Smart Cities and ICT – Insights from the Morgenstadt project

According to the United Nations, 60% of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2030 (United Nations 2012). While many cities around the world are growing and expanding, at the same time, a big number of cities in the northern hemisphere is facing reverse trends, e.g. caused by the demographic change. As a result of these trends and the comprehensive globalization, cities are competing within a global market for companies and well educated inhabitants. As an additional challenge, the climate change revealed his powerful forces during the last decades as seen in hurricanes Katrina and Sandy in 2005 respectively 2012 or typhoon Haiyan in 2013. In this context, cities are facing an extremely difficult assignment: an innovative sustainable development of the city, including ecologic, economic and social dimensions. This task includes two central requirements, making the city livable on the one hand and resilient against external factors as natural disasters or other crises on the other. This paper outlines innovative approaches of cities all over the world, in order to achieve the goal of a sustainable city of tomorrow, concentrating on the contribution of innovative information and communication technologies (ICT). The paper is based on an interdisciplinary long-term research project called “Morgenstadt: City Insights” (m:ci), which analyzed innovative and sustainable solutions and projects of the city sectors mobility, water infrastructure, production and logistics, governance, buildings, energy, security and ICT in six leading cities around the world in order to identify common characteristics and structures of success stories. Therefore, the paper first presents the research methodology of the m:ci project, followed by an overview of the examined sectors, projects and cities. Subsequently the key findings regarding the ICT sector will be presented and the role of ICT for an innovative and sustainable city development will be outlined. In this context it will be elaborated for instance how ICT enables innovative solutions of other sectors and to which extent the collection and procession of urban data contributes to a sustainable development. Finally, the paper discusses the transferability of the identified approaches and tries to illustrate possible strategies to implement such innovative and sustainable solutions

Mobility in a Globalised World

The term mobility has different meanings in the following academic disciplines. In economics, mobility is the ability of an individual or a group to improve their economic status in relation to income and wealth within their lifetime or between generations. In information systems and computer science, mobility is used for the concept of mobile computing, in which a computer is transported by a person during normal use. Logistics creates, by the design of logistics networks, the infrastructure for the mobility of people and goods. Electric mobility is one of today’s solutions from engineering perspective to reduce the need of energy resources and environmental impact. Moreover, for urban planning, mobility is the crunch question about how to optimize the different needs for mobility and how to link different transportation systems. The conference “Mobility in a Globalised World” took place in Iserlohn, Germany, on September 14th – 15th, 2011. The aim of this conference was to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the exchange of ideas among practitioners, researchers, and government officials regarding the different modes of mobility in a globalised world, focusing on both domestic and international issues. The proceedings at hand document the results of the presentations and ensuing discussions at the conference

Позиционный электропривод механизма перемещения

Объектом исследования является позиционный асинхронный электропривод механизма горизонтального перемещения груза. Цель работы – исследовать основные характеристики асинхронного электропривода с трехконтурной системой управления положением вала двигателя. В процессе исследования проводились выбор асинхронного двигателя для механизма перемещения, расчет параметров двигателя, его статических и динамических характеристик, выбор преобразователя частоты, синтез трехконтурной системы управления следящим электроприводом на базе регулируемого с векторным управлением.The object of the study is a positional asynchronous electric drive mechanism for the horizontal movement of cargo. The purpose of the work is to investigate the basic characteristics of an asynchronous electric drive with a three-circuit control system for positioning the motor shaft. In the process of research, the choice of an asynchronous motor for the displacement mechanism, calculation of the engine parameters, its static and dynamic characteristics, choice of a frequency converter, synthesis of a three-circuit control system for a servomotor drive based on an adjustable vector control were made

Experimenting Towards Civil Society Resilience

International audienceCivil Society Resilience is an area of crisis management that is complementary to professional response. Crisis managers and response organizations need to integrate individuals, communities and local governments in their management efforts, among others by efficient crisis communication via media and the mobilization and handling of citizens as spontaneous volunteers. DRIVER aims at a campaign of experiments: organizational concepts and IT-solutions will be iteratively tested and assessed under realistic conditions to understand and improve their operational benefits. Therefore, this paper outlines the DRIVER approach of addressing the civil society in the context of resilience towards crisis situations. This does not only include a society oriented definition of local resilience as well as an introduction into the DRIVER perspectives of the society to be included in the DRIVER framework, rather it will be explained how DRIVERs consecutive experimentation approach supports the sustainable development of local societal resilience

Developing and applying a framework for assessing the research quality of qualitative project methods in the EU project SECUR-ED

Qualitative research plays a vital role in political development and in the design of statutes and directives. Consequently, ensuring the quality of this research is important. However, the current literature on evaluation of quantitative and qualitative research does not reflect this importance, and we have identified a need to establish guidelines for evaluating qualitative research projects for quality. Therefore, and based on existing research, we have developed a framework for assessing the research quality of large complex projects using qualitative methods. In our study, as presented in this article, we operationalize and apply the framework to evaluate six specific methods in the large European research project, Secured Urban Transportation—A European Demonstration (SECUR-ED); each method is assessed according to the quality criteria of “transferability,” “systematic design/reliability,” and “transactional validity.” Overall, we find that half of the SECUR-ED project methods demonstrate thorough documentation and transferability, and that half of the methods lack consistent usage and therefore score low on both reliability and validity. We also find that one method, the capacity mapping matrix, scores high on all quality parameters. Accordingly, we suggest that future European Union (EU) projects replicate the documentation efforts demonstrated in relation to several of the SECUR-ED methods, and consider the capacity mapping matrix as “best practice” standard. We conclude that the framework represents a novel approach to quality assessments of qualitative project methods across research topics and contexts