The role of sustainability assessment in sustainability management for urban redevelopment

Sustainability assessment has the potential to influence decision making and hence to improve the management of sustainability. This paper presents the development and reporting of benchmark sustainability indicators and discusses the challenges of embedding sustainability indicators into existing process for urban infrastructure development. It links sustainability indicators with a range of tools that were implemented within a Sustainability Enhancement and Monitoring Framework for the £1billion redevelopment of Dundee Waterfront. The sustainability monitoring framework followed the UK and Scottish Government thematic indicator approach and provided a set of Sustainability Benchmark Indicators for assessing and managing a public sector funded urban redevelopment. The process of indicator development was iterative and consisted of three main activities, literature, interviews and document analysis. Indicators were finalised through close working with Dundee City Council, Scottish Enterprise and partnership stakeholders. The indicators were successfully established in 2010 within Dundee City Council at project and departmental level, providing the link across policies, programmes and projects. The indictor development process is discussed and the findings of a January 2015 review of changes in the benchmark indicators will be reported. The transition of the indicators over time and its impact on future sustainability enhancement opportunities are evaluated alongside the implications for sustainability management of Dundee Waterfront. The efficacy of the benchmark indicators to support sustainability management over the planned 30 year programme of urban redevelopment is discussed. The wider implications of the findings of the Dundee Waterfront project are reviewed in the context of current work on sustainability assessment

Service Orientation and the Smart Grid state and trends

The energy market is undergoing major changes, the most notable of which is the transition from a hierarchical closed system toward a more open one highly based on a “smart” information-rich infrastructure. This transition calls for new information and communication technologies infrastructures and standards to support it. In this paper, we review the current state of affairs and the actual technologies with respect to such transition. Additionally, we highlight the contact points between the needs of the future grid and the advantages brought by service-oriented architectures.

The application of GIS to analyse occupier chains and property market filtering

With funding from the RICS Education Trust, Paul Greenhalgh and Helen King of Northumbria University, UK sought to investigate whether using Geographic Information System (GIS) can enhance the representation and analysis of property occupier chaining data – the method used to analyse the chain of moves that take place when firms occupy new premises. The way that they tested this was by transferring a dataset of office and industrial occupier chains in Tyne and Wear that had been collected by Paul Greehalgh for his PhD study into a GIS to illustrate, measure and analyse the chaining data more effectively than had previously been possible. What they were able to show was that, although the process is time-consuming, it is a relatively straightforward and logical process to translate property occupier chaining data into a GIS. The resultant GIS representation was able to replicate and verify findings of the original research. For example, it confirmed the accuracy of the original calculation of the distances that occupiers move, but it also revealed that the average distance moved diminished the further that they occur along a chain. The team then used rateable value and VAT registration datasets to interpret the origin of occupiers of new office and industrial developments, and the location of vacant chain end property. Of the two, the strongest correlation was with new VAT registrations within a three year period. New VAT registrations are associated with levels of economic activity and enterprise which would generate new businesses or start-ups that would typically take up small office and industrial units, thus absorbing vacant accommodation and contributing to property market filtering. Although the work used the Tyne and Wear region as a practical example, the key objective of the work was to test the applicability and robustness of the approach. As such, the key findings from the work relate as much to the process involved as to any specific insights into the Tyne and Wear region: • The application of GIS to property occupier chaining data was successfully demonstrated and was able, not only to verify the findings of the original research, but was able to extend the breadth and depth of analysis • The GIS was used to produce maps of the Tyne and Wear conurbation, displaying occupier chaining data, to enable further interpretation and analysis • By exploiting existing datasets it was possible to characterise the locations where occupiers relocate from and where property voids persist; this enhances our understanding of the impact of occupier displacement on the dynamics of commercial property markets • a multi-criteria analysis Business Activity Score (BAS) was developed with which to measure the relative performance of Middle Super Output Areas within the conurbation • The property chaining GIS may be used, not only to evaluate previous property market interventions, but also to inform the development of spatial strategies that shape new ones. The detailed and comprehensive investigation of occupier chains, generated by occupiers relocating to new commercial and industrial developments, makes an important contribution to our understanding of the spatial impact of development on local property markets, in terms of the displacement of property occupiers, the operation of property market filtering and the side-effects of public sector intervention in land and property markets

SHAP Enrollment and Eligibility Activities: Implications for Process and System Modernization Under National Health Reform

Shares five states' experiences and best practices in using State Health Access Program grants to expand public health coverage through community-based outreach and improved eligibility and enrollment processes, as well as implications for federal reform

Microservice Transition and its Granularity Problem: A Systematic Mapping Study

Microservices have gained wide recognition and acceptance in software industries as an emerging architectural style for autonomic, scalable, and more reliable computing. The transition to microservices has been highly motivated by the need for better alignment of technical design decisions with improving value potentials of architectures. Despite microservices' popularity, research still lacks disciplined understanding of transition and consensus on the principles and activities underlying "micro-ing" architectures. In this paper, we report on a systematic mapping study that consolidates various views, approaches and activities that commonly assist in the transition to microservices. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the transition; it also contributes a working definition of the transition and technical activities underlying it. We term the transition and technical activities leading to microservice architectures as microservitization. We then shed light on a fundamental problem of microservitization: microservice granularity and reasoning about its adaptation as first-class entities. This study reviews state-of-the-art and -practice related to reasoning about microservice granularity; it reviews modelling approaches, aspects considered, guidelines and processes used to reason about microservice granularity. This study identifies opportunities for future research and development related to reasoning about microservice granularity.Comment: 36 pages including references, 6 figures, and 3 table

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers