4,132 research outputs found
Developing A Road Freight Transport Performance Measurement System To Drive Sustainability:An Empirical Study Of Egyptian Road Freight Transport Companies
While several road freight performance measurement systems have been developed, only a limited number of quantified performance measurement frameworks encompassing diverse sets of performance metrics from multiple sustainable perspectives are available on a technological platform. These sets of metrics could be integrated as crucial performance indicators for assessing the operational performance of various road freight transport companies. These indicators include fuel efficiency, trip duration, vehicle loading, and cargo capacity. The objective of this research is to construct a conceptual road freight performance measurement framework that comprehensively incorporates performance elements from sustainable viewpoints (economic, environmental, and social), leveraging technology to measure the performance of road freight transport companies. This proposed framework aims to aid these companies in gauging their performance using technology, thus enhancing their operations towards sustainability.Within the road freight transport sector, several challenges exist, with congestion, road infrastructure maintenance, and driver training and qualifications being particularly pressing issues. The developed performance measurement framework offers the means for companies to evaluate the effects of technology integration on vehicles and overall performance. This allows companies to measure their performance from an operational standpoint rather than solely a strategic one, thereby identifying areas requiring improvement. Egypt was chosen as the empirical study location due to its relatively low level of technological integration within its road freight sector.This thesis employs an explanatory mixed methods approach, encompassing four distinct phases. The first phase entails a review to formulate the proposed theoretical performance measurement framework. Subsequently, the second phase involves conducting semi-structured interviews using a Delphi method to both develop a conceptual performance measurement framework and explore the present state of Egypt's road freight transport sector. Following this, the third phase encompasses surveys based on the results derived from Delphi analysis, involving diverse participants from the road freight transport industry. The aim is to validate the developed performance measurement framework through an empirical study conducted in Egypt. Lastly, the fourth phase centres around organizing focus groups involving stakeholders within road freight transport companies. The goal here is to propose a roadmap for implementing the developed road freight transport performance measurement framework within the Egyptian context.The primary theoretical contribution of this research is the development of a road freight transport performance measurement framework that integrates the three sustainability dimensions with technology. Additionally, this study offers practical guidance for the application of the developed framework in various countries and contexts. From a practical standpoint, this research aids road freight transport managers in evaluating their operational performance, thereby identifying challenges, devising action plans, and making informed decisions to mitigate these issues and enhance sustainability-oriented performance. Ultimately, the developed road freight transport performance measurement framework is poised to promote performance measurement aligned with technology, fostering progress towards achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030
Natural and Technological Hazards in Urban Areas
Natural hazard events and technological accidents are separate causes of environmental impacts. Natural hazards are physical phenomena active in geological times, whereas technological hazards result from actions or facilities created by humans. In our time, combined natural and man-made hazards have been induced. Overpopulation and urban development in areas prone to natural hazards increase the impact of natural disasters worldwide. Additionally, urban areas are frequently characterized by intense industrial activity and rapid, poorly planned growth that threatens the environment and degrades the quality of life. Therefore, proper urban planning is crucial to minimize fatalities and reduce the environmental and economic impacts that accompany both natural and technological hazardous events
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction
In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible
Tools for efficient Deep Learning
In the era of Deep Learning (DL), there is a fast-growing demand for building and deploying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on various platforms. This thesis proposes five tools to address the challenges for designing DNNs that are efficient in time, in resources and in power consumption.
We first present Aegis and SPGC to address the challenges in improving the memory efficiency of DL training and inference. Aegis makes mixed precision training (MPT) stabler by layer-wise gradient scaling. Empirical experiments show that Aegis can improve MPT accuracy by at most 4\%. SPGC focuses on structured pruning: replacing standard convolution with group convolution (GConv) to avoid irregular sparsity. SPGC formulates GConv pruning as a channel permutation problem and proposes a novel heuristic polynomial-time algorithm. Common DNNs pruned by SPGC have maximally 1\% higher accuracy than prior work.
This thesis also addresses the challenges lying in the gap between DNN descriptions and executables by Polygeist for software and POLSCA for hardware. Many novel techniques, e.g. statement splitting and memory partitioning, are explored and used to expand polyhedral optimisation. Polygeist can speed up software execution in sequential and parallel by 2.53 and 9.47 times on Polybench/C. POLSCA achieves 1.5 times speedup over hardware designs directly generated from high-level synthesis on Polybench/C.
Moreover, this thesis presents Deacon, a framework that generates FPGA-based DNN accelerators of streaming architectures with advanced pipelining techniques to address the challenges from heterogeneous convolution and residual connections. Deacon provides fine-grained pipelining, graph-level optimisation, and heuristic exploration by graph colouring. Compared with prior designs, Deacon shows resource/power consumption efficiency improvement of 1.2x/3.5x for MobileNets and 1.0x/2.8x for SqueezeNets.
All these tools are open source, some of which have already gained public engagement. We believe they can make efficient deep learning applications easier to build and deploy.Open Acces
Propulsion system study for ONAerospace eVTOL
This is a project whose main objective is to determine the required values of thrust, power, and efficiency for the propulsion systems of the ONA DLC eVTOL aircraft by ONAerospace during the hover and cruise phases. Additionally, it is an investigation work on both open propeller and ducted fan propulsion systems.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - IndĂşstria, InnovaciĂł i InfraestructuraObjectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::11 - Ciutats i Comunitats Sostenible
Southern Adventist University Undergraduate Catalog 2022-2023
Southern Adventist University\u27s undergraduate catalog for the academic year 2022-2023.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/undergrad_catalog/1121/thumbnail.jp
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