The link between infrastructure and green logistics performance in the services sector has been studied in this study. The mediating function of business performance and service quality are also ...discussed in this study as this is a deductive and cross-sectional study, the hypothesis was first formulated based on the literature gap and then tested. The unit of analysis is management personnel, entry-level economists, and financial analysts. The structural equation modeling-partial least-squares analysis (PLS-SEM) approach was employed in this investigation. The authors validated the reliability and validity of constructs and indicators used to measure constructs by assessing measurement models. The measurement methodology has then utilized to confirm the study hypothesis. The study results demonstrate that infrastructure and green logistics performance have a beneficial influence on services trade and environment; besides that, service quality and company performance are also important factors in improving services trade in China. Furthermore, firm performance and service quality have been identified as strong positive mediators between Green logistic performance, infrastructure, and services trade & environment. This study has a theoretical contribution by introducing, verifying, and proposing a new measurement for three variables: infrastructure, green logistic performance, and services trade & environment. This study has numerous relevant and helpful implications for government agencies and departments. It will provide a pathway for the upcoming industry practitioners in terms of green logistic performance and service trade & environment.
For next-generation smart cities, small UAVs (also known as drones) are vital to incorporate in airspace for advancing the transportation systems. This paper presents a review of recent developments ...in relation to the application of UAVs in three major domains of transportation, namely; road safety, traffic monitoring and highway infrastructure management. Advances in computer vision algorithms to extract key features from UAV acquired videos and images are discussed along with the discussion on improvements made in traffic flow analysis methods, risk assessment and assistance in accident investigation and damage assessments for bridges and pavements. Additionally, barriers associated with the wide-scale deployment of UAVs technology are identified and countermeasures to overcome these barriers are discussed, along with their implications.
•A single sustainability performance indicator is proposed for highway bridges.•A robust sustainability-informed decision support framework is presented.•Optimal maintenance plans are found ...considering multi-attribute utility theory.•The risk attitude of the decision maker affects optimal intervention strategies.
Throughout their service life, highway bridges deteriorate due to increasing traffic loads and aggressive environmental conditions. Aging of materials can have significant effects on the structural performance of highway bridges. A comprehensive risk assessment procedure is crucial in evaluating and ultimately mitigating detrimental consequences of structural failure to the economy, society, and the environment. The proposed sustainability-based maintenance optimization decision-support framework provides decision makers with optimal life-cycle maintenance actions that balance conflicting objectives. Utility theory is employed herein in order to effectively capture the sustainability performance of highway bridges and impact of the decision maker’s risk attitude. The main objective of this framework is to reduce the extent of the consequences of structural failure to the economy, society, and the surrounding environment. The capabilities of the proposed approach are demonstrated on an existing highway bridge.
Structural systems are under deterioration due to ageing, mechanical stressors, and harsh environment, among other threats. Corrosion and fatigue can cause gradual structural deterioration. Moreover, ...natural and man-made hazards may lead to a sudden drop in the structural performance. Inspection and maintenance actions are performed to monitor the structural safety and maintain the performance over certain thresholds. However, these actions must be effectively planned throughout the life-cycle of a system to ensure the optimum budget allocation and maximum possible service life without adverse effects on the structural system safety. Life-cycle engineering provides rational means to optimise life-cycle aspects, starting from the initial design and construction to dismantling and replacing the system at the end of its service life. This paper presents a brief overview of the recent research achievements in the field of life-cycle engineering for civil and marine structural systems and indicates future directions in this research field. Several aspects of life-cycle engineering are presented, including the performance prediction under uncertainty and optimisation of life-cycle cost and intervention activities, as well as the role of structural health monitoring and non-destructive testing techniques in supporting the life-cycle management decisions. Risk, resilience, sustainability, and their integration into the life-cycle management are also discussed.
The problem addressed in this research is the existence of employees who lack understanding of their duties, functions, and responsibilities, resulting in delayed completion of tasks. Furthermore, ...the level of employee discipline is low, as seen from the high rate of absenteeism. The employees' performance is also suboptimal, and the office lacks adequate facilities. This study aims to investigate the influence of facility management on employee performance, discipline on employee performance, and the combined effect of facility management and discipline on employee performance. The population of this research is employees of a regional company in Medan city, consisting of 50 respondents. The data collection technique used in this research is saturated sampling, and the data sources are primary and secondary data. Quantitative analysis and multiple linear regression analysis are employed in data analysis. The results of the multiple regression analysis show that facility management and discipline have a positive and significant effect on employee performance. The partial test results show that facility management has a positive and significant effect on employee performance, while the discipline variable also has a positive and significant effect on employee performance. The coefficient of determination is 0.525 or 52.5%. This indicates that 52.5% of the dependent variable, which is employee performance, can be explained by the facility management and discipline variables in the model, while the remaining 47.5% is influenced by other variables outside the model.
•Integrated management of water, wastewater, and transportation is studied.•Local context challenges implementing integrated infrastructure management approach.•Practitioners’ willingness to ...collaborate drives implementing integrative approach.•Customers also benefit from implementing integrative management approach.
Infrastructure systems are known to be interdependent systems; however, infrastructure systems are typically managed individually by agencies in charge of these systems. The existing literature has proposed the concept of an integrated infrastructure management approach, yet this literature has focused on managing infrastructure systems in short-term contexts (e.g., response to natural and human-made disasters). As such, limited understanding exists about implementing an integrated infrastructure management approach in the long-term (i.e., maintenance and rehabilitation). This study aims to explore the challenges, drivers, and benefits of implementing an integrated urban infrastructure management approach by agencies managing urban water, wastewater, stormwater, and transportation infrastructure systems in the long-term. This study qualitatively analyzed 15 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders in the management of infrastructure systems in Chile. It was found that the implementation of an integrated infrastructure management approach is challenged and driven by organizational instead of technical aspects. It was found that the local context where agencies operate represents a challenge for the successful implementation, the willingness to collaborate of infrastructure agencies’ workers represents a driver to implementation, and that benefits encompass agencies and users. Infrastructure agencies can use our findings to account for contextual conditions to successfully implement an integrated infrastructure management approach.
Within the literature, concerns have been raised that centralised urban water systems are maladapted to challenges associated with climate change, population growth and other socio-economic and ...environmental strains. This paper provides a critical assessment of the discourse that surrounds emerging approaches to urban water management and infrastructure provision. As such, ‘sustainable urban water management’ (SUWM) concepts are scrutinized to highlight the limitations and strengths in the current lines of argument and point towards unaddressed complexities in the transformational agendas advocated by SUWM proponents. Taking an explicit infrastructure view, it is shown that the specific context of the urban water sector means that changes to infrastructure systems occur as an incremental hybridisation process. This process is driven by a range of factors including lock-in effects of legacy solutions, normative values and vested interests of agents, cost and performance certainty and perceptions of risk. Different views of these factors help explain why transformational agendas have not achieved the change SUWM proponents call for and point to the need for a critical reassessment of the system effects and economics of alternative service provision models.
•Urban water has to date developed under a predominantly centralised model.•The literature abounds with calls for sustainable urban water management (SUWM).•Impediments to change reflect lock-in effects of existing socio-technical systems.•However, there are also conceptual and practical weaknesses in arguments for SUWM.•A societal business case for a broader system transition still needs to be made.
Smarter Cities and Their Innovation Challenges Naphade, M; Banavar, G; Harrison, C ...
Computer (Long Beach, Calif.),
2011-June, 2011-06-00, 20110601, Letnik:
44, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The transformation to smarter cities will require innovation in planning, management, and operations. Several ongoing projects around the world illustrate the opportunities and challenges of this ...transformation. Cities must get smarter to address an array of emerging urbanization challenges, and as the projects highlighted in this article show, several distinct paths are available. The number of cities worldwide pursuing smarter transformation is growing rapidly. However, these efforts face many political, socioeconomic, and technical hurdles. Changing the status quo is always difficult for city administrators, and smarter city initiatives often require extensive coordination, sponsorship, and support across multiple functional silos. The need to visibly demonstrate a continuous return on investment also presents a challenge. The technical obstacles will center on achieving system interoperability, ensuring security and privacy, accommodating a proliferation of sensors and devices, and adopting a new closed-loop human-computer interaction paradigm.
Efficient management of temporary infrastructure is pivotal for the success and sustainability of periodic fairs and festivals. Coordination among stakeholders involved in procurement, supply, and ...timely delivery is essential. The involvement of multiple stakeholders results in varying cost engagements at different levels. This study proposes a centralised operational framework for infrastructure distribution, potentially reducing overall costs. Focusing on West Midnapore district, India, the research aims to introduce a sustainable and cost-effective strategy for temporary infrastructure management. Recognising the significance of transportation in managing temporary infrastructures, the study emphasises reducing travel distances and minimising site occupancy time to enhance cost efficiency. Using a linear regression model, the required infrastructural goods for fairs in the district are quantified. A delivery schedule is devised, employing vehicle route planning techniques to determine reduced truck travel distances. Comparing different distribution frameworks, the study finds that a centralised approach utilising three trucks is the most sustainable and cost-effective solution. Moreover, it examines and quantifies the social cost incurred when infrastructure items exceed the allowed fair duration in the current system. Implementing this proposed approach enables stakeholders to balance sustainability cost-effectiveness and build an efficient infrastructure supply chain management.
In the context of modern engineering, environmental, and societal concerns, there is an increasing demand for methods able to identify rational management strategies for civil engineering systems, ...minimizing structural failure risks while optimally planning inspection and maintenance (I&M) processes. Most available methods simplify the I&M decision problem to the component level, often assuming statistical, structural, or cost independence among components, due to the computational complexity associated with global optimization methodologies under joint system-level state descriptions. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithmic framework for inference and decision-making under uncertainty for engineering systems exposed to deteriorating environments, providing optimal management strategies directly at the system level. In our approach, the decision problem is formulated as a factored partially observable Markov decision process, whose dynamics are encoded in Bayesian network conditional structures. The methodology can handle environments under equal or general, unequal deterioration correlations among components, through Gaussian hierarchical structures and dynamic Bayesian networks, decoupling the originally joint system state space to component networks conditional on shared random variables. In terms of policy optimization, we adopt a deep decentralized multi-agent actor-critic (DDMAC) reinforcement learning approach, in which the policies are approximated by actor neural networks guided by a critic network. By including deterioration dependence in the simulated environment, and by formulating the cost model at the system level, DDMAC policies intrinsically consider the underlying system-effects. This is demonstrated through numerical experiments conducted for both a 9-out-of-10 system and a steel frame under fatigue deterioration. Results demonstrate that DDMAC policies offer substantial benefits when compared to state-of-the-art heuristic approaches. The inherent consideration of system-effects by DDMAC strategies is also interpreted based on the learned policies.
•An efficient modeling framework for inference and decision-making is proposed.•Environments under general deterioration correlation are effectively treated.•Factored POMDP and DRL methods are integrated into a unified algorithmic framework.•Underlying system dependencies are intrinsically considered by POMDP-DRL policies.•POMDP-DRL policies offer substantially lower costs compared to their counterparts.
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