The energy efficiency of existing buildings is a crucial factor in addressing energy consumption challenges in European countries, accounting for nearly 40% of the total energy usage. One such ...country is Cyprus, which faces significant challenges in transforming its existing building stock into energy-efficient and sustainable structures. To face this situation, extensive focus has been made by the government on the energy-efficient retrofit of non-residential public buildings erected before 2010, which lack any energy efficiency measures. This study examines the case of the Pano Polemidia Cultural Hall (PPCH), which represents the building stock of that period. Through the simulation of two scenarios, before and after the adoption of retrofit measures, the existing energy performance is initially evaluated and then the adoption of sustainable solutions, which improve substantially the energy efficiency and can be easily adopted from the relevant authorities, is explored. These retrofit measures include installation of HVAC system, covering of the shell of the building with external thermal insulation, lighting replacement with LED devices, installation of PV system and solar panels, and replacement of the external openings with aluminum windows. The results derived show that the energy consumption of the building was reduced from 468 to 218 kWh/m2·yr, with renewable energy sources (RESs) contributing 177 kWh/m2·yr, the CO2 emissions were reduced from 136.73 to 11.5 kg/m2·yr, while the reduction in energy consumption per sector ranged from 25% in lighting to 83% in hot water. Therefore, it is evident that a comprehensive retrofitting plan can transform the PPCH into a near-zero energy consumption building that also provides value to the local community and can act as a successful example for any other non-residential buildings with similar characteristics.
Cirebon is one of the regions of West Java which has around 54,306 MSMEs. However, currently, there are still many MSEs actors who don't understand the urgency of halal certification and ...incomprehensible how to apply for a halal certificate for their products. This community service activity aims to socialize and assist in applying for halal product certification for MSEs through the self-declaration program. The research method is Community Education through training and counselling conducted in the Pasaleman and Beber area with the category of food and beverage products. The data were used descriptive analysis. The results show that the mentoring participants gave a positive response to these activities, and MSEs received assistance in the practice of submitting halal products to the SIHALAL application. Some MSEs actors were able to apply for halal certification with the verification application status completed by National Fatwa Committee, LP3H, some were still in the draft submission and some had not yet submitted because business actors were more focused on product sales, so the time to complete the submission documents was limited. Furthermore, the community service team evaluates activities and monitors tracking periodically after submitting halal certification until release certificate halal product.
In the study, the authors have examined the provisions of the Romanian Civil Code (art. 375-378) concerning the marriage dissolution through extrajudicial agreement, indicating administrative and ...notarial divorce. Today’s media coverage of divorce often gives the impression that divorce is a new and modern phenomenon. But this is not so. Divorce has been around as long as bad marriages. However, the ways we divorce have changed. In the beginning, divorce was a personal decision determined by individuals, not by religion or the law.
To assure the confidentiality of the sensitive data stored in public cloud storages, the data owners should encrypt their data before submitting them to the clouds. However, it brings new challenge ...for us to effectively share the encrypted data in the public clouds. The paradigm of proxy re-encryption provides a promising solution to data sharing as it enables a data owner to delegate the decryption rights of the encrypted data to the authorized recipients without any direct interaction. Certificate-based proxy re-encryption is a new cryptographic primitive to effectively support the data confidentiality in public cloud storages, which enjoys the advantages of certificate-based encryption while providing the functionalities of proxy re-encryption. In this paper, we propose a certificate-based proxy re-encryption scheme without bilinear pairings. The proposed scheme is proven secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Due to avoiding the time-consuming bilinear pairing operations, the proposed scheme significantly reduces the computation cost. Compared to the previous certificate-based proxy re-encryption schemes with bilinear pairings, it enjoys obvious advantage in the computation efficiency, and thus is more suitable for the computation-limited or power-constrained devices.
•This paper proposes a pairing-free certificate-based proxy re-encryption scheme.•The scheme is proven secure under the classic CDH assumption.•The scheme is particularly suitable for the computation-limited devices.
The Digital Building Logbook (DBL) was first introduced together with the Renovation Wave initiative, promoted by the European Commission and then defined in the proposal for a recast of the energy ...performance of buildings Directive, in December 2021, as a repository of relevant data on a building that aims to alleviate the current lack of information of the European building stock. Several data sources on buildings already exist at different levels in Europe, and their interlinkage is crucial for a proper data population of the future Building Logbook. However, these data sources are scattered and heterogeneous, thus, they need to be evaluated to determine their suitability for the DBL. This paper analyses the sources that currently exist in Spain and Italy, focusing respectively on Aragon and Lombardy region, and addressing their interoperability possibilities and the indicators collected. The results show that the available data are not fully aligned with the relevant indicators from the existing proposals for a European DBL, and that few data sources are currently suitable for the DBL, since most of them are not interoperable. Considering the features and limitations of the data sources, a dataflow general scheme based on the definition of the DBL is defined for each case study, and guidelines are presented on data collection and interoperability in order to make its implementation feasible at the European scale.
•DBL data is available in existing digital sources: 40% in Spain and 35% in Italy.•Interoperable data must be promoted: the cadastres of Spain and Italy are not.•Some data sources are interoperable in Spain, such as Aragon's EPC registry.•Some data sources are interoperable in Italy, such as Lombardy's CEER and CURIT.•Open data is encouraged: now 36% in Spain and 90% in Italy.
•Building-physical- and statistical methods can be combined into a hybrid model.•User behavior need not be modelled in a hybrid building stock energy model (BSEM).•Effects of energy-efficiency ...measures can be studied in a hybrid BSEM.•Hybrid building stock energy modelling improves accuracy.•Results of a hybrid BSEM can be validated.
Assessing the energy-saving potential in a building stock requires accurate prediction of the energy use in buildings, as well as estimating effects of imposing energy-conservation measures. Bottom-up building physics-based building stock energy models are widely used for this purpose. However, deficient data (e.g. data related to the use of the building) compel modellers to use normative assumptions in its place, thereby compromising the accuracy of building-physics based models. Furthermore, validation of building-physics based building stock energy models is often lacking.
In the present study, a hybrid bottom-up building stock energy model was developed in order to overcome the drawbacks of traditional building-physics (engineering) based modelling methods. Using a sample of more than 100,000 residential buildings, individual building-physics based models were calibrated against energy use data in a multiple linear regression setting, thereby providing a novel hybrid bottom-up building stock energy model. Furthermore, embedding building-physics based building energy models in a statistical model made it possible to validate the model by means of common statistical measures.
The proposed hybrid model provided significantly more accurate estimates of the energy use in an unseen sample of buildings than a purely building-physics based building stock energy model. Moreover, as the hybrid model included a unique building-physical description of each building in the sample, it could be used for estimating the effect of imposing an arbitrary energy upgrade.
This way of setting up a hybrid building stock energy model provides a simple, yet accurate, approach for estimating the energy-saving potential of a building stock that could be used for informing policy makers and other stakeholders.
The method behind the UK Display Energy Certificate (DEC) improves the comparability of benchmarking by accounting for variations in weather and occupancy. To improve the comparability further, the ...incorporation of other features that are intrinsic to buildings (e.g. built form and building services) deserve exploration. This study investigates the impact of these features and explores ways to improve further comparability in benchmarking the energy performance of schools. Statistical analyses of approximately 7700 schools were performed, followed by analyses of causal factors in 465 schools in greater detail using artificial neural networks (ANNs), each designed to understand and identify the factors that have significant impact on the pattern of energy use of schools. Changes in the pattern of energy use of schools have occurred over the past four years. This fact highlights issues associated with static benchmarks. A significant difference in energy performance between primary and secondary schools meant that it was necessary to re-examine the way non-domestic buildings are classified. Factors were identified as having significant impact on the pattern of energy use. The characteristics raise new possibilities for developing sector-specific methods and improving comparability.
The 12th GCC Closed Forum was held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, on 9 April 2018. Representatives from international bioanalytical Contract Research Organizations were in attendance in order to discuss ...scientific and regulatory issues specific to bioanalysis. The issues discussed at the meeting included: critical reagents; oligonucleotides; certificates of analysis; method transfer; high resolution mass spectrometry; flow cytometry; recent regulatory findings and case studies involving stability and nonclinical immunogenicity. Conclusions and consensus from discussions of these topics are included in this article.
Investigation and management of stillbirth Obaro, Jemimah; Heazell, Alexander
Obstetrics, gynaecology and reproductive medicine,
08/2023, Volume:
33, Issue:
8
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Stillbirth describes the delivery of a baby with no signs of life in relation to thresholds of either gestational age or birthweight. In the UK, a stillbirth is legally defined as the delivery of a ...baby at or after 24 weeks’ gestation or 500 g where gestation is unknown. A history of previous stillbirth remains one of the strongest risk factors for subsequent stillbirth and other adverse outcomes in a subsequent pregnancy. According to World Health Organization (WHO), there are nearly 2 million stillbirths globally every year. There is a drive to reduce the rate of stillbirths by 50% in England by 2025 and a global target of 12 or fewer stillbirths per 1000 total births in every country by 2030. The significant psychological burden placed on parents following a stillbirth and the associated increased risk of complications in subsequent pregnancies need appropriate management. This article covers the investigation and management of stillbirth reflecting current UK practice.
Edge computing is an emerging computing paradigm, which extends the functions of cloud center to the edge of the networks, and brings great convenience to solving problems of delay and bandwidth in ...the traditional cloud computing paradigm. In edge computing architecture, one-to-many communication is a important communication mode that supports the edge nodes to send one message to multiple terminal devices in one broadcast report. To build a secure one-to-many communication, several multi-receiver signcryption (MRSC) schemes have been brought forward to ensure the security of broadcast messages. However, the existing MRSC schemes need the heavy computation and communication cost, and is not suitable for IoT terminal devices with limited resources. Besides, most of the existing MRSC schemes are vulnerable to the security and privacy leakage, and fail in achieving the decryption fairness. To solve these problems, based on the implicit certificate (IC) cryptosystem and polynomial interpolation evaluation, this paper proposes an provably secure multi-receiver IC-based signcryption (MRICSC) scheme for one-to-many communication in edge computing. The security analysis evidences the proposed MRICSC scheme can ensure the security. With the experimental results indicating that the proposed MRICSC scheme achieves the better performance than existing schemes.
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