scholarly journals Empowering Decision Makers to Avoid the Oversizing of Building Service Systems

Author(s):  
Darren Anthony Jones ◽  
Claudia Margot Eckert

AbstractOversizing of building service systems has a direct impact on building efficiency and operational costs. The research of this paper highlights several major contributors to the issue of oversizing. A key factor is the excessive and uncoordinated application of design margins applied during the multiple stages of a building services project; others include, a lack of communication and transparency across the various stakeholder groups, and the use of vague or unreliable data upon which initial project requirements are based. The impact of these factors on system performance and cost, and how these can impede on a building's ability to meet energy efficiency targets are analysed and discussed.The paper emphasises the need to develop robust processes that capture the scope and rationale for the margins applied, and to communicate this knowledge in a clear and unambiguous format, to all project stakeholders. The development of flexible and alternative design solutions that apply diversity principles, such as different backup systems to provide resilience rather than the traditional ‘like-for- like’ redundancy solutions, are also explored.

Author(s):  
Sewmini Jayatilake ◽  
Jonathan M. Bunker

The operation of a bus rapid transit (BRT) station platform is a key factor that affects BRT system performance. As waiting passengers occupy more platform space than circulating passengers, evaluation of their distribution across the platform is important. Public transport systems have been affected by the global pandemic Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This may have affected the waiting passenger distribution on BRT platform space. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the impact of COVID-19 on waiting passenger distribution on a platform during the peak period at an important station on the BRT system in Brisbane, Australia. Manual data collection was carried out before COVID-19 and during COVID-19. Waiting passenger counts in each case were evaluated separately to identify variation across the platform. The total waiting passenger count on the platform at a given time reduced significantly during COVID-19. To compare the two cases, data sets were normalized, and statistical analysis performed. The test results indicated that the distribution of waiting passengers during COVID-19 has significantly changed, bringing more waiting passengers into the platform center than the two ends, whereas before COVID-19, more waiting passengers were observed at the upstream half of the platform. There was also greater temporal variation across the whole platform during COVID-19. These findings were used to postulate the reasons behind the changes resulting from COVID-19, which affected platform operation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 215-224
Author(s):  
D. A. Jones ◽  
C. Eckert ◽  
P. Garthwaite

AbstractThe capacity of building services in many hospitals exceeds the requirements by significant amounts. Oversizing of building services has a direct impact on building efficiency and operational costs, ultimately impacting upon patient care, by diverting much needed funding. A key factor leading to the oversizing is the excessive and uncoordinated application of design margins across various project stages. Based on a hospital case study, this paper analyses the reasons for the overdesign of a replacement cooling system and raises the importance of managing margins activity to avoid overdesign.


2009 ◽  
pp. 54-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Shastitko ◽  
S. Avdasheva ◽  
S. Golovanova

The analysis of competition policy under economic crisis is motivated by the fact that competition is a key factor for the level of productivity. The latter, in its turn, influences the scope and length of economic recession. In many Russian markets buyers' gains decline because of the weakness of competition, since suppliers are reluctant to cut prices in spite of the decreasing demand. Data on prices in Russia and abroad in the second half of 2008 show asymmetric price rigidity. At least two questions are important under economic crisis: the 'division of labor' between pro-active and protective tools of competition policy and the impact of anti-crisis policy on competition. Protective competition policy is insufficient in transition economy, especially in the days of crisis it should be supplemented with the well-designed industrial policy measures which do not contradict the goals of competition. The preferable tools of anti-crisis policy are also those that do not restrain competition.


Author(s):  
Rodrigo Cueva ◽  
Guillem Rufian ◽  
Maria Gabriela Valdes

The use of Customer Relationship Managers to foster customers loyalty has become one of the most common business strategies in the past years.  However, CRM solutions do not fill the abundance of happily ever-after relationships that business needs, and each client’s perception is different in the buying process.  Therefore, the experience must be precise, in order to extend the loyalty period of a customer as much as possible. One of the economic sectors in which CRM’s have improved this experience is retailing, where the personalized attention to the customer is a key factor.  However, brick and mortar experiences are not enough to be aware in how environmental changes could affect the industry trends in the long term.  A base unified theoretical framework must be taken into consideration, in order to develop an adaptable model for constructing or implementing CRMs into companies. Thanks to this approximation, the information is complemented, and the outcome will increment the quality in any Marketing/Sales initiative. The goal of this article is to explore the different factors grouped by three main domains within the impact of service quality, from a consumer’s perspective, in both on-line and off-line retailing sector.  Secondly, we plan to go a step further and extract base guidelines about previous analysis for designing CRM’s solutions focused on the loyalty of the customers for a specific retailing sector and its product: Sports Running Shoes.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena S. Wisniewski

With companies now recognizing how artificial intelligence (AI), digitalization, the internet of things (IoT), and data science affect value creation and the maintenance of a competitive advantage, their demand for talented individuals with both management skills and a strong understanding of technology will grow dramatically. There is a need to prepare and train our current and future decision makers and leaders to have an understanding of AI and data science, the significant impact these technologies are having on business, how to develop AI strategies, and the impact all of this will have on their employees’ roles. This paper discusses how business schools can fulfill this need by incorporating AI into their business curricula, not only as stand-alone courses but also integrated into traditional business sequences, and establishing interdisciplinary efforts and collaborative industry partnerships. This article describes how the College of Business and Public Policy (CBPP) at the University of Alaska Anchorage is implementing multiple approaches to meet these needs and prepare future leaders and decision makers. These approaches include a detailed description of CBPP’s first AI course and related student successes, the integration of AI into additional business courses such as entrepreneurship and GSCM, and the creation of an AI and Data Science Lab in partnership with the College of Engineering and an investment firm.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dave L Dixon ◽  
William L Baker

BACKGROUND The impact and quality of a faculty members publications is a key factor in promotion and tenure decisions and career advancement. Traditional measures, including citation counts and journal impact factor, have notable limitations. Since 2010, alternative metrics have been proposed as another means of assessing the impact and quality of scholarly work. The Altmetric Attention Score is an objective score frequently used to determine the immediate reach of a published work across the web, including news outlets, blogs, social media, and more. Several studies evaluating the correlation between the Altmetric Attention Score and number of citations have found mixed results and may be discipline-specific. OBJECTIVE To determine the correlation between higher Altmetric Attention Scores and citation count for journal articles published in major pharmacy journals. METHODS This cross-sectional study evaluated articles from major pharmacy journals ranked in the top 10% according to the Altmetric Attention Score. Sources of attention that determined the Altmetric Attention Score were obtained, as well each articles open access status, article type, study design, and topic. Correlation between journal characteristics, including the Altmetric Attention Score and number of citations, was assessed using the Spearman’s correlation test. A Kruskal-Wallis 1-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare the Altmetric Attention Scores between journals. RESULTS Six major pharmacy journals were identified. A total of 1,376 articles were published in 2017 and 137 of these represented the top 10% with the highest Altmetric Attention Scores. The median Altmetric Attention Score was 19 (IQR 15-28). Twitter and Mendeley were the most common sources of attention. Over half (56.2%) of the articles were original investigations and 49.8% were either cross-sectional, qualitative, or cohort studies. No significant correlation was found between the Altmetric Attention Score and citation count (rs=0.07, P = 0.485). Mendeley was the only attention source that correlated with the number of citations (rs=0.486, P<0.001). The median Altmetric Attention Score varied widely between each journal (P<0.001). CONCLUSIONS The overall median Altmetric Attention score of 19 suggests articles published in major pharmacy journals are near the top 5% of all scientific output. However, we found no correlation between the Altmetric Attention Score and number of citations for articles published in major pharmacy journals in the year 2017.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (21) ◽  
pp. 9090
Author(s):  
Jungeun Lee ◽  
Hye-Young Joo

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the support of top management significantly improves the level of environmental collaboration with participating companies upstream and downstream of the green supply chain and the impact on environmental performance. The results of the empirical analysis of 301 companies that are establishing a green supply chain are as follows. First, top management’s support positively affects the level of collaboration with suppliers and customers in the green supply chain. Secondly, support from top management has a direct impact on the company’s environmental performance. Thirdly, the environmental collaboration of participating companies partially plays a mediation role between the support of top management and the environmental performance. This study has significance in that it analyzes the theoretical mechanism of top management’s support for environmental collaboration with participating companies, leading to environmental performance, and draws implications.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 195
Author(s):  
Akash Gupta ◽  
Adnan Al-Anbuky

Hip fracture incidence is life-threatening and has an impact on the person’s physical functionality and their ability to live independently. Proper rehabilitation with a set program can play a significant role in recovering the person’s physical mobility, boosting their quality of life, reducing adverse clinical outcomes, and shortening hospital stays. The Internet of Things (IoT), with advancements in digital health, could be leveraged to enhance the backup intelligence used in the rehabilitation process and provide transparent coordination and information about movement during activities among relevant parties. This paper presents a post-operative hip fracture rehabilitation model that clarifies the involved rehabilitation process, its associated events, and the main physical movements of interest across all stages of care. To support this model, the paper proposes an IoT-enabled movement monitoring system architecture. The architecture reflects the key operational functionalities required to monitor patients in real time and throughout the rehabilitation process. The approach was tested incrementally on ten healthy subjects, particularly for factors relevant to the recognition and tracking of movements of interest. The analysis reflects the significance of personalization and the significance of a one-minute history of data in monitoring the real-time behavior. This paper also looks at the impact of edge computing at the gateway and a wearable sensor edge on system performance. The approach provides a solution for an architecture that balances system performance with remote monitoring functional requirements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emalie Rosewarne ◽  
Michael Moore ◽  
Wai-Kwan Chislett ◽  
Alexandra Jones ◽  
Kathy Trieu ◽  
...  

Abstract Background Public health advocacy strategies facilitate policy change by bringing key health issues to the forefront of public and political discourse, influencing decision-makers and public opinion, and increasing policy demand. The Victorian Salt Reduction Partnership (VSRP) was established in 2014 in response to inadequate government action to improve population diets in Australia. This study aimed to evaluate the success of the VSRP’s advocacy strategy in achieving policy change. Methods Documentation of VSRP activities and outputs were collected, and semi-structured interviews conducted as part of a comprehensive process evaluation. For this study, the Kotter Plus 10-step public health advocacy evaluation framework was used to guide data extraction, analysis, and synthesis. Results A sense of urgency for salt reduction was generated by producing evidence and outlining the potential impact of a state-based salt reduction programme. This enabled the creation of a coalition with diverse skills and expertise, which facilitated the development of an innovative and collaborative advocacy action plan. A clear change vision was established, but communication of the vision to decision-makers was lacking, which reduced the impact of the programme as decision-makers were not provided with a clear incentive for policy change. As a result, while programme outputs were achieved, these did not translate to achieving broader strategic goals during a limited-term intervention in a political climate unconcerned with salt. Conclusions The Kotter Plus 10-step framework was a useful tool for evaluating the success of the VSRP advocacy strategy. The framework enabled the identification of key strengths, including the creation of the guiding coalition, and areas where efforts could be improved in future similar strategies, such as effective communication within partnerships and to decision-makers, to better influence policy and improve public health impact.


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