDEM has been developed as an easy to use, Web based tool, built on detailed simulation models aligned with national house survey data. From pragmatic inputs, EDEM can determine energy use and carbon emissions at any scale, from individual dwelling to national housing stock. EDEM was used at the behest of the Scottish Building Standards Agency and South Ayrshire Council to quantify the impact of upgrades including new and renewable energy systems. EDEM was also used to rate energy/carbon performance of dwellings as required by the EU Directive (EU, 2002). This paper describes the evolving EDEM methodology, its structure and operation then presents findings from applications. While initial EDEM projects have been for the Scottish housing stock the methodology is structured to facilitate project development and application to other countries

Keys to effective transit strategies for commuting

Commuting poses relevant challenges to cities\u2019 transport systems. Various studies have identified transit as a tool to enhance sustainability, efficiency and quality of the commute. The scope of this paper is to present strategies that increase public transport attractiveness and positively impact its modal share, looking at some case studies and underlining key success factors and possible elements of replica to be ultimately planned in some of the contexts of the Interreg project SMART-COMMUTING. The strategies analyzed in this paper concern prices and fares, service expansion, service improvements, usage of vehicle locators and other technology, changes to the built environment. Relevant gains in transit modal share are more easily achievable when considering integrations between various strategies, thus adapting and tailoring the planning process to the specific context

NEAR SHORING IT-ENABLED SERVICES IN AN ENLARGED EUROPE

The aim of the paper is to explore the potential for off shoring IT-enabled services among traditional (EU15) and new Member States of the EU, including Romania. First, issues related to the theoretical background of the off shoring phenomenon are addressed. The second part of the paper includes the assessment of EU15 - CEECs (Central and Eastern European countries) trade and FDI in e-tradable services. In the final section, potential factors that could explain the preference of the EU15 to offshore services to the CEECs, especially Romania, are considered, as well as the challenges of off shoring for the enlarged EU.IT-enabled services, e-tradable services, near shoring, off shoring, Central and Eastern European countries, EU15

Measuring the Economic Impact of High Speed Rail Construction for California and the Central Valley Region

The nation’s first high-speed rail project is under construction in California’s Central Valley as of the date of this report. This research analyzes the immediate economic impacts, focused on employment and spending generated by California High-Speed Rail (HSR) Construction Package 1 (CP1) in the Central Valley and the rest of California. The authors use a two-pronged approach that combines original economic analysis and modeling with case study vignettes that explore the economic impacts through the lens of a sample of businesses and individuals directly impacted by this phase of HSR development. Overall, the economic analysis suggests that CP1-related spending (forecasted through to 2019) will lead to more than 31,500 additional jobs (both part-time and full-time) by the year 2029. Growth is concentrated in Fresno County, with the number of additional jobs estimated at more than 15,500. The analysis considers job growth across a number of alternative scenarios, converting the raw jobs estimates to full-time equivalent job-years. Under the most conservative HSR spending scenario considered, over the 15-year period evaluated, more than 25,000 full-time equivalent job-years are created. This amount to 14,900 jobs per billion (real) dollars of spending, or a cost of approximately $67,200 per job-year

Strategies for sustainable socio-economic development and mechanisms their implementation in the global dimension

The authors of the book have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to effectively use modern approaches to developing and implementation strategies of sustainable socio-economic development in order to increase efficiency and competitiveness of economic entities. Basic research focuses on economic diagnostics of socio-economic potential and financial results of economic entities, transition period in the economy of individual countries and ensuring their competitiveness, assessment of educational processes and knowledge management. The research results have been implemented in the different models and strategies of supply and logistics management, development of non-profit organizations, competitiveness of tourism and transport, financing strategies for small and medium-sized enterprises, cross-border cooperation. The results of the study can be used in decision-making at the level the economic entities in different areas of activity and organizational-legal forms of ownership, ministries and departments that promote of development the economic entities on the basis of models and strategies for sustainable socio-economic development. The results can also be used by students and young scientists in modern concepts and mechanisms for management of sustainable socio-economic development of economic entities in the condition of global economic transformations and challenges

Advances in Dynamic Virtualized Cloud Management

Cloud computing continues to gain in popularity, with more and more applications being deployed into public and private clouds. Deploying an application in the cloud allows application owners to provision computing resources on-demand, and scale quickly to meet demand. An Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud provides low-level resources, in the form of virtual machines (VMs), to clients on a pay-per-use basis. The cloud provider (owner) can reduce costs by lowering power consumption. As a typical server can consume 50% or more of its peak power consumption when idle, this can be accomplished by consolidating client VMs onto as few hosts (servers) as possible. This, however, can lead to resource contention, and degraded VM performance. As such, VM placements must be dynamically adapted to meet changing workload demands. We refer to this process as dynamic management. Clients should also take advantage of the cloud environment by scaling their applications up and down (adding and removing VMs) to match current workload demands. This thesis proposes a number of contributions to the field of dynamic cloud management. First, we propose a method of dynamically switching between management strategies at run-time in order to achieve more than one management goal. In order to increase the scalability of dynamic management algorithms, we introduce a distributed version of our management algorithm. We then consider deploying applications which consist of multiple VMs, and automatically scale their deployment to match their workload. We present an integrated management algorithm which handles both dynamic management and application scaling. When dealing with multi-VM applications, the placement of communicating VMs within the data centre topology should be taken into account. To address this consideration, we propose a topology-aware version of our dynamic management algorithm. Finally, we describe a simulation tool, DCSim, which we have developed to help evaluate dynamic management algorithms and techniques