Sustainability Target Pyramid A Synthesis of Sustainability and Information System

Abstract The businesses have a critical role in moving the society toward sustainability. The fast changing and dynamic global business environment requires firms to be more flexible to quickly adapt and respond to market changes. Among the forces that drive changes, requirements for corporate responsibility and sustainability are getting more urgent. During such difficult time as this economic downturn, companies are faced with hard choices to survive. Research has acknowledged that addressing sustainability issues is critical to the long-term existence and thriving of companies. The concept of sustainability makes it necessary that besides the economic categories and the operational environment protection, it should be considered the social effects of company in management actions. Sustainability business oriented can be realized through developing a corporate target pyramid in enterprise. Such pyramid will help organizations to shape their targets in accepting social, environmental and economic responsibilities. The current research tries to review the research background done till now and depict a perspective of an integrated target pyramid for both scholars and managers. Furthermore, this paper has a holistic look toward the concept of sustainable information system

A Technique for Developing High-Resolution Residential Occupancy Schedules for Urban Energy Models

Occupants’ presence and activity schedules directly influence residential energy consumption loads. Regardless of their widely acknowledged importance, developing proper representative occupancy inputs for urban energy use studies of residential neighborhoods remains to be a challenge to overcome. The presented work aims to balance between accuracy and complexity of such occupancy models by developing a technique that takes advantage of a previously proposed sophisticated method for schedule generation and attempts to refine and simplify its results for practicality purposes. Here, we used a Markov chain transition probability matrix based on the American Time-Use Survey (ATUS) database and selectively refined its outputs according to the data collected from our own designated population of study. The resulting refined schedules were incorporated into the Urban Modeling Interface (umi) interface and were then tested on our pilot case study, a relatively low-income dense neighborhood in the Midwestern United States composed of 272 residential buildings. An initial investigation of this technique’s performance suggests that while the use of the ATUS based model provided a high level of variability and sophistication, the customization step ensured that the resulting schedules are representative of our population and its characteristics. More importantly, we were able to maintain simplicity and practicality