Optimizing a joint multi-operator planning to reduce deployment costs and urban hinder

Unavailable roads and sidewalks are common in any city, often linked to utility works, urgent repairs, periodic maintenance or installing new infrastructure. Independent of the cause of the utility work, hinder for the city environment is common due to closed roads and associated diversions, unreachable shops, or noise disturbance for people near the construction sites. Despite the fact this could lead to less hinder and also to noteworthy cost reductions, on only a limited number of locations do utility operators decide to collaborate, mainly due to little communication between the different utility operators. To address this issue, we introduce an abstract score-based model which can score a multi-utility planning for both single-actor as well as multi-actor parameters. This model aims to maximally respect the budget of each actor, while optimizing the levels of synergy between multiple actors. Using Mixed Integer Linear Programming, a new synergy-focused multi-utility planning can be generated. This planning model has been applied to real data, thereby showing the model can increase the amount of collaboration expressed as 'number of weeks in collaboration' up to a significant 94%. As this is a theoretical model for a practical problem, an extensive sensitivity analysis was performed to verify the impact of the different parameters at play. We have shown the model is able to generate major improvements under a large range of constraints. Although the results are promising, we do argue that this solution should not be considered a black box to optimize a multi-utility planning without further human intervention

The Usability of E-learning Platforms in Higher Education: A Systematic Mapping Study

The use of e-learning in higher education has increased significantly in recent years, which has led to several studies being conducted to investigate the usability of the platforms that support it. A variety of different usability evaluation methods and attributes have been used, and it has therefore become important to start reviewing this work in a systematic way to determine how the field has developed in the last 15 years. This paper describes a systematic mapping study that performed searches on five electronic libraries to identify usability issues and methods that have been used to evaluate e-learning platforms. Sixty-one papers were selected and analysed, with the majority of studies using a simple research design reliant on questionnaires. The usability attributes measured were mostly related to effectiveness, satisfaction, efficiency, and perceived ease of use. Furthermore, several research gaps have been identified and recommendations have been made for further work in the area of the usability of online learning