Revealing circular material flow in Terrazzo making process

This paper investigates the value in material expression that reveals the material resource flow through terrazzo making process. The potential of the patterning process as a vital practice in terrazzo making is posed through attention to the use of salvaged elements and fragmented pieces of the material. They are an essential part of circular economy practice knowledge. The patterning process, such as reinforcement and recombination of salvaged materials is decreasing carbon emissions produced by fabricating new components of the terrazzo. Besides, the patterning process enables the materialization of the design intention and locals’ interests and particularities; in which it adds value to the material. This study was conducted through a workshop in Lombok, Indonesia, as part of an exhibition of architectural materials that were produced locally from earth-based ingredients. It is found that the value of sustainability lies in its ability to promote such circular strategies that can enable improved material resource efficiency as well as generate material value.

A Resource Flow Based Branch-and-bound Algorithm to Solve Fuzzy Stochastic Resource-constrained Project Scheduling Problem

In this paper a resource flow based branch-and-bound procedure is designed to solve the well-known resource constrained project scheduling problem under the mixed uncertainty of fuzziness and randomness (FS-RCPSP). The objective is to minimize the expected makespan of the project subject to precedence and resource constraints. The proposed branch-and-bound can be employed to obtain optimal solutions and also can be truncated in order to find promising near optimal solutions. The depth-first strategy is utilized for constructing the search tree and earliest start time (EST) concept is adopted for selecting a node for further branching while traversing the tree down to the leaves. The performance of developed branch-and-bound is benchmarked against CPLEX and SADESP across an extensive set of 960 problems. The results returned by the proposed algorithm show experimentally its effectiveness to solve the FS-RCPSP.

Economic security of agricultural enterprises in the trajectory of resource flow

The article considers theoretical, methodological, and practical aspects of increasing the level of economic security of agricultural enterprises as a system that embodies the state of stable equilibrium of its components in the trajectory of resource flow when the environment changes, taking into account the restructuring of amplification factors. The necessity of a synergetic approach to balancing the state of stable equilibrium of functional components of economic security is proved. It is substantiated that economic security creates such a “security corridor” of the enterprise, which ensures its long-term progressive development, embodying it as a system that changes in response to any changes in the environment; forming a stable trajectory of resource flows; maintaining their synchronicity and rhythm by restructuring the random factors of influence, reducing bifurcation (state of unstable equilibrium), determining the critical point and increasing the amplification (action) of system parameters for further formation of new order imperatives. A methodical approach to the diagnosis of forming components of economic security of agricultural enterprises, which minimizes their number, avoids double counting of coefficients by forming a system of indicators for each component, taking into account the contour of the amplification (bifurcation) of the system equilibrium. The indicators of functional components of economic security of agricultural enterprises were combined. Diagnosis of economic security is carried out and indicators of functional components of agroholdings of Ukraine are identified. The level of economic security and its functional components is forecasted. The model of the optimal level of economic security of agricultural enterprises (agroholdings) in the interaction of isolated parts of components and their agreed indicators is presented.

Influence of rate of resource flow on dynamics of community of people and artificial beings

We develop and analyze a population model allowing us to examine a system, where people coexist with artificial beings (robots) and the both consume the same resource entering the system. The robot population consists of friendly and aggressive robots that differ in their attitudes towards people. We propose a system of differential equations, which define a dynamics of the populations of people, friendly robots and aggressive robots, and discuss different scenarios of the system evolution including those that lead to disappearance of the human population. We determine conditions that ensure a more or less prosperous future for humanity. We analyze the behavior of the system for different time dependences of the rate of the resource flow (a constant function, a step-like function, constant functions with undershoots and overshoots, a periodic function, monotonically increasing and decreasing functions). Our analysis shows that the dynamics of the rate of the resource flow defines the changes of the tendencies of the population sizes. Among the obtained solutions, there are solutions that lead to an equilibrium between populations. For people this equilibrium may be regarded as favorable if robots prefer to benefit from communication with people, but not from their extermination. However, equilibrium solutions imply a constant or slowly changes of the rate of the resource flow. Short-term changes of the rate of the resource flow modify the balance between the human population and the robot population. Accumulation of the changes can even lead to disappearance of one of the populations. Qualitative analyzes of the proposed system of differential equations along with computer simulations allow us to conclude that there are some necessary conditions for a well-being of the humans and robots. These conditions are as follows. Firstly, the benefit of the robot from communicating with people has to be higher than the benefit from their extermination. Secondly, to prevent the appearance of the aggressive robots the humanity has to regulate effectively the size of its own population. Thirdly, people have to be able to restrict their needs while maintaining the reproduction rate.