Agile Tool Research Articles

Models for MATLAB Simulation of a University Campus Micro-Grid

This work presents a library of microgrid (MG) component models integrated in a complete university campus MG model in the Simulink/MATLAB environment. The model allows simulations on widely varying time scales and evaluation of the electrical, economic, and environmental performance of the MG. The models include photovoltaic (PV) generation (with MPPT control), battery storage (including charge/discharge control), loads (campus buildings and outdoor lighting), electric vehicle charging stations, and interconnections. The campus MG model is shown to be useful for (i) week-long simulations throughout the year, to analyze seasonal differences; (ii) year-long simulations for the estimation of overall economic and environmental impacts; (iii) MG islanded-mode simulations. The model is an agile tool for planning the deployment and penetration of photovoltaic plants and battery storage, with consideration of economic and environmental (carbon footprint) aspects.

Towards a new supply chain manager dashboard under circular economy constraints: A case study on France textile and clothing industry

AbstractThis paper aims to propose a new dashboard in which we consider all indicators related to the sustainable supply chain (SSC) under circular economy (CE) constraints. As small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) represent 99% of all businesses in the European Union (EU), this study mainly focuses on surveys of French textile and clothing SMEs. It aims to propose a practical and agile tool to help SC managers cope with sustainability challenges and assess the performance of CE implementation in the SC of the textile and clothing industries. To achieve this objective and to develop a relevant questionnaire enabling us to prepare and conduct surveys, we first identified 63 relevant indicators through an extensive exploratory study based on a leading group in luxury and fashion and a pioneer in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Second, we conducted a survey of 46 textile and clothing companies based in France. Finally, we proposed a new comprehensive SC manager dashboard under CE constraints. From the results, we found that there are several barriers to implementing the CE concept in the textile and clothing industry, such as a lack of sustainability performance, a lack of regulation, and a lack of mandatory responsibilities of SC actors. Hence, to cope with these barriers, the SC must be circular and sustainable by highlighting more circular practices such as recycling, eco‐design, compliance with regulations, reducing waste, minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy, and water consumption. The results revealed that our new proposed dashboard highlights all these concepts that enable us to support textile and clothing SMEs to achieve high sustainable development goals. It can also be used as a decision‐making tool to help SMEs' managers, practitioners, and researchers make better sustainability decisions.

Rethinking customer engagement design: Using customer-mobilized engagement (CME) to grow business networks

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework of customer-mobilized engagement (CME) pathways where customers actively identify, engage, and mobilize hidden (new) actors (and their resources) who are beyond the reach of the focal organization. As a large proportion of value stems from connections with multiple business networks, an organization's customer network becomes an important strategic asset contributing to competitive advantage and survival. Taking a propositional approach, we conceptualize the CME pathway and elaborate on factors critical to CME drawing on two organizations for illustrative purposes. We develop three propositions explaining how customer-mobilized engagement of hidden (new) actors, resources, and engagement platforms connect dynamically via the mobilizing customer. The reinterpreted communicative value proposition increases the contribution of hidden actors and enhances and expands value outcomes for actors within the CME pathway including increased sustainable competitive advantage for the focal organization. Adopting CME adds new resources, in different ways to deliver value to an organization's diverse business streams and grow their business networks. The CME pathway provides industrial marketing managers with an agile tool to guide the design of their offerings which can adapt across business contexts and time as the social, economic, political and technological environment changes.

Emotional Strengths and Difficulties in Italian Adolescents: Analysis of Adaptation through the SDQ

An adolescent’s knowledge of him/herself (positive aspects and weaknesses) is shaped by interactions with external and internal factors, including the family context and the educational environment. The assessment of this knowledge serves to construct the concept of self-esteem. The main objective of the present study was to examine the prevalence of self-reported emotional and behavioral symptoms in a representative sample of Italian adolescents and their relationship with gender and age, using Goodman’s Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). A total of 440 adolescents (49.8% female) aged 15–18 years from the southern Italy region participated. The results show the prevalence of emotional and behavioral symptoms in the analyzed sample. Gender differences were also found in the variables under study. In conclusion, the SDQ test is offered as an agile, simplified, and effective tool, to be proposed to all formative agents who are concerned with the interest and care not only of young people, but also of the future of socio-political realities.

A Crowdsourcing Open Contest to Design a Latino-Specific COVID-19 Campaign: Mixed Methods Analysis.

BackgroundLatino communities are among the most heavily impacted populations by the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States due to intersectional barriers to care. Crowdsourcing open contests can be an effective means of community engagement but have not been well studied in Latino populations nor in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.ObjectiveThe aims of this study are to (1) implement and evaluate a crowdsourcing open contest to solicit a name for a COVID-19 social marketing campaign for Latino populations in Maryland and (2) conduct a thematic analysis of submitted entries to guide campaign messaging.MethodsTo assess the level of community engagement in this crowdsourcing open contest, we used descriptive statistics to analyze data on entries, votes, and demographic characteristics of participants. The submitted text was analyzed through inductive thematic analysis.ResultsWe received 74 entries within a 2-week period. The top 10 entries were chosen by community judges and the winner was decided by popular vote. We received 383 votes within 1 week. The most common themes were collective efficacy, self-efficacy, and perceived benefits of COVID-19 testing. We used these themes to directly inform our social marketing intervention and found that advertisements based on these themes became the highest performing.ConclusionsCrowdsourcing open contests are an effective means of community engagement and an agile tool for guiding interventions to address COVID-19, including in populations impacted by health care disparities, such as Latino communities. The thematic analysis of contest entries can be a valuable strategy to inform the development of social marketing campaign materials.

Automatic extraction of land cover statistics from satellite imagery by deep learning1

In this paper, we address the challenge of producing fully automated land cover estimates from satellite imagery through Deep Learning algorithms. We developed our system according to a tile-based, classify-and-count design. To implement the classification engine of the system, we adopted a cutting-edge Convolutional Neural Network model named Inception-V3, which we customized and trained for scene classification on the EuroSAT dataset. We tested and validated our system on two Sentinel-2 images representing quite different Italian territories (with an area of 751 km2 and 443 km2, respectively). Because no genuine ground-truth is available for the land cover of these sub-regional territories, we built a pseudo ground-truth by integrating land cover information from flagship European projects CORINE and LUCAS. A critical and careful analysis shows that our automatic land cover estimates are in good agreement with the pseudo ground-truth and offers extensive evidence of the remarkable segmentation ability of our system. The limits of our approach are also critically discussed in the paper and possible countermeasures are illustrated. When compared with traditional projects like CORINE and LUCAS, our automatic land cover estimation system exhibits three fundamental advantages: it can dramatically reduce production costs; it can allow delivering very timely and frequent land cover statistics; it can enable land cover estimation for very small territorial areas, well beyond the NUTS-2 level. As an additional outcome of land cover estimation, our system also automatically generates moderate resolution land cover maps that might be used in cartography projects as an agile first-level tool for map update or change detection purposes.

CoSimPy: An open-source python library for MRI radiofrequency Coil EM/Circuit Cosimulation

Background and objectivesThe Electromagnetic/Circuit cosimulation method represents a valuable and effective strategy to address those problems where a radiative structure has to interact with external supporting circuitries. This is of particular concern for Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), radiofrequency (RF) coils design, where the supporting circuitry optimisation represents, generally, a crucial aspect. This article presents CoSimPy, an open-source Python circuit simulation library for Electromagnetic/Circuit cosimulations and specifically optimised for MRI, RF coils design. MethodsCoSimPy is designed following an Object-orientated programming. In addition to the essential methods aimed to performed the Electromagnetic/Circuit cosimulations, many others are implemented both to simplify the standard workflow and to evaluate the RF coils performance. In this article, the theory which underlies the fundamental methods of CoSimPy is shown together with the basic framework of the library. ResultsIn the paper, the reliability of CoSimPy is successfully tested against a full-wave electromagnetic simulations involving a reference setup. The library is made available under https://github.com/umbertozanovello/CoSimPy together with a detailed documentation providing guidelines and examples. CoSimPy is distributed under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) license. ConclusionsCoSimPy demonstrated to be an agile tool employable for Electromagnetic/Circuit cosimulations. Its distribution is meant to fulfil the needs of several researchers also avoiding duplication of effort in writing custom implementations. CoSimPy is under constant development and aims to represent a coworking environment where scientists can implement additional methods whose sharing can represent an advantage for the community. Finally, even if CoSimPy is designed with special focus on MRI, it represents an efficient and practical tool potentially employable wherever electronic devices made of radiative and circuitry components are involved.

Facts of (Financial) life: Political power and re-visualization strategies

Digital visualizations have seen an exponential rise in use by politicians, candidates, and other political actors. Digital visualizations are an informative and engaging genre, but when applied by political candidates, they may also be used to persuade or mislead. However, the ways in which different actors utilize them have yet to receive systematic scholarly attention. Informed by a comprehensive theoretical framework related to political power, digital visualizations, and social media campaigns, I perform grounded qualitative content analysis of all cost-of-living visualizations posed to Facebook during the 2015 Israeli election period, by both peripheral and primary political actors. I define two main argumentation strategies ( Progress Makers & Hinderers and Re-Visualized Economy) reliant on different narrative, visual, and information-oriented strategies by different actors. An overview of the findings reveals digital visualizations as a meeting ground between the political power of actors, the rhetorical power of emotionality, and the cultural-political power of numbers. I conclude with a reflection on re-visualization as a means of expanding a fourth type of power, discursive power, wherein visualizations are used as a tool for resistance by weaker actors, against the narrative of reality promoted by stronger actors, relying on the rhetorical affordances of the digital political visualization genre to increase their political power. Digital visualizations thus offer a uniquely agile tool for political actors of all types to utilize in gaining discursive power in the competition over election narratives in the digital arena of social media.

Profeel—An open source dosimetry data visualization and analysis software

Background and objectivesThis article presents Profeel, a Matlab (MathWorks Inc., MA) based open source dosimetry data visualization and analysis software. Profeel aims to support quality assurance, dosimetry and research in the field of radiotherapy by providing an environment to visualize, process and analyse measured and simulated dosimetry data from several data sources used in radiotherapy practice and research. MethodsThe processing and analysis tools are based on routinely used dosimetry analysis methods, such as gamma analysis, different data normalizations and data filtering. Additionally the Profeel performs an automatic 1 dimensional profile and percentage depth dose analysis in accordance with International Electrotechnical Commission definitions. All data can be operated by user created custom functions and lower dimensionality data can be extracted from volume doses and dose planes. ResultsProfeel supports data import in all 3 dimensions and offers an intuitive user interface to perform data visualization, processing and analysis between simulated and measured data. Profeel and its source code are distributed free of charge under the General Public Licence (GPL). ConclusionsProfeel has shown to be an agile tool for fulfilling various needs of several researchers and since Profeel is under constant development and is an open source project, community needs, issues and bug reports are taken into account in the development.

FACTS OF (FINANCIAL) LIFE: POLITICAL POWER AND RE-VISUALIZATION STRATEGIES ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Digital visualizations have seen an exponential rise in use by politicians, candidates and other political actors. Digital visualizations may be informative and engaging as well as potentially, persuasive or misleading when applied by political candidates. However, the ways in which different actors utilize them has yet to receive systematic scholarly attention. Informed by a comprehensive theoretical framework related to political power, digital visualizations and social media campaigns, I performed grounded qualitative content-analysis of all "cost-of-living" visualizations posted to Facebook during the 2015 Israeli election period, by both peripheral and primary political actors. I define two main argumentation strategies (Progress Makers & Hinderers and Re-visualized Economy), reliant on different narrative, visual, and information-oriented choices by different actors. An overview of my findings reveals digital visualizations as a meeting ground between the political power of actors, the rhetorical power of emotionality and the cultural power of numbers. I conclude with a reflection on revisualization as a means of expanding a fourth type of power, discursive power, wherein visualizations are used as an act of resistance by weaker actors against the narrative of reality promoted by stronger actors, relying on the rhetorical affordances of the digital political visualization genre toincrease their rhetorical power. Digital visualizations thus offer a uniquely agile tool for political actors of all types to utilize in gaining discursive power in the competition over election narratives in the digital arena of social media.

Surrogate models for predicting noise emission and aerodynamic performance of propellers

This paper deals with the innovative development of surrogate models suitable for the simulation of aerodynamic performance and acoustic emission in terms of tonal components, of multi-propeller systems like those applicable in urban air-mobility vehicles. These can be of great help particularly when designing distributed-electric-propulsion configurations, as they provide an agile tool that avoids the need for computationally expensive CFD/CAA predictions. Without losing the generality of the conclusions that can be drawn about the capability of the proposed surrogate models to accurately describe multi-propeller aerodynamic and aeroacoustic responses, applications to a single propeller configuration are presented. Focusing on the simulation of the effects due to the spanwise distribution of blade twist and chord length, two surrogate modelling techniques are examined: one based on Artificial Neural Networks and one based on Genetic Programming. The numerical database for the identification of these models is determined by the combined application of a boundary integral formulation suitable for the potential aerodynamics solution around lifting/thrusting bodies, and the Farassat 1A formulation for the evaluation of the noise field. The numerical investigation demonstrates that both metamodelling techniques are able to reproduce propeller aerodynamic performance and radiated noise with a very good level of accuracy, certainly suitable for preliminary design applications.

Multiplex Genome Editing in Yeast by CRISPR/Cas9 - A Potent and Agile Tool to Reconstruct Complex Metabolic Pathways.

Numerous important pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals originate from plant specialized metabolites, most of which are synthesized via complex biosynthetic pathways. The elucidation of these pathways is critical for the applicable uses of these compounds. Although the rapid progress of the omics technology has revolutionized the identification of candidate genes involved in these pathways, the functional characterization of these genes remains a major bottleneck. Baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) has been used as a microbial platform for characterizing newly discovered metabolic genes in plant specialized metabolism. Using yeast for the investigation of numerous plant enzymes is a streamlined process because of yeast’s efficient transformation, limited endogenous specialized metabolism, partially sharing its primary metabolism with plants, and its capability of post-translational modification. Despite these advantages, reconstructing complex plant biosynthetic pathways in yeast can be time intensive. Since its discovery, CRISPR/Cas9 has greatly stimulated metabolic engineering in yeast. Yeast is a popular system for genome editing due to its efficient homology-directed repair mechanism, which allows precise integration of heterologous genes into its genome. One practical use of CRISPR/Cas9 in yeast is multiplex genome editing aimed at reconstructing complex metabolic pathways. This system has the capability of integrating multiple genes of interest in a single transformation, simplifying the reconstruction of complex pathways. As plant specialized metabolites usually have complex multigene biosynthetic pathways, the multiplex CRISPR/Cas9 system in yeast is suited well for functional genomics research in plant specialized metabolism. Here, we review the most advanced methods to achieve efficient multiplex CRISPR/Cas9 editing in yeast. We will also discuss how this powerful tool has been applied to benefit the study of plant specialized metabolism.

Simulation as a Dynamic Tool to Reorganize Pediatric Emergency Department Resuscitation During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pandemic and Beyond.

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has challenged hospitals and pediatric emergency department (PED) providers to rapidly adjust numerous facets of the care of critically ill or injured children to minimize health care worker (HCW) exposure to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. We aimed to iteratively devise protocols and processes that minimized HCW exposure while safely and effectively caring for children who may require unanticipated aerosol-generating procedures. As part of our PED's initiative to optimize clinical care and HCW safety during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, regular multidisciplinary systems and process simulation sessions were conducted. These sessions allowed us to evaluate and reorganize patient flow, test and improve communication modalities, alter the process for consultation in resuscitations, and teach and reinforce the appropriate donning and use of personal protective equipment. Simulation was a highly effective method to disseminate new practices to PED staff. Numerous workflow modifications were implemented as a result of our in situ systems and process simulations. Total number of persons in the resuscitation room was minimized, use of a "command post" with remote providers was initiated, communication devices and strategies were trialed and adopted, and personal protective equipment standards that optimized HCW safety and communication were enacted. Simulation can be an effective and agile tool in restructuring patient workflow and care of the most critically ill or injured patients in a PED during a novel pandemic.

The need for an understory decision support system for temperate deciduous forest management

Numerous decision-makers have an interest in how forest biodiversity and functioning will alter under environmental change. These decision-makers may have varied motivations underlying their management response to environmental change by focusing on contrasting management challenges and targets. Decision-makers may use different tools to aid their decision-making when facing uncertainty. We specifically investigate whether decision-makers in forest management across Europe consider the understory (i.e. herbaceous layer) in decision making, as this component constitutes the vast majority of floral biodiversity in temperate forests, and has an important functional role. To address this question, we distributed an online questionnaire to more than 800 forest management decision-makers across Europe, and received 100 completed responses. We assess what objectives drive management decisions, and whether these are consistent depending on respondents’ occupations. Interestingly, regardless of respondent profile, biodiversity loss and climate change are expected to permeate management decisions in the coming decades, motivated primarily by a sense of environmental protection. Priority management targets did not vary across respondent profiles (i.e. occupation) either, and focused on biodiversity values, adaptation and mitigation to climate change, and forest regeneration. The majority of respondents identified the understory as an “Important” target for forest management decisions. Respondents used a mix of personal experience and literature sources to base management decisions on, while infrequently using recognised decision support systems (DSS). No utilised system considered the understory at the moment. Indeed, our review of available forest management DSS, conducted in parallel to the questionnaire, shows that an understory DSS tool, especially one that can consider changing socio-environmental conditions, is lacking for decision-makers. Based on (1) forest management decision-makers’ wide concern around biodiversity loss, climate change and forest regeneration, (2) the known functional role of temperate forest understories, and (3) an apparent lack of existing DSS with an understory component, we identify the requirement for an agile tool that accounts for understory dynamics. Such a tool, especially when integrated into existing DSS, will strongly support decision-makers in their quest to attain more biodiverse, functional and resilient forests for the future.

MELODI Presto: a fast and agile tool to explore semantic triples derived from biomedical literature.

ABSTRACTSummaryThe field of literature-based discovery is growing in step with the volume of literature being produced. From modern natural language processing algorithms to high quality entity tagging, the methods and their impact are developing rapidly. One annotation object that arises from these approaches, the subject–predicate–object triple, is proving to be very useful in representing knowledge. We have implemented efficient search methods and an application programming interface, to create fast and convenient functions to utilize triples extracted from the biomedical literature by SemMedDB. By refining these data, we have identified a set of triples that focus on the mechanistic aspects of the literature, and provide simple methods to explore both enriched triples from single queries, and overlapping triples across two query lists.Availability and Implementationhttps://melodi-presto.mrcieu.ac.uk/.Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Analysis of a New Work-Related Stress Assessment Tool

Background:Work-related stress is a relevant phenomenon in terms of health and safety at work, as occupational distress has a negative impact on individual and organisational well-being. It is a complex and multifactorial phenomenon, whose evaluation must be carried out through a specific and adequate methodology.Objective:This work aims to identify versatile tools that can quickly provide reliable measures of work distress. It analyzes the proposal elaborated by the “Comitato Unico di Garanzia per le Pari Opportunità, la Valorizzazione del Benessere di chi lavora e contro le Discriminazioni” of Rome,i.e. the tool “Valutazione è prevenzione, Sicurezza è partecipazione”.Methods:A study was carried out on a sample of 474 employees of the Neapolitan Judicial Offices, who were given a standardized questionnaire to investigate the stress, associated with the proposal of the Comitato Unico di Garanzia.Results:From the elaboration of the results, it emerges that the conditions of working wellbeing are linked to two main factors related to the perception of workers both of physical-environmental and organisational-relational aspects. In particular, it emerged that the new assessment tool, consisting of a small number of items, contributes to the detection of work stress, so it is necessary to deepen through future research the contribution that this tool can offer to the survey on work-related stress.Conclusion:Having highlighted two factors that significantly saturate the presence of a working discomfort, through an agile tool, allows us to plan a new research path, which can approach the complexity of the phenomenon through the methods of deep learning.

Dissolution of an ensemble of differently shaped poly-dispersed drug particles undergoing solubility reduction: mathematical modelling.

The aim of this theoretical paper is to develop a mathematical model for describing the dissolution process, in a finite liquid environment, of an ensemble of poly-dispersed drug particles, in form of sphere, cylinder and parallelepiped that can undergo solubility reduction due to phase transition induced by dissolution. The main result of this work consists in its simplicity as, whatever the particular particles size distribution, only two ordinary differential equations are needed to describe the dissolution process. This, in turn, reflects in a very powerful and agile theoretical tool that can be easily implemented in electronic sheets, a widespread tool among the research community. Another model advantage lies on the possibility of determining its parameters by means of common independent techniques thus enabling the evaluation of the importance of solid wettability on the dissolution process.

Towards data-driven software engineering skills assessment

Purpose Today’s software engineers often work in teams to develop complex software systems. Therefore, successful software engineering in practice require team members to possess not only sound programming skills such as analysis, design, coding and testing but also soft skills such as communication, collaboration and self-management. However, existing examination-based assessments are often inadequate for quantifying students’ soft skill development. The purpose of this paper is to explore alternative ways for assessing software engineering students’ skills through a data-driven approach. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the exploratory data analysis approach is adopted. Leveraging the proposed online agile project management tool – Human-centred Agile Software Engineering (HASE), a study was conducted involving 21 Scrum teams consisting of over 100 undergraduate software engineering students in multi-week coursework projects in 2014. Findings During this study, students performed close to 170,000 software engineering activities logged by HASE. By analysing the collected activity trajectory data set, the authors demonstrate the potential for this new research direction to enable software engineering educators to have a quantifiable way of understanding their students’ skill development, and take a proactive approach in helping them improve their programming and soft skills. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there has yet to be published previous studies using software engineering activity data to assess software engineers’ skills.

Potential for aquifer contamination of anthropogenic activity in the recharge area of the Guarani Aquifer System, southeast of Brazil

Understanding the response of physical environment to anthropogenic activities assists land use planning aimed at protecting water resources, which prevents society from incurring major economic and social costs. This paper aimed to identify the potential contamination of groundwater by human activity at an outcropping area of Guarani Aquifer System (GAS), the most important hydrogeological unit in South America. The methodology used was based on a multi-criteria analysis using decision matrices to analyze, from algebra mapping in a GIS environment, the influence of rock units, aquifer units, soil classes, steepness, slope shape, and land cover and use in contamination potential. Overall, medium to very high potential for groundwater contamination predominates in the area, amounting to 69.23%. In such areas, when the absence of federal or state law which defines the areas of protection for recharge, the master plans of the municipalities located in the GAS outcropping regions play an important role in complementing the legislation. São Carlos, has its own legislation that aims to control land use in areas of springs, and thereby to protect them. However, the GAS recharge areas near the surface are not contemplated, and specific regulation and standards for deployment of human activity in these areas, have not been established. Therefore, it is suggested that territorial planning to be carried out on a more refined scale. Given that the natural conditions and anthropogenic activities performed in the area of study are reflected in many other periurban wellheads, as well as that of the Guarani Aquifer outcropping are, the decision matrices designed can be applied and serve as an agile tool to define the recharge areas to be protected on a preliminary basis.

Project Management Tools for Agile Teams

The 21st century started as the era of agile methods and technologies which combine adaptable and highly flexible methods designed to help teams to develop applications faster and safer. The challenge is to adapt just enough technology to enhance the performance of teams which are using agile methods and to avoid going back to weak workflow ideas of the industrial era. In this paper, I will present some relevant agile tools that could improve every software development project and I will also mention the features and criteria used for evaluating currently existing tools. Finally, I will propose a classification model to the appropriate agile tool selection, but keep in mind that in order to be successful, organizations and teams do need to deal first with the issues that accompany product complexity and growing teams.