Holistic Solution Research Articles

Enhancing the resilience of low-income housing using emerging digital technologies

The research discussed is part of a Belmont Forum disaster risk reduction project aimed at enhancing the resilience of low-income housing. This paper examines feasibility and viability of using emerging digital technologies to enhance the resilience of low-income housing based on requirements of resource constrained, low-lying coastal areas in East Africa. The authors focus on the need to facilitate data and knowledge sharing across domains to: 1) reduce or avoid the potential property loss from flooding events through mapping the interdependencies and interconnectedness across natural and human systems; 2) coordinate the provision of temporary shelter for displaced victims, and 3) building (back) better during the recovery phase. The deployment of Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, BIM, Digital twin, VR/AR in disaster risk management is still an emerging area of research. In general, cutting-edge digital technologies are deployed as standalone solutions to address existing data and knowledge sharing needs that are unique to a sub-group of stakeholders. A more holistic and comprehensive solution will require an integrative framework that supports the seamless flow of information across the stakeholders. We propose to address this need through an artificial intelligence enhanced data, information and knowledge sharing platform that synthesizes content into actionable insights

A preliminary design of a 3D maritime gamified mentoring platform to support tanker pre-vetting inspection training: ‘Maritime Gamentor’

ABSTRACT Pre-vetting inspection, enhanced with onsite training, is a critical process to improve safety and environmental compliance onboard tanker ships. As a part of pre-vetting services, this study develops a maritime gamified mentoring platform, namely Maritime Gamentor, to manage crew upskilling in tanker vetting requirements. In this stage, the study considers the recently updated requirements of the Ship Inspection Report (SIRE 2.0) Programme of Oil Companies International Marine Forum (OCIMF) to conceptualise a holistic serious game-based training solution. Then, a step-by-step approach to the preliminary design, development and prototyping of maritime serious games is provided in detail. Particular to the SIRE 2.0 Clause# 5.1.4, the study conducts a case study on Maritime Gamentor Module-01 illustrated with a task-based risk assessment (TBRA) on enclosed space entry operation. Consequently, the Maritime Gamentor is conceptualised as a powerful training and mentorship platform for global shipping companies.

Biocompatible engineered erythrocytes as plasmonic sensor initiators for high-sensitive screening of non-small cell lung cancer-derived exosomal miRNA in an integrated system

The development of a holistic solution is crucial for exosome-based liquid biopsy, which is a significant advancement from basic research to clinical application for the early and non-invasive diagnosis of disease. However, the challenge of current technology is how to facilitate the separation and quickly connect with the detection. Herein, employing miRNA-155 as a target, a novel integrated concentration and determination system of exosomes (ICDSE) was fabricated for the targeted enrichment of exosomes from the plasma of patients with non-small cell lung cancer and instant downstream analysis of exosomal miRNA. This ICDSE consists of aptamer-engineered erythrocytes with a supramolecular plasmonic biosensor. The streamlined analytical procedure benefited from engineered erythrocytes as an interlinkage, needlessly removing them before extracting total RNA due to the lack of nuclei. With the assistance of a specific aptamer and simple centrifugation, engineered erythrocytes achieved exceptional enrichment of exosomes within 30 min. The LOD of the biosensor for miR-155 approached 2.03 fM due to the substantially high refractive index of the quadruplet supramolecular dendrimer and zirconium metal-organic framework. Impressively, the developed ICDSE successfully isolated and evaluated exosomes from clinical specimens of patients with NSCLC, which can also be promising for other diseases with identifiable exosome signatures. Thus, our ICDSE is expected to have widespread biomedical applications, as it is economical and well-accepted.

CONFEDERATION BETWEEN ISRAEL, PALESTINE, AND JORDAN

This essay discusses Ben‐Meir's proposal for a confederation and examines both the disadvantages and advantages that such arrangements can offer Israeli and Palestinians and the region in general. Briefly, the confederation proposal suggests gradual agreed‐upon political, economic, military, and sociocultural arrangements that will produce a new set of relationships among governments and people in these three societies. I argue that the realpolitik approach that permeates this proposal is certainly useful as an initial step toward a reduced level of violence and de‐escalate conflicts. However, it falls short of building trustful relationships and moving people in the direction of healing and reconciliation. There is no doubt that the idea of a confederation as an arrangement to transform the Israeli–Palestinian conflict carries the seeds for a holistic and transformative solution to deeply divided communities and a deep‐rooted conflict. However, there are several limitations to Ben‐Meir's proposal that require significant additional deliberation and should lead to further modification if its core ideas are to be accepted and endorsed by both Israelis and Palestinians.

Biogas driven multigeneration integrated with simultaneous charging-discharging type thermal energy storage system

This work presents a novel and sustainable solution based on combined heat and power (CHP) system integrated with a simultaneous charging-discharging type thermal energy storage tank. The multi-generation system uses biogas as the heat source and is analyzed from the thermodynamic, exergoeconomic, and environmental perspectives. The proposed configuration aims to meet the electrical requirements of a cluster of 20 villages, greenhouse heating, and hot air production for agricultural drying applications. The exhaust gases from the biogas fired turbine are utilized to power a recompression supercritical CO2 and steam Rankine cycle. The additional surplus heat is stored inside a simultaneous charging/discharging type thermal storage tank that provides favorable conditions (50–55 °C) for biogas producing microorganisms to maximizing gas production. The meso-erythritol (sugar alcohol) is used as a phase change material due to its high latent heat and large supercooling (>60 °C), suitable for the present applications. The PCM is characterized on heat flux Differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) and thermophysical properties are evaluated. Further, the exergoeconomic analysis is presented to examine the economic viability of the system which serves as a holistic solution for rural power generation. It is found that the total product unit cost of the system is 12.96 $/GJ and operating charges are 140.5 $/h. The proposed multigenerational system promises a Levelized cost of electricity at 5 ¢ /kWh. The net overall electricity generated by the system is 1432 kW and provides 200 kW of space thermal heating. In addition, hot air is produced at the rate of 9720 kg/h for different agricultural drying applications.

Accelerating boundary element methods in wideband frequency sweep analysis by matrix-free model order reduction

In frequency-domain acoustic simulations, a wideband frequency sweep analysis is often required. This becomes particularly challenging for boundary element methods (BEM), as the system matrix has a complex dependency on frequency. Previous attempts have been made to accelerate the frequency sweep analysis for the conventional BEM i.e., without fast multipole or ℋ-matrices accelerations, which restrains the applications to limited scale problems due to the dense system matrix. This paper investigates and incorporates a rational Krylov projection based model order reduction (MOR) technology i.e., matrix-free method into various BEM formulations to address the critical challenge of accelerating frequency sweep analysis. Operating on the transfer functions of the BEM system’s input and output, the matrix-free MOR avoids the direct interference with the BEM kernels, which makes it feasible and attractive to work with existing fast BEM techniques such as ℋ-matrices and fast multipole method. The combined holistic BEM solution retains the merits of the acceleration from both MOR and fast BEM techniques. Significant speed-ups have been achieved by the matrix-free MOR for wideband BEM simulations. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the capability of the presented holistic approach in simulating various acoustic problems, including interior–exterior models, complex geometries and frequency dependent boundary conditions.

How teachers manage their classroom in the digital learning environment – experiences from the University Smart Learning Project

The development of modern technologies facilitated for teachers to integrate and use them in managing their teaching classroom. The aim of this paper is to explore how teachers in the Khon Kaen University (KKU) Smart Learning Project use the smart learning concept and innovation to manage their classroom in the digital learning environment. The qualitative research was conducted to clarify the teaching process of teachers in Grade 7–9 at junior high schools using KKU Smart Learning with three subjects (namely, Mathematics, Science, and English). Consequently, 18 in-depth interviews and six observations were done. The results of this research showed that teachers applied and used the basis of KKU Smart Learning technologies, contents, and guidelines to manage their classroom, including design teaching activities in accordance with the learners’ characteristics; create a pleasant learning atmosphere to enhance their thinking ability, knowledge and skills; organize learning activities and solve problematic situations; promote learning motivation; develop and evaluate learners' competence. However, the classroom management of teachers faced with some problems concerning the limitation of internet connection, lack of digital devices and digital literacy of teachers and learners. The findings of this paper have implications for educators, administrators, teachers and stakeholders to design holistic solutions to enhance the quality of educational activities and academic performance.

Climate Change and Pathways Used by Pests as Challenges to Plant Health in Agriculture and Forestry

Climate change already challenges people’s livelihood globally and it also affects plant health. Rising temperatures facilitate the introduction and establishment of unwanted organisms, including arthropods, pathogens, and weeds (hereafter collectively called pests). For example, a single, unusually warm winter under temperate climatic conditions may be sufficient to assist the establishment of invasive plant pests, which otherwise would not be able to establish. In addition, the increased market globalization and related transport of recent years, coupled with increased temperatures, has led to favorable conditions for pest movement, invasion, and establishment worldwide. Most published studies indicate that, in general, pest risk will increase in agricultural ecosystems under climate-change scenarios, especially in today’s cooler arctic, boreal, temperate, and subtropical regions. This is also mostly true for forestry. Some pests have already expanded their host range or distribution, at least in part due to changes in climate. Examples of these pests, selected according to their relevance in different geographical areas, are summarized here. The main pathways used by them, directly and/or indirectly, are also discussed. Understanding these pathways can support decisions about mitigation and adaptation measures. The review concludes that preventive mitigation and adaptation measures, including biosecurity, are key to reducing the projected increases in pest risk in agriculture, horticulture, and forestry. Therefore, the sustainable management of pests is urgently needed. It requires holistic solutions, including effective phytosanitary regulations, globally coordinated diagnostic and surveillance systems, pest risk modeling and analysis, and preparedness for pro-active management.

The Better Building Initiative — a Collaborative Ecosystem Involving All Stakeholders as Catalyst to Accelerate the Adoption of Circular Economy Innovations in the Construction Sector

Despite the recognition and a growing interest in sustainable innovation in the construction industry, the speed at which such innovations are being deployed into practical and scalable solutions that reduce the environmental impact of our built world is far too slow. Considering the complex structure of the industry, which involves a multidisciplinary mix of stakeholders from various backgrounds, adopting the systems thinking approach of circular economy (CE) is crucial to deploy effective and holistic solutions that can be scaled exponentially. Hence, addressing the challenges resulting from the complexity and multidisciplinary constitution of the industry for the deployment of sustainable innovations necessitates a deepening of collaboration between stakeholders with highly diverse cultures, ways of working, business models, and priorities. Within this communication, it is being discussed how a holistic system-thinking approach as constituted by the CE paradigm can be practically deployed in the typically traditional construction industry. The proposed approach, called the Better Building Initiative, centers around establishing an ecosystem for circular innovation in building and construction that involves intrinsically motivated stakeholders from all relevant disciplines and interests. Based on the action-oriented Better Building Manifesto, it is proposed how to unify the three sustainable innovation areas: materials, design, and process in one holistic innovation approach and develop an innovation platform that accelerates circular innovation in the building and construction industry.

A comprehensive optimal energy control in interconnected microgrids through multiport converter under N−1 criterion and demand response program

Nowadays, the local distribution grids have been facing technical, economic, and regulatory challenges, because of the increased integration of renewable energy sources (RESs) and electrification of vehicles. The traditional solutions to the grid expansion, e.g., to build an additional power line, are utility-centered solutions, i.e., the distribution grid operators (DSOs) are the only party involved to tackle grid issues. The DSOs have to engage grid users with technology providers to develop innovative solutions that tackle one problem and overcome several cost-effectively. This paper presents a holistic solution to optimally control cross-sectoral energy flow between interconnected microgrids (MGs) consisting of different RESs, hydroelectric power plant (HPP) and wind turbines (WTs) to meet electric vehicles (EVs), residential, commercial and industrial demands with the main grid contribution. This issue will provide the advantages of community-based MGs for local energy trading which causes for an active and engaged system, however, an adequate control strategy for proper operation is required. The proposed solution is based on a new interconnection line between two MGs through a multiport converter (MPC) with the techno-economic consideration of newly installed components such as MPC, cables and the required battery energy storage system (BESS). The proposed case study is evaluated under three different conditions e.g., load increment, demand response (DR) and N-1 criterion in separate, interconnect and island modes. The CPLEX solver of GAMS software is employed to solve the mixed-integer linear programming model. The results show that the applied interconnection line for MGs compared to the separated operation mode can decrease the system's total costs, reduce the applied peak to the upstream grid, and enhance the system's reliability under different conditions. Furthermore, the applied solution provides the ability for MGs operation even in island mode under different conditions for a full day (24 h).

Construction of an adaptive river-based recreational network for urban river restoration: A case study of Rencheng District, Jining City, China

Recreation-oriented urban river ecological restoration can help restore damaged ecosystems and improve human well-being. This study selects the urban river network of Rencheng District, Jining City, China as a case to map and construct a river-based recreational network (RRN) in an urban river restoration context. Morphological spatial pattern analysis, connectivity evaluation methods, and an overlay method of ArcGIS are applied to identify river network connectivity and ecological sources, which are used to map RRN. The research findings show that except rivers in the Liangshan-Jining Canal, other rivers have medium, poor, or extremely poor ecological connectivity. The ecological sources are mainly distributed in the vicinity of Nanyang lake and Taibai lake. The distribution of river connectivity is largely correlated with the regional physical geography pattern (e.g., geological structure and topological position of water patches), as well as historical human activities (e.g., canalization). Furthermore, the continuous subsidence of coal mining subsidence areas, urban expansion and rural construction, environmental damage and pollution, natural changes (e.g., climate change) are the risk sources of river network connectivity. To restore the ecological and social connectivity of urban river network, an adaptive RRN is proposed according to the current environmental status and the factors affecting the river connectivity. Specifically, form-based and process-based restoration measures can be adopted in urban built-up areas and rural areas, respectively. The findings provide a holistic solution for the restoration and recreational use of urban river network at a regional scale, thereby promoting the coordination of urban ecosystems and sociocultural systems.

Extending the lighting design objectives procedure for holistic lighting solutions

The author has previously proposed a novel spreadsheet-based lighting design objectives procedure (LiDOs) that enables practitioners to reconcile interacting LiDOs relating to the spatial distribution of illumination within a space, and this procedure has been successfully adopted by several lighting design practices. This paper proposes that the procedure is developed into an extended computer-based lighting design tool (LiDOs2) that includes LiDOs relating to spectral and temporal illumination distributions, as well as spatial distribution. This would enable regulators to specify limiting values for basic indoor lighting objectives such as perceived adequacy of illumination while at the same time guiding practitioners to incorporate LiDOs that address characteristics of lighting chosen to suit specific applications. The LiDOs2 procedure would be capable of generating holistic lighting performance specifications that would enable practitioners to conduct informed searches for light sources and luminaires, and to determine layouts and control circuits with confidence that the specified combination of LiDOs would be achieved.

Review: Sculpture on a Grand Scale: Jack Christiansen’s Thin Shell Modernism

Review: <i>Sculpture on a Grand Scale: Jack Christiansen’s Thin Shell Modernism</i>

Food selection and processing: can we blend science with engineering to address Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD)?

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) alters the function and structure of the kidney irreversibly, over months or years. The rising incidence of CKD has become a leading global health problem and therefore a number of multi-field investigations are being carried on. In general, diabetes and high blood pressure (hypertension) are the most common causes of CKD. However, the importance of functional food selection and less consumption of ultra-processed food is at the forefront of the current research domain to manage CKD. To address this threat, experts suggest and recommend adopting a science-based dietary pattern, for instance, the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH). Moreover, food bioactive compounds are non-nutrients that typically occur in small quantities in foods, and hence, the selection of proper food (source) and subsequent processing is of paramount importance to attenuate the magnitude of CKD. The role of food science in managing chronic diseases could be coupled with the advancement of food engineering to minimize the detrimental effect of food processing along with the delivery of target bioactive molecules. This potentially indicates bold ambitions to innovate holistic solutions to address CKD through a proper selection of food and processing parameters.

Blockchain-Enabled and Data-Driven Smart Healthcare Solution for Secure and Privacy-Preserving Data Access

The major advances in body-mounted sensors and wireless technologies have been revolutionizing the healthcare industry, where patient’s conditions can be remotely monitored by medical staff. Such a model is gaining broad support due to its economic and social advantages. However, the wealth of sensor measurements pose major technical challenges on where to store the collected data, how to ensure its integrity, who control access permissions, and how to enable secure interaction between patients and medical facilities and professionals. This article aspires to provide a holistic solution based on blockchain technology. Our solution puts the patient in charge for granting and revoking access permissions and makes it easy for healthcare organizations and providers to meet privacy regulations. The sensor data are to reside on cloud storage, while access control and session logs are maintained on blockchain. In addition, a novel data-driven authentication and secure communication protocol is proposed to mitigate the risk of fraud and identity theft. In order to enforce such a protocol, all interactions between the cloud and patients and healthcare providers are regulated through smart contracts. The security properties of our solution are analyzed using AVISPA; it is also shown to be computationally efficient.

Planning for wooden multistorey construction – insights from Finland's municipal civil servants

ABSTRACT Municipalities across Finland are promoting wooden multistorey construction as a low-carbon alternative for building construction. However, do attitudes towards implementing these alternatives stem from the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions or because these alternatives are perceived to improve local economies? This research employs a survey to collects the attitudes of Finnish municipal civil servants towards implementing wooden multistorey buildings in their municipalities. The respondents represent a mix of administrative professionals such as planners, real estate managers, building inspectors and other strategic managerial professionals (n = 273, 8% response rate). Their responses reflect views from approximately 8% of all municipal civil servants working on municipal land use and planning issues during 2019. The findings reveal attitudes towards implementing wooden multistorey buildings are engendered by fulfilling ecological development, economic development, technical quality and output efficiency goals. Furthermore, comparing municipal planners to other municipal administrators reveals dissimilar planning logics. Municipal planners holistically prioritize the project's ecological and economic development outcomes. Other administrators chiefly prioritize economic development outcomes. Hence, some municipal administrators may value wooden multistorey construction primarily as an activity to improve municipal vitality rather than as a holistic spatial planning solution. Future research should identify whether these divergences lead to planning tensions within municipal administrations.

One Health – A holistic solution for sustainable management of globalization-driven public health challenges

Globalization is an inevitable and extremely complex phenomenon that involves transnational integration of culture, economy, environment, politics, and other social interest. Globally, we are witnessing multitude changes such as a rapid population growth, urbanization, international trade and commerce, agricultural intensification, and encroachment into the natural ecosystem. Further mismatching of food demand and supply, growth disparities, increasing food prices, and over utilization of natural resources are among the challenges to the economic status of a nation and its health sector. The health impacts of globalization can be both positive and negative; of course, its impacts vary based on factors such as geographical location, gender, age, literacy, and socioeconomic status. Globalization has played pivotal role in health improvements via dissemination of new medical knowledge, low-cost health technologies, fast transactions of medical supply and improvement of human rights. Thus it has shown potential positive impacts by minimizing the gaps in health inequalities between rich and poor people in the global South and North and improved the idea of healthcare for all. On the other hand, there are also shortcomings of globalization to global health, such as the spread of infectious diseases due to rapid mobility, which is emerging as the greatest threat to all. The interconnectedness of globalization and One Health is complex. Whereas, globalization is one of the main challenges to ensure global health security. One Health is a remedy to manage the negative health consequences of globalization, especially in least developed world. It is undeniable that the connection between humans, animals, and the environment calls for the attention of multi-sectorial institutes to collaborate to closely monitor and reduce the risks and consequences on health and wellbeing. One Health approach is increasingly recognized and streamlined into national and international plans and strategies for effective management of zoonotic diseases, food safety, antimicrobial resistance, and climate change. Human practices such as, changes in land use and how food is produced are driving ecological and evolutionary conditions that facilitate disease spillover events and contribute to antimicrobial resistance. These changes are occurring rapidly on a large scale, both locally and globally. The pursuit of understanding human, veterinary and environmental health issues separately leads to an incomplete understanding of disease dynamics and, therefore, missed synergy for a joint mitigation of the problems. One Health actions support the primary prevention of such problems, enabling more timely and effective containment and response to public health threats at the human-animal-environment interface. In short, systematic and sustained One Health approach becomes more important than ever in order to promote and ensure health security and avert the negative impacts of globalization. Therefore, there is a need to focus on the creation of socially and environmentally sustainable forms of globalization that provide the greatest benefits and least costs, shared more equitably than the status queue.

A Review on AI for Smart Manufacturing: Deep Learning Challenges and Solutions

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been successfully applied in industry for decades, ranging from the emergence of expert systems in the 1960s to the wide popularity of deep learning today. In particular, inexpensive computing and storage infrastructures have moved data-driven AI methods into the spotlight to aid the increasingly complex manufacturing processes. Despite the recent proverbial hype, however, there still exist non-negligible challenges when applying AI to smart manufacturing applications. As far as we know, there exists no work in the literature that summarizes and reviews the related works for these challenges. This paper provides an executive summary on AI techniques for non-experts with a focus on deep learning and then discusses the open issues around data quality, data secrecy, and AI safety that are significant for fully automated industrial AI systems. For each challenge, we present the state-of-the-art techniques that provide promising building blocks for holistic industrial AI solutions and the respective industrial use cases from several domains in order to better provide a concrete view of these techniques. All the examples we reviewed were published in the recent ten years. We hope this paper can provide the readers with a reference for further studying the related problems.

Fine-Grained Drug Interaction Extraction Based on Entity Pair Calibration and Pre-Training Model for Chinese Drug Instructions

Existing pharmaceutical information extraction research often focus on standalone entity or relationship identification tasks over drug instructions. There is a lack of a holistic solution for drug knowledge extraction. Moreover, current methods perform poorly in extracting fine-grained interaction relations from drug instructions. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an information extraction framework for drug instructions. The framework proposes deep learning models with fine-tuned pre-training models for entity recognition and relation extraction. In addition, it incorporates an novel entity pair calibration process to promote the performance for fine-grained relation extraction. The framework experiments on more than 60k Chinese drug description sentences from 4000 drug instructions. Empirical results show that the framework can successfully identify drug related entities (F1 3 0.95) and their relations (F1 3 0.83) from the realistic dataset, and the entity pair calibration plays an important role (~5% F1 score improvement) in extracting fine-grained relations.

The Roles of Campus Protection Services For Students’ Safety: A Case of A Higher Education Institution in South Africa

Students’ safety and security problem have been reported as a regular problem across institutions of higher learning in South Africa. This paper departs from regularly reported cases of theft in student belongings in a South African university. The purpose of this study was to investigate the roles and involvement of the Campus Protection Services (CPS) in ensuring students’ safety in an identified institution of learning. The paper report findings obtained through the mixed methods approach which used questionnaires – with 265 cases returned and analysed with document analysis to support the quantitative results. The main findings reveal in descending order, that the main forms of campus crimes are theft, mugging, damage to property, robbery, assault, and stalking. Ascribed reasons to these crimes were administrative shortfalls, broken equipment, frequent substance abuse and students’ negligence and lifestyle. This paper recommends that campus management and security departments reach a holistic solution that brings together all stakeholder of the learning environment, thus establishing baseline policies for keeping students and their belongings safe in a typical learning environment