Design for Sustainability and Project Management Literature – A Review

AbstractThe growing pressure on natural resources and increasing global trade have made sustainability issues a prime area of concern for all businesses alike. The increased focus on sustainability has impacted the way projects are conceived, planned, executed and evaluated in industries. Since project management literature has hardly been considered in design for sustainability research, this article attempts to review the points of intersection between these two fields, and explores the potential that knowledge from project management literature has in improving efficiency and effectiveness of development and implementation of design for sustainability tools

A Modular Hybridization of Particle Swarm Optimization and Differential Evolution

In swarm intelligence, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Differential Evolution (DE) have been successfully applied in many optimization tasks, and a large number of variants, where novel algorithm operators or components are implemented, has been introduced to boost the empirical performance. In this paper, we first propose to combine the variants of PSO or DE by modularizing each algorithm and incorporating the variants thereof as different options of the corresponding modules. Then, considering the similarity between the inner workings of PSO and DE, we hybridize the algorithms by creating two populations with variation operators of PSO and DE respectively, and selecting individuals from those two populations. The resulting novel hybridization, called PSODE, encompasses most up-to-date variants from both sides, and more importantly gives rise to an enormous number of unseen swarm algorithms via different instantiations of the modules therein. In detail, we consider 16 different variation operators originating from existing PSO- and DE algorithms, which, combined with 4 different selection operators, allow the hybridization framework to generate 800 novel algorithms. The resulting set of hybrid algorithms, along with the combined 30 PSO- and DE algorithms that can be generated with the considered operators, is tested on the 24 problems from the well-known COCO/BBOB benchmark suite, across multiple function groups and dimensionalities.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, to be published in GECCO 2020 Companio

Staphylococcus aureus-Fibronectin Interactions with and without Fibronectin-Binding Proteins and Their Role in Adhesion and Desorption

Adhesion and residence-time-dependent desorption of two Staphylococcus aureus strains with and without fibronectin (Fn) binding proteins (FnBPs) on Fn-coated glass were compared under flow conditions. To obtain a better understanding of the role of Fn-FnBP binding, the adsorption enthalpies of Fn with staphylococcal cell surfaces were determined using isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC). Interaction forces between staphylococci and Fn coatings were measured using atomic force microscopy (AFM). The strain with FnBPs adhered faster and initially stronger to an Fn coating than the strain without FnBPs, and its Fn adsorption enthalpies were higher. The initial desorption was high for both strains but decreased substantially within 2 s. These time scales of staphylococcal bond ageing were confirmed by AFM adhesion force measurement. After exposure of either Fn coating or staphylococcal cell surfaces to bovine serum albumin (BSA), the adhesion of both strains to Fn coatings was reduced, suggesting that BSA suppresses not only nonspecific but also specific Fn-FnBP interactions. Adhesion forces and adsorption enthalpies were only slightly affected by BSA adsorption. This implies that under the mild contact conditions of convective diffusion in a flow chamber, adsorbed BSA prevents specific interactions but does allow forced Fn-FnBP binding during AFM or stirring in ITC. The bond strength energies calculated from retraction force-distance curves from AFM were orders of magnitude higher than those calculated from desorption data, confirming that a penetrating Fn-coated AFM tip probes multiple adhesins in the outermost cell surface that remain hidden during mild landing of an organism on an Fn-coated substratum, like that during convective diffusional flow

Sustainability in design engineering education: experiences in Northern Europe

In recent years, the implementation of sustainability into the curricula of engineering has become increasingly important. This paper focuses on the experiences of integrating sustainability in Design Engineering education in the academic bachelor programs at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, at the University College of West-Flanders in Belgium, and at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The different approaches are described and discussed. This paper aims to share insights and lessons learned in how to accomplish true integration of sustainability in bachelor course curricula of Industrial Design Engineering