A photovoltaic panel modelling method for flexible implementation in Matlab/Simulink using datasheet quantities

This paper presents a detailed method for creating an embedded Matlab model in Simulink for any solar photovoltaic panel starting with its datasheet values. It links extrinsic functions to the Simulink embedded model to provide fast and simple iterative solving of non-linear equations. It also provides a method sufficiently flexible to produce a model output based on panel current or voltage such that it can be cascaded with different Simulink elements

Operationalising a large research programme tackling complex urban and planetary health problems: A case study approach to critical reflections

Addressing increasingly urgent global challenges requires the rapid mobilisation of new research groups that are large in scale, co-produced, and focused explicitly on investigating root causes at a systemic level. This requires new ways of operationalising and funding research programmes to better support effective interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary (ID/TD) partnerships between a wide range of academic disciplines and stakeholder groups. Understanding of the challenges and approaches that teams can follow to overcome them can come through critical reflection on experiences initiating new research programmes of this nature and sharing of these reflections. We aimed to offer a framework for critical reflection and an overview of how we developed it, and to share our reflections on operationalising a newly formed large-scale ID/TD research programme. We present a framework of 10 areas for critical reflection: Systems, Unknowns and Imperfection; ID/TD Understanding; Values; Societal Impact; Context and Stakeholder Knowledge; Project Understanding and Direction; Team Cohesion; Decision-Making; Communications; and Method Development. We reflect on our experience of operationalising the research programme in these areas. Based on this critical examination of our experiences and the processes we adopted, we make recommendations for teams seeking to tackle important and highly complex global challenges, and for those who fund or support such research groups. Our reflections point to an overarching challenge of the structural and institutional barriers for cross-disciplinary research of this nature

Tackling root causes upstream of unhealthy urban development (TRUUD): Protocol of a five-year prevention research consortium

Poor quality urban environments substantially increase non-communicable disease. Responsibility for associated decision-making is dispersed across multiple agents and systems: fast growing urban authorities are the primary gatekeepers of new development and change in the UK, yet the driving forces are remote private sector interests supported by a political economy focused on short-termism and consumption-based growth. Economic valuation of externalities is widely thought to be fundamental, yet evidence on how to value and integrate it into urban development decision-making is limited, and it forms only a part of the decision-making landscape. Researchers must find new ways of integrating socio-environmental costs at numerous key leverage points across multiple complex systems. This mixed-methods study comprises of six highly integrated work packages. It aims to develop and test a multi-action intervention in two urban areas: one on large-scale mixed-use development, the other on major transport. The core intervention is the co-production with key stakeholders through interviews, workshops, and participatory action research, of three areas of evidence: economic valuations of changed health outcomes; community-led media on health inequalities; and routes to potential impact mapped through co-production with key decision-makers, advisors and the lay public. This will be achieved by: mapping system of actors and processes involved in each case study; developing, testing and refining the combined intervention; evaluating the extent to which policy and practice changes amongst our target users, and the likelihood of impact on non-communicable diseases (NCDs) downstream. The integration of such diverse disciplines and sectors presents multiple practical/operational issues. The programme is testing new approaches to research, notably with regards practitioner-researcher integration and transdisciplinary research co-leadership. Other critical risks relate to urban development timescales, uncertainties in upstream-downstream causality, and the demonstration of impact. [Abstract copyright: Copyright: © 2022 Black D et al.

A Systems-based Approach to Creating Value from Infrastructure Interdependencies

Abstract: Current planning and appraisal processes treat infrastructure as discrete, sector-specific assets, and as a consequence fail to identify and exploit potentially valuable interdependencies. Similarly, these silo-based approaches are unable to identify potentially hazardous and costly interdependencies in a systematic manner. A major challenge then for providers of modern infrastructure, is to realise the innovative opportunities in interdependencies, and so increase value-for-money, sustainability and resilience. To achieve this it is necessary to recognise that real-world infrastructure ‘systems’ are highly interconnected, both with each other and with the socio-economic and natural systems in which they are located. This paper presents a focused set of the findings from a research partnership between the University of Bristol and University College London, sponsored by HM Treasury in the UK. It proposes an ‘open-systems’, cross-sectoral approach to create and manage beneficial infrastructure interdependencies, and comprises a framework of principles (‘stewardship’, ‘shared-governance’ and ‘interdiscipliniarity’), and associated and systems-based tools. These have been applied to four case studies relating to the UK’s National Infrastructure Programme, three of which are summarized in this paper. Citation: Rosenberg, G. & Carhart, N. (2014). A Systems-based Approach to Creating Value from Infrastructure Interdependencies. In: Campbell P. and Perez P. (Eds), Proceedings of the International Symposium of Next Generation Infrastructure, 1-4 October 2013, SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong, Australia