9,705 research outputs found

    A Design Science Research Approach to Smart and Collaborative Urban Supply Networks

    Get PDF
    Urban supply networks are facing increasing demands and challenges and thus constitute a relevant field for research and practical development. Supply chain management holds enormous potential and relevance for society and everyday life as the flow of goods and information are important economic functions. Being a heterogeneous field, the literature base of supply chain management research is difficult to manage and navigate. Disruptive digital technologies and the implementation of cross-network information analysis and sharing drive the need for new organisational and technological approaches. Practical issues are manifold and include mega trends such as digital transformation, urbanisation, and environmental awareness. A promising approach to solving these problems is the realisation of smart and collaborative supply networks. The growth of artificial intelligence applications in recent years has led to a wide range of applications in a variety of domains. However, the potential of artificial intelligence utilisation in supply chain management has not yet been fully exploited. Similarly, value creation increasingly takes place in networked value creation cycles that have become continuously more collaborative, complex, and dynamic as interactions in business processes involving information technologies have become more intense. Following a design science research approach this cumulative thesis comprises the development and discussion of four artefacts for the analysis and advancement of smart and collaborative urban supply networks. This thesis aims to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence-based supply networks, to advance data-driven inter-organisational collaboration, and to improve last mile supply network sustainability. Based on thorough machine learning and systematic literature reviews, reference and system dynamics modelling, simulation, and qualitative empirical research, the artefacts provide a valuable contribution to research and practice

    Victims' Access to Justice in Trinidad and Tobago: An exploratory study of experiences and challenges of accessing criminal justice in a post-colonial society

    Get PDF
    This thesis investigates victims' access to justice in Trinidad and Tobago, using their own narratives. It seeks to capture how their experiences affected their identities as victims and citizens, alongside their perceptions of legitimacy regarding the criminal justice system. While there have been some reforms in the administration of criminal justice in Trinidad and Tobago, such reforms have not focused on victims' accessibility to the justice system. Using grounded theory methodology, qualitative data was collected through 31 in-depth interviews with victims and victim advocates. The analysis found that victims experienced interpersonal, structural, and systemic barriers at varying levels throughout the criminal justice system, which manifested as institutionalized secondary victimization, silencing and inequality. This thesis argues that such experiences not only served to appropriate conflict but demonstrates that access is often given in a very narrow sense. Furthermore, it shows a failure to encompass access to justice as appropriated conflicts are left to stagnate in the system as there is often very little resolution. Adopting a postcolonial lens to analyse victims' experiences, the analysis identified othering practices that served to institutionalize the vulnerability and powerlessness associated with victim identities. Here, it is argued that these othering practices also affected the rights consciousness of victims, delegitimating their identities as citizens. Moreover, as a result of their experiences, victims had mixed perceptions of the justice system. It is argued that while the system is a legitimate authority victims' endorsement of the system is questionable, therefore victims' experiences suggest that there is a reinforcement of the system's legal hegemony. The findings suggest that within the legal system of Trinidad and Tobago, legacies of colonialism shape the postcolonial present as the psychology and inequalities of the past are present in the interactions and processes of justice. These findings are relevant for policymakers in Trinidad and Tobago and other regions. From this study it is recognized that, to improve access to justice for victims, there needs to be a move towards victim empowerment that promotes resilience and enhances social capital. Going forward it is noted that there is a need for further research

    The Disputation: The Enduring Representations in William Holman Hunt's “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple,” 1860

    Get PDF
    This interdisciplinary thesis problematizes the Jewish presence in the painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860) by William Holman Hunt. This “Jewish presence” refers to characters within the painting, Jews who posed for the picture and the painting’s portrayal of Judaism. The thesis takes a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to The Finding providing careful description and interpretation of what appears in the painting. It situates the painting within a newly configured genre of disputation paintings depicting the Temple scene from the Gospel of Luke (2:47 – 52). It asks two questions. Why does The Finding look the way it does? And how did Holman Hunt know how to create the picture? Under the rubric of the first question, it explores and challenges customary accounts of the painting, explicitly challenging the over reliance upon F.G. Stephens’s pamphlet. Additionally, it examines Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian religious contexts and bringing hitherto unacknowledged artistic contexts to the fore. The second question examines less apparent influences through an analysis of the originary Lukan narrative in conjunction with the under-examined genre of Temple “disputation” paintings, and a legacy of scholarly and religious disputation. This demonstrates a discourse of disputation informing The Finding over and above the biblical narrative. In showing that this discourse strongly correlates with the painting’s objectifying and spectacular properties, this thesis provides a new way to understand The Finding’s orientalism which is further revealed in its typological critical reworking of two Christian medieval and renaissance paintings. As a demonstration of the discourse, the thesis includes an examination of Jewish artists who addressed the theme of disputation overtly or obliquely thereby engaging with and challenging the assumptions upon which the disputation rests

    The temporality of rhetoric: the spatialization of time in modern criticism

    Get PDF
    Every conception of criticism conceals a notion of time which informs the manner in which the critic conceives of history, representation and criticism itself. This thesis reveals the philosophies of time inherent in certain key modern critical concepts: allegory, irony and the sublime. Each concept opens a breach in time, a disruption of chronology. In each case this gap or aporia is emphatically closed, elided or denied. Taking the philosophy of time elaborated by Giorgio Agamben as an introductory proposition, my argument turns in Chapter One to the allegorical temporality which Walter Benjamin sees as the time of photography. The second chapter examines the aesthetics of the sublime as melancholic or mournful untimeliness. In Chapter Three, Paul de Man's conception of irony provides an exemplary instance of the denial of this troubling temporal predicament. In opposition to the foreclosure of the disturbing temporalities of criticism, history and representation, the thesis proposes a fundamental rethinking of the philosophy of time as it relates to these categories of reflection. In a reading of an inaugural meditation on the nature of time, and in examining certain key contemporary philosophical and critical texts, I argue for a critical attendance to that which eludes those modes of thought that attempt to map time as a recognizable and essentially spatial field. The Confessions of Augustine provide, in the fourth chapter, a model for thinking through the problems set up earlier: Augustine affords us, precisely, a means of conceiving of the gap or the interim. In the final chapter, this concept is developed with reference to the criticism of Arnold and Eliot, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and the philosophy of cinema derived from Deleuze and Lyotard. In conclusion, the philosophical implications of the thesis are placed in relation to a conception of the untimeliness of death

    ‘Mental fight’ and ‘seeing & writing’ in Virginia Woolf and William Blake

    Get PDF
    This thesis is the first full-length study to assess the writer and publisher Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) responses to the radical Romantic poet-painter, and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827). I trace Woolf’s public and private, overt and subtle references to Blake in fiction, essays, notebooks, diaries, letters and drawings. I have examined volumes in Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s library that are pertinent, directly and indirectly, to Woolf’s understanding of Blake. I focus on Woolf’s key phrases about Blake: ‘Mental fight’, and ‘seeing & writing.’ I consider the other phrases Woolf uses to think about Blake in the context of these two categories. Woolf and Blake are both interested in combining visual and verbal aesthetics (‘seeing & writing’). They are both critical of their respective cultures (‘Mental fight’). Woolf mentions ‘seeing & writing’ in connection to Blake in a 1940 notebook. She engages with Blake’s ‘Mental fight’ in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940). I map late nineteenth and early twentieth-century opinion on Blake and explore Woolf’s engagement with Blake in these wider contexts. I make use of the circumstantial detail of Woolf’s friendship with the great Blake collector and scholar, Geoffrey Keynes (1887-1982), brother of Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes. Woolf was party to the Blake centenary celebrations courtesy of Geoffrey Keynes’s organisation of the centenary exhibition in London in 1927. Chapter One introduces Woolf’s explicit references to Blake and examines the record of Woolf scholarship that unites Woolf and Blake. To see how her predecessors had responded, Chapter Two examines the nineteenth-century interest in Blake and Woolf’s engagement with key nineteenth-century Blakeans. Chapter Three looks at the modernist, early twentieth-century engagement with Blake, to contextualise Woolf’s position on Blake. Chapter Four assesses how Woolf and Blake use ‘Mental fight’ to oppose warmongering and fascist politics. Chapter Five is about what Woolf and Blake write and think about the country and the city. Chapter Six discusses Woolf’s reading of John Milton (1608-1674) in relation to her interest in Blake, drawing on the evidence of Blake’s intense reading of Milton. Chapter Seven examines further miscellaneous continuities between Woolf and Blake. Chapter Eight proposes, in conclusion, that we can only form an impression of Woolf’s Blake. The thesis also has three appendices. First, a chronology of key publications which chart Blake’s reputation as well as Woolf’s allusions to Blake. Second a list all of Blake’s poetry represented in Woolf’s library including contents page. The third lists all the other volumes in Woolf’s library that proved relevant. Although Woolf’s writing is the subject of this thesis, my project necessitates an attempt to recover how Blake was understood and misunderstood by numerous writers in the early twentieth century. The thesis argues Blake is a model radical Romantic who combines the visual and the verbal and that Woolf sees him as a kindred artist

    Translating erasure: Proposing auto-theory as a practice for artistic enquiry and analysis while comprehending personal grief

    Get PDF
    Erasure as an artistic technique has developed in my moving image work after my father's passing. I export videos into sequences of thousands of images and erase outlines of the targeted objects in each frame. The repetitive and low conscious labour is a way to ease the agony and to grieve my father. Hours compressed into thousands of frames, turning into a glimpse of illusion and leaving a ghostly emptiness on the images. Both its visual presentation and making reflect the life events and encounters I've experienced in the UK and Taiwan in the past years. I consider an artwork embodies interconnected relationships between one's personal impulses and artistic training. As an art student, I have found it challenging to describe such a creative process with conventional academic writing. Within a construct that inclines to present thoughts as reasonable and rational arguments, my personal experiences and the intensity of feeling seem out of place. Within an academic framework, how can I make an argument out of how I have developed the erasure in my artwork to perform the grief, fading memories of a loved one, existential crisis and what's in-between? Through auto-theoretical approaches to writing and making of moving image work, this research aims to build a structure that can express both the intimate and intellectual aspects of an art practice. This writing up process interweaves my personal stories that motivate my artistic expression into art theories. The memories about my late father, my relationship with languages, and my lives between the UK and Taiwan meet with different artists' uses of erasure. As the conversations between the introspections and theoretical analysis accumulate, my writing and moving image work unravel an art journey that encompasses the nuances and struggles I've experienced as an international student. Within the search for an ideal model to illustrate an art practice, this research further generates profound understandings of memory, grief, loss, language, conflicted identities and cultural belonging

    Modelling and Solving the Single-Airport Slot Allocation Problem

    Get PDF
    Currently, there are about 200 overly congested airports where airport capacity does not suffice to accommodate airline demand. These airports play a critical role in the global air transport system since they concern 40% of global passenger demand and act as a bottleneck for the entire air transport system. This imbalance between airport capacity and airline demand leads to excessive delays, as well as multi-billion economic, and huge environmental and societal costs. Concurrently, the implementation of airport capacity expansion projects requires time, space and is subject to significant resistance from local communities. As a short to medium-term response, Airport Slot Allocation (ASA) has been used as the main demand management mechanism. The main goal of this thesis is to improve ASA decision-making through the proposition of models and algorithms that provide enhanced ASA decision support. In doing so, this thesis is organised into three distinct chapters that shed light on the following questions (I–V), which remain untapped by the existing literature. In parentheses, we identify the chapters of this thesis that relate to each research question. I. How to improve the modelling of airline demand flexibility and the utility that each airline assigns to each available airport slot? (Chapters 2 and 4) II. How can one model the dynamic and endogenous adaptation of the airport’s landside and airside infrastructure to the characteristics of airline demand? (Chapter 2) III. How to consider operational delays in strategic ASA decision-making? (Chapter 3) IV. How to involve the pertinent stakeholders into the ASA decision-making process to select a commonly agreed schedule; and how can one reduce the inherent decision-complexity without compromising the quality and diversity of the schedules presented to the decision-makers? (Chapter 3) V. Given that the ASA process involves airlines (submitting requests for slots) and coordinators (assigning slots to requests based on a set of rules and priorities), how can one jointly consider the interactions between these two sides to improve ASA decision-making? (Chapter 4) With regards to research questions (I) and (II), the thesis proposes a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model that considers airlines’ timing flexibility (research question I) and constraints that enable the dynamic and endogenous allocation of the airport’s resources (research question II). The proposed modelling variant addresses several additional problem characteristics and policy rules, and considers multiple efficiency objectives, while integrating all constraints that may affect airport slot scheduling decisions, including the asynchronous use of the different airport resources (runway, aprons, passenger terminal) and the endogenous consideration of the capabilities of the airport’s infrastructure to adapt to the airline demand’s characteristics and the aircraft/flight type associated with each request. The proposed model is integrated into a two-stage solution approach that considers all primary and several secondary policy rules of ASA. New combinatorial results and valid tightening inequalities that facilitate the solution of the problem are proposed and implemented. An extension of the above MIP model that considers the trade-offs among schedule displacement, maximum displacement, and the number of displaced requests, is integrated into a multi-objective solution framework. The proposed framework holistically considers the preferences of all ASA stakeholder groups (research question IV) concerning multiple performance metrics and models the operational delays associated with each airport schedule (research question III). The delays of each schedule/solution are macroscopically estimated, and a subtractive clustering algorithm and a parameter tuning routine reduce the inherent decision complexity by pruning non-dominated solutions without compromising the representativeness of the alternatives offered to the decision-makers (research question IV). Following the determination of the representative set, the expected delay estimates of each schedule are further refined by considering the whole airfield’s operations, the landside, and the airside infrastructure. The representative schedules are ranked based on the preferences of all ASA stakeholder groups concerning each schedule’s displacement-related and operational-delay performance. Finally, in considering the interactions between airlines’ timing flexibility and utility, and the policy-based priorities assigned by the coordinator to each request (research question V), the thesis models the ASA problem as a two-sided matching game and provides guarantees on the stability of the proposed schedules. A Stable Airport Slot Allocation Model (SASAM) capitalises on the flexibility considerations introduced for addressing research question (I) through the exploitation of data submitted by the airlines during the ASA process and provides functions that proxy each request’s value considering both the airlines’ timing flexibility for each submitted request and the requests’ prioritisation by the coordinators when considering the policy rules defining the ASA process. The thesis argues on the compliance of the proposed functions with the primary regulatory requirements of the ASA process and demonstrates their applicability for different types of slot requests. SASAM guarantees stability through sets of inequalities that prune allocations blocking the formation of stable schedules. A multi-objective Deferred-Acceptance (DA) algorithm guaranteeing the stability of each generated schedule is developed. The algorithm can generate all stable non-dominated points by considering the trade-off between the spilled airline and passenger demand and maximum displacement. The work conducted in this thesis addresses several problem characteristics and sheds light on their implications for ASA decision-making, hence having the potential to improve ASA decision-making. Our findings suggest that the consideration of airlines’ timing flexibility (research question I) results in improved capacity utilisation and scheduling efficiency. The endogenous consideration of the ability of the airport’s infrastructure to adapt to the characteristics of airline demand (research question II) enables a more efficient representation of airport declared capacity that results in the scheduling of additional requests. The concurrent consideration of airlines’ timing flexibility and the endogenous adaptation of airport resources to airline demand achieves an improved alignment between the airport infrastructure and the characteristics of airline demand, ergo proposing schedules of improved efficiency. The modelling and evaluation of the peak operational delays associated with the different airport schedules (research question III) provides allows the study of the implications of strategic ASA decision-making for operations and quantifies the impact of the airport’s declared capacity on each schedule’s operational performance. In considering the preferences of the relevant ASA stakeholders (airlines, coordinators, airport, and air traffic authorities) concerning multiple operational and strategic ASA efficiency metrics (research question IV) the thesis assesses the impact of alternative preference considerations and indicates a commonly preferred schedule that balances the stakeholders’ preferences. The proposition of representative subsets of alternative schedules reduces decision-complexity without significantly compromising the quality of the alternatives offered to the decision-making process (research question IV). The modelling of the ASA as a two-sided matching game (research question V), results in stable schedules consisting of request-to-slot assignments that provide no incentive to airlines and coordinators to reject or alter the proposed timings. Furthermore, the proposition of stable schedules results in more intensive use of airport capacity, while simultaneously improving scheduling efficiency. The models and algorithms developed as part of this thesis are tested using airline requests and airport capacity data from coordinated airports. Computational results that are relevant to the context of the considered airport instances provide evidence on the potential improvements for the current ASA process and facilitate data-driven policy and decision-making. In particular, with regards to the alignment of airline demand with the capabilities of the airport’s infrastructure (questions I and II), computational results report improved slot allocation efficiency and airport capacity utilisation, which for the considered airport instance translate to improvements ranging between 5-24% for various schedule performance metrics. In reducing the difficulty associated with the assessment of multiple ASA solutions by the stakeholders (question IV), instance-specific results suggest reductions to the number of alternative schedules by 87%, while maintaining the quality of the solutions presented to the stakeholders above 70% (expressed in relation to the initially considered set of schedules). Meanwhile, computational results suggest that the concurrent consideration of ASA stakeholders’ preferences (research question IV) with regards to both operational (research question III) and strategic performance metrics leads to alternative airport slot scheduling solutions that inform on the trade-offs between the schedules’ operational and strategic performance and the stakeholders’ preferences. Concerning research question (V), the application of SASAM and the DA algorithm suggest improvements to the number of unaccommodated flights and passengers (13 and 40% improvements) at the expense of requests concerning fewer passengers and days of operations (increasing the number of rejected requests by 1.2% in relation to the total number of submitted requests). The research conducted in this thesis aids in the identification of limitations that should be addressed by future studies to further improve ASA decision-making. First, the thesis focuses on exact solution approaches that consider the landside and airside infrastructure of the airport and generate multiple schedules. The proposition of pre-processing techniques that identify the bottleneck of the airport’s capacity, i.e., landside and/or airside, can be used to reduce the size of the proposed formulations and improve the required computational times. Meanwhile, the development of multi-objective heuristic algorithms that consider several problem characteristics and generate multiple efficient schedules in reasonable computational times, could extend the capabilities of the models propositioned in this thesis and provide decision support for some of the world’s most congested airports. Furthermore, the thesis models and evaluates the operational implications of strategic airport slot scheduling decisions. The explicit consideration of operational delays as an objective in ASA optimisation models and algorithms is an issue that merits investigation since it may further improve the operational performance of the generated schedules. In accordance with current practice, the models proposed in this work have considered deterministic capacity parameters. Perhaps, future research could propose formulations that consider stochastic representations of airport declared capacity and improve strategic ASA decision-making through the anticipation of operational uncertainty and weather-induced capacity reductions. Finally, in modelling airlines’ utility for each submitted request and available time slot the thesis proposes time-dependent functions that utilise available data to approximate airlines’ scheduling preferences. Future studies wishing to improve the accuracy of the proposed functions could utilise commercial data sources that provide route-specific information; or in cases that such data is unavailable, employ data mining and machine learning methodologies to extract airlines’ time-dependent utility and preferences
    • 

    corecore