Photovoltaics and Electrification in Agriculture

Integration of photovoltaics and electrification in agriculture. Works on the integration of photovoltaics in agriculture, as well as electrification and microgrids in agriculture. In addition, some works on sustainability in agriculture are added

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

New Multidisciplinary Approaches for Reducing Food Waste in Agribusiness Supply Chains

This reprint is a collection of research articles that highlight the achievements of the team of the European project called REAMIT. REAMIT was funded by Interreg North-West Europe and ERDF. The term REAMIT stands for “Improving Resource Efficiency of Agribusiness supply chains by Minimising waste using Big Data and Internet of Things sensors.” The main aim of the REAMIT project was to reduce food waste in agrifood supply chains by using the power of modern, digital technologies (e.g., the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, big data, cloud computing and analytics). The chapters in this reprint provide detailed information of the activities of the project team.The chapters of this reprint were published as articles in the Special Issue titled ”New Multidisciplinary Approaches for Reducing Food Waste in Agribusiness Supply Chains” published in the journal Sustainability. For ease of readability and flow, the book is divided into four distinct parts.In Part 1, the project members provided a comprehensive review of the existing literature. Part 2 is devoted to the in-depth discussions of the development, adaptation, and applications of these technologies for specific food companies. While the project team worked with a number of food companies including human milk, fresh vegetables and fruits, meat production, this part discusses four different applications.Part 3 presents a detailed analysis of our case studies. A general life-cycle analysis tool for implementing technology for reducing food waste (REAMIT-type activities) is presented in Chapter 7. A specific application of this tool for the case study on a human milk bank is presented in Chapter 8. In Chapter 9, we developed a novel mathematical programming model to identify the conditions when food businesses will prefer the use of modern technologies for helping to reduce food waste.The final part, Part 4, is devoted to summarising learnings from the project and developing some policy-oriented guidelines. Chapter 10 reviews the current state of corporate reporting guidelines for reporting on food waste. Chapter 11 presents the important leanings from the REAMIT project on the motivations for food companies in reducing waste and the associated challenges. Business models are discussed, and some policy guidelines were developed.We gratefully acknowledge the generous funding received from the Interreg North-West Europe for carrying out our activities. The content of Chapter 10 was funded additional funding received from the University of Essex. We believe that the reprint and individual chapters will be of interest to a wide and various audience and will kindle interest in food companies, technology companies, business support organisations, policy-makers and members of the academic community in finding ways to reduce food waste with and without the use of technology

The Impact of Occupants’ Behaviours on Energy Consumption in Multi-Functional Spaces

Over the last 15 years, the estimation of energy consumption in buildings has become a critical process during various stages of building’s lifecycle due to growing global scientific and political pressure to respond to climate change. It has been widely acknowledged in the literature that there is a distinct performance gap between predicted and actual energy consumption of buildings which has attracted scholars across the world to investigate the sufficiency of software inputs and presumptions regarding how the buildings are actually used. Several studies have confirmed that occupant’s presence, in addition to, their interactions with building systems (such as: opening door and window, changing the thermostat set-point and using appliances), known as passive and active energy consumption behaviours, play significant roles in building’s energy consumption. However, the incorporation of occupants’ behaviours into the building energy performance analysis has been mostly overlooked. Most of the existing studies on the impacts of occupants on building energy consumption have focused on residential and office buildings. Therefore, there is a lack of knowledge about the impacts of occupants’ behaviours on energy consumption in public buildings such as: galleries, exhibitions, recreational facilities and institutional buildings. In such building occupants have limited access to building systems, and their energy consumption behaviours are limited to their presence and the production of metabolic heat (passive behaviour), in addition to, few activities such as: opening the entrance door. This research develops a conceptual framework to improve the accuracy of energy consumption assessment in multi-functional spaces at different stages of building’s lifecycle by integrating the impacts of occupants’ behaviours into building energy predictions to reduce the gap between actual and predicted energy consumption. In this quantitative research, a model simulation method is applied on multiple cases at different stages of the building lifecycle including design, construction and post-occupancy. The first two cases are multi-functional spaces of public buildings at the design and construction stages, which were studied to address the missing information and potential gaps in energy modelling and simulation. The study was then taken forward using case studies at the post-occupancy stage to integrate the realistic observed data into the building energy simulation tool. For each of the cases, energy simulation was run twice: first, using default values of the software, and second, using the collected data. The data collection included hourly observation of 38 zones in both cases at the post-occupancy stage for the duration of two weeks, in addition to, using available governmental and real-time statistics. The analysis of energy simulation results using default software values and collected data highlighted that lack of sufficient information regarding building working hours, space layout and function, occupancy density and schedules, the entrance door opening time and HVAC set-points may result significant performance gaps in energy consumption prediction of multi-functional spaces in institutional buildings and galleries. This study provides conceptual frameworks for the prospect energy modellers and researchers to obtain more accurate energy consumption predictions for multi-functional spaces of public buildings