87,723 research outputs found
Lean and green – a systematic review of the state of the art literature
The move towards greener operations and products has forced companies to seek alternatives to balance efficiency gains and environmental friendliness in their operations and products. The exploration of the sequential or simultaneous deployment of lean and green initiatives is the results of this balancing action. However, the lean-green topic is relatively new, and it lacks of a clear and structured research definition. Thus, this paper’s main contribution is the offering of a systematic review of the existing literature on lean and green, aimed at providing guidance on the topic, uncovering gaps and inconsistencies in the literature, and finding new paths for research. The paper identifies and structures, through a concept map, six main research streams that comprise both conceptual and empirical research conducted within the context of various organisational functions and industrial sectors. Important issues for future research are then suggested in the form of research questions. The paper’s aim is to also contribute by stimulating scholars to further study this area in depth, which will lead to a better understanding of the compatibility and impact on organisational performance of lean and green initiatives. It also holds important implications for industrialists, who can develop a deeper and richer knowledge on lean and green to help them formulate more effective strategies for their deployment
DISCO: Distributed Multi-domain SDN Controllers
Modern multi-domain networks now span over datacenter networks, enterprise
networks, customer sites and mobile entities. Such networks are critical and,
thus, must be resilient, scalable and easily extensible. The emergence of
Software-Defined Networking (SDN) protocols, which enables to decouple the data
plane from the control plane and dynamically program the network, opens up new
ways to architect such networks. In this paper, we propose DISCO, an open and
extensible DIstributed SDN COntrol plane able to cope with the distributed and
heterogeneous nature of modern overlay networks and wide area networks. DISCO
controllers manage their own network domain and communicate with each others to
provide end-to-end network services. This communication is based on a unique
lightweight and highly manageable control channel used by agents to
self-adaptively share aggregated network-wide information. We implemented DISCO
on top of the Floodlight OpenFlow controller and the AMQP protocol. We
demonstrated how DISCO's control plane dynamically adapts to heterogeneous
network topologies while being resilient enough to survive to disruptions and
attacks and providing classic functionalities such as end-point migration and
network-wide traffic engineering. The experimentation results we present are
organized around three use cases: inter-domain topology disruption, end-to-end
priority service request and virtual machine migration
Strategic Research Agenda for organic food and farming
The TP Organics Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) was finalised in December 2009.
The purpose of the Strategic Research Agenda (SRA) is to enable research, development and knowledge transfer that will deliver relevant outcomes – results that will contribute to the improvement of the organic sector and other low external input systems.
The document has been developed through a dynamic consultative process that ran from 2008 to 2009.
It involved a wide range of stakeholders who enthusiastically joined the effort to define organic research priorities.
From December 2008 to February; the expert groups elaborated the first draft. The consultative process involved the active participation of many different countries. Consultation involved researchers, advisors, members of inspection/certification bodies, as well as different users/beneficiaries of the research such as farmers, processors, market actors and members of civil society organisations throughout Europe and further afield in order to gather the research needs of the whole organic sector
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Academic Resilience and Achievement
This study uses narrative analysis to understand the ways in which Mexican university faculty members used their self-motivational resources to persist in an instructional technology training program within adverse work conditions. The methodology included interviews and participant observation. Findings suggest that faculty’s academic resilience was based on faculty’s self-definition as permanent learners and innovators, the perception of instruction as a field of reflection-in-action and systematization, and the caring instructional approach used by training instructors
Values in Water
Inaugural speech spoken in acceptance of the chair ‘Ethics of water engineering’ at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology on 16 November 2018
Exploratory Research into the Resilience of Farming Systems during Periods of Hardship
This paper investigates the management strategies and responses used by New Zealand sheep and beef farmers to ensure resilience during periods of hardship. Using two, farm level surveys conducted in 1986 and 2010, some aspects of resilient farming systems were identified. Despite apparent hardship current farmers seemed more willing to take risks, with many more borrowing to invest in on farm developments than those in 1986. The main similarity between time periods was the greatest response to economic changes being the adoption of a low input policy. This result was quite significant, as conventional farmers are generally believed to resort to other strategies or responses.Resilience, New Zealand, indicators, sustainable agriculture, strategies, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Land Economics/Use, Production Economics,
ANCHOR: logically-centralized security for Software-Defined Networks
While the centralization of SDN brought advantages such as a faster pace of
innovation, it also disrupted some of the natural defenses of traditional
architectures against different threats. The literature on SDN has mostly been
concerned with the functional side, despite some specific works concerning
non-functional properties like 'security' or 'dependability'. Though addressing
the latter in an ad-hoc, piecemeal way, may work, it will most likely lead to
efficiency and effectiveness problems. We claim that the enforcement of
non-functional properties as a pillar of SDN robustness calls for a systemic
approach. As a general concept, we propose ANCHOR, a subsystem architecture
that promotes the logical centralization of non-functional properties. To show
the effectiveness of the concept, we focus on 'security' in this paper: we
identify the current security gaps in SDNs and we populate the architecture
middleware with the appropriate security mechanisms, in a global and consistent
manner. Essential security mechanisms provided by anchor include reliable
entropy and resilient pseudo-random generators, and protocols for secure
registration and association of SDN devices. We claim and justify in the paper
that centralizing such mechanisms is key for their effectiveness, by allowing
us to: define and enforce global policies for those properties; reduce the
complexity of controllers and forwarding devices; ensure higher levels of
robustness for critical services; foster interoperability of the non-functional
property enforcement mechanisms; and promote the security and resilience of the
architecture itself. We discuss design and implementation aspects, and we prove
and evaluate our algorithms and mechanisms, including the formalisation of the
main protocols and the verification of their core security properties using the
Tamarin prover.Comment: 42 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, 5 algorithms, 139 reference
Simulating Auxiliary Inputs, Revisited
For any pair of correlated random variables we can think of as a
randomized function of . Provided that is short, one can make this
function computationally efficient by allowing it to be only approximately
correct. In folklore this problem is known as \emph{simulating auxiliary
inputs}. This idea of simulating auxiliary information turns out to be a
powerful tool in computer science, finding applications in complexity theory,
cryptography, pseudorandomness and zero-knowledge. In this paper we revisit
this problem, achieving the following results:
\begin{enumerate}[(a)] We discuss and compare efficiency of known results,
finding the flaw in the best known bound claimed in the TCC'14 paper "How to
Fake Auxiliary Inputs". We present a novel boosting algorithm for constructing
the simulator. Our technique essentially fixes the flaw. This boosting proof is
of independent interest, as it shows how to handle "negative mass" issues when
constructing probability measures in descent algorithms. Our bounds are much
better than bounds known so far. To make the simulator
-indistinguishable we need the complexity in time/circuit size, which is better by a
factor compared to previous bounds. In particular, with our
technique we (finally) get meaningful provable security for the EUROCRYPT'09
leakage-resilient stream cipher instantiated with a standard 256-bit block
cipher, like .Comment: Some typos present in the previous version have been correcte
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