The RainBO Platform for Enhancing Urban Resilience to Floods: An Ecient Tool for Planning and Emergency Phases

Many urban areas face an increasing flood risk, which includes the risk of flash floods. Increasing extreme precipitation events will likely lead to greater human and economic losses unless reliable and efficient early warning systems (EWS) along with other adaptation actions are put in place in urban areas. The challenge is in the integration and analysis in time and space of the environmental, meteorological, and territorial data from multiple sources needed to build up EWS able to provide efficient contribution to increase the resilience of vulnerable and exposed urban communities to flooding. Efficient EWS contribute to the preparedness phase of the disaster cycle but could also be relevant in the planning of the emergency phase. The RainBO Life project addressed this matter, focusing on the improvement of knowledge, methods, and tools for the monitoring and forecast of extreme precipitation events and the assessment of the associated flood risk for small and medium watercourses in urban areas. To put this into practice, RainBO developed a webGIS platform, which contributes to the “planning” of the management of river flood events through the use of detailed data and flood risk/vulnerability maps, and the “event management” with real-time monitoring/forecast of the events through the collection of observed data from real sensors, estimated/forecasted data from hydrologic models as well as qualitative data collected through a crowdsourcing app

An Agent Based Tool to Support Tactical Dialogues in Industrial Enterprise Networks

The globalization of competition has entailed that organizations of developed countries have toface a new kind of competitor with low labour costs, and often-advantageous exchange rates (resulting infavorable export selling prices). In such a state of affairs, innovation and organizational flexibility are becoming fundamental levers to enable enterprises to increase their competitiveness. Consequently, the need arises for a formalized methodology that enables organizational flexibility and capacity of performing innovation. These findings originate from the analysis of a case study which highlighted that enterprise networks can enable organizational flexibility, and defined the formalization of the VDO concept – Virtual Development Office – a network organizational model based on an independent subject that has the role of enabling innovation in a collaborative environment to reach world class manufacturing capabilities. A multiagent system based on architecture is proposed to model and support tactical dialogues inside the network. The VDO has been modeled as a supervisor and coordinator agent able to perform a selection process in order to create the best coalition for managing emerging business opportunities. The context analyzed in this research assumes a virtual market place where enterprises, represented by agents, can „meet each other‟ and cooperate in order to achieve a common business goal given through collaborating opportunities

Performance Measurement and Management: What is Next?

The paper reviews the literature in the field of performance measurement and management (PMM) for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large companies. The methodology adopted for reviewing the literature relies on the citation/co-citation analysis of research on PMM and on the analysis of the frameworks/models developed in the last twenty years both for large and SMEs. The evolution of the research field is discussed and future areas of research are identified. The results of the literature review carried out reveal a certain maturity of the literature related to large companies and a significant lack of PMM literature for SMEs