Infrastructure Redesign Research Articles

Human Health Adaptation Strategies to Climate-Induced Extreme Weather Events: A Systematic Review

This systematic review evaluates the health impacts of climate-induced extreme weather events and the effectiveness of various adaptation strategies. Seventeen studies were analyzed, focusing on adaptation measures such as agricultural adjustments, renewable energy, ecosystem restoration, infrastructure redesign, and public health interventions. Significant health impacts were identified, including increased morbidity and mortality due to heatwaves, floods, and vector-borne diseases. The success of adaptation strategies was found to be highly dependent on local context, implementation capacity, and sustainability. This review underscores gaps in data quality, the generalizability of findings, and the integration of adaptation measures into public health policies. An urgent need exists for interdisciplinary approaches and community engagement to ensure sustainable, equitable health outcomes in the face of climate change. Future research should focus on these areas to strengthen public health resilience.

Industrial Decarbonization through Blended Combustion of Natural Gas and Hydrogen

The transition to cleaner energy sources, particularly in hard-to-abate industrial sectors, often requires the gradual integration of new technologies. Hydrogen, crucial for decarbonization, is explored as a fuel in blended combustions. Blending or replacing fuels impacts combustion stability and heat transfer rates due to differing densities. An extensive literature review examines blended combustion, focusing on hydrogen/methane mixtures. While industrial burners claim to accommodate up to 20% hydrogen, theoretical support is lacking. A novel thermodynamic analysis methodology is introduced, evaluating methane/hydrogen combustion using the Wobbe index. The findings highlight practical limitations beyond 25% hydrogen volume, necessitating a shift to “totally hydrogen” combustion. Blended combustion can be proposed as a medium-term strategy, acknowledging hydrogen’s limited penetration. Higher percentages require burner and infrastructure redesign.

Community-Centric Approaches to Coastal Hazard Assessment and Management in Southside Norfolk, Virginia, USA

Urban communities in environmentally sensitive areas face escalating challenges due to climate change and inadequate infrastructural support, particularly in underserved regions like southside Norfolk, Virginia. This area, characterized by its vulnerability to flooding and a predominantly low-income population, lacks equitable inclusion in broader urban flood protection plans. This research focuses on the development of community-centered resilience strategies through active engagement and collaboration with local residents. The methodology centered around building trust and understanding within the community through a series of interactions and events. This approach facilitated a two-way exchange of information, enabling the research team to gather crucial insights on community-valued assets, prevalent flooding issues, and preferred flood mitigation solutions. The engagement revealed a significant increase in community knowledge regarding climate change, sea level rise, and stormwater management. Residents expressed a strong preference for green infrastructure solutions, including rain gardens, permeable pavements, and living shorelines, alongside concerns about pollution and the need for infrastructure redesign. The outcomes of this community engagement have initiated plans to develop tailored, nature-based flooding solutions. These results are set to inform future urban planning and policy, offering insights to the City of Norfolk and the United States Army Corps of Engineers for potential redesigns of flood intervention strategies that are more inclusive and effective. A template for participatory research to inform coastal hazard management includes cross-sector collaboration, a long-term engagement commitment, and education and surveying opportunities to align solutions to lived, local experiences. This template allows for community trust building, which is especially important in environmental justice communities. The study highlights the importance of community involvement in urban resilience planning, demonstrating that local engagement is essential in shaping community-centric solutions and equitable environmental policies.

A Decentralized Marketing Model for the Online Accommodation Rental Market

This paper presents an infrastructure redesign of the online accommodation rental marketing model. The decentralized marketplace it proposes represents a significant Business Model Innovation (BMI) and a new normative marketing tool. We suggest it has the potential to be disruptive from an International Marketing (IM) perspective, shifting the focus from owners as agents, to a shared one with renters and agents. This is supportive of the paradigm where marketing is focused on facilitating and maintaining relationships. Using code that we developed, we illustrate how a decentralized application (dAirBnB) can promote disintermediation and can be built to optimize price discovery. Utilizing block chain technology, we show how trust originates from the distributed consensus enforced by a network of peers. This trusted interaction is facilitated between untrusted parties over the internet, thereby changing the marketing relationship. In this respect, the application and the business model are inextricably linked. Enabled by the technology, we propose a monetization of reputation, which introduces the concept of good behaviour as an asset in a marketing context. We explore the implications of this for both BMI and IM. Our approach would increase the quality and quantity of information in online rentals, both major dimensions of marketing advantage. The dominant position of AirBnB represents a limitation on the implementation of our approach and would be an area for policy makers to focus on.

Modernizing health information technology: lessons from healthcare delivery systems.

ObjectiveTo identify recurrent themes, insights, and process recommendations from stakeholders in US organizations during the health information technology (HIT) modernization of an existing electronic health record (EHR) to a commercial-off-the-shelf product in both resource-plentiful settings and in a resource-constrained environment, the US Indian Health Service.Materials and MethodsThirteen qualitative interviews with stakeholders in various organizations were conducted about HIT modernization efforts. Using a Theory of Change framework, recurring themes were identified and analyzed.ResultsThe interviewees emphasized the importance of organizational and process revision during modernization, converting historical data, and clinical and leadership involvement. HIT implementation required technological and infrastructure redesign, additional training, and workflow reconfiguration. Motivations for modernization included EHR usability dissatisfaction, revenue enhancements, and improved clinical operations. Decision-making strategies, primarily during HIT selection, included meetings with stakeholders. Successful modernization resulted in improvements in clinical operations, patient experience, and financial outlay.DiscussionExisting implementation frameworks fail to provide experiential feedback, such as implementation challenges, like data conversion, regulatory, functionality, and interoperability requirements. Regardless of the healthcare environment, HIT modernization requires the engagement of leadership and end-users during HIT selection and through all stages of the implementation to prepare people, processes, and technology. Organizations must iteratively define the technological, infrastructure, organizational, and workflow changes required for a successful HIT modernization effort.ConclusionsHIT modernization is an opportunity for organizational and technological change. Successful modernization requires a comprehensive, intentional, well-communicated, and multidisciplinary approach. Resource-constrained environments have the additional challenges of financial burdens, limited staffing, and unstable infrastructure.

DSRIP’s innovation and collaboration in population health management: A cross-sectional segmented time series model

Texas Medicaid Section 1115 waiver approved Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program has four categories, namely infrastructure development, program innovation and redesign, reporting of quality improvement outcomes, and population health improvement. A metric of the fourth category, preventable hospitalization rate, was analyzed for a set of eight diagnostic conditions to assess the impact of DSRIP on participating- and non-participating hospitals over two time periods, pre-DSRIP and post-DSRIP, with the help of a cross-sectional segmented time series regression model. Texas Healthcare Information Collection database was leveraged to obtain preventable hospitalization rate data. The dependent variables were preventable hospitalization rates of eight program-specified conditions and the independent variables were time, intervention, and post-implementation intervention. The overall combined preventable hospitalization rate for DSRIP hospitals was observed to decrease by 25.73%, whereas the overall combined preventable hospitalization rate for non-DSRIP hospitals was observed to increase by 37.57%. DSRIP hospitals had invested in coordinating healthcare projects and were subsequently reimbursed by the state for healthcare improvements. The implementation of DSRIP may have had the capacity to decrease preventable hospitalization rates in regions wherein its adoption may have improved the health of the population.

Pedestrian and bicycle bridges as examples of safe collision-free road crossings

Pedestrians are most at risk when they are crossing the road. This represents a significant proportion of all fatalities among pedestrians, amounting respectively to 50% in non-built-up areas and 75% in built-up areas. The most frequent reason for this accident is failure to give way. What is most terrible is that 30% of pedestrian accidents occurred at marked pedestrian crossings. Therefore, an important part of pedestrian safety management is selecting the right type of crossings, which are suitable for the conditions. At certain speeds and traffic volume, the only safe option for pedestrian crossings is to apply multi-level solutions, that is footbridges or tunnels. The paper presents examples of infrastructure redesign by constructing footbridges and hence, separating pedestrians and vehicular traffic to improve pedestrian safety.

Designing and Deploying A Professional Learning Community (PLC) Organizational Routine: Bureaucratic and Collegial Arrangements in Tandem

Our analysis explores how local educational policymakers redesigned the formal organizational infrastructure of their 14 elementary schools to support teacher collaboration and learning. In particular, we examine the design, deployment, and workings of a Professional Learning Community (PLC) routine intended to support teachers’ on-the-job learning about instruction. The PLC routine was part of a broader system-wide infrastructure redesign effort to support teachers’ implementing a more inquiry approach to teaching mathematics in elementary (primary) schools. We show how participation in the PLC routine structured teachers’ advice and information interactions about mathematics. We also describe how bureaucratic and collegial arrangements interacted in the implementation and performance of the bureaucratically mandated and monitored PLC organizational routine that relied on collegiality arrangements for institutionalization. Based on this analysis, we theorize how bureaucratic and collegial arrangements work in tandem, rather than in opposition or independently, in transforming how school staff work with one another.

A Review on Mobile and Sensor Networks Innovations in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Rapid developments of mobile technologies, data acquisition and big data analytics, and their integration with critical application domains such as transportation systems have the potential to produce more efficient, real-time, intelligent and safe transportation infrastructure. To increase the quality of transportation services, wireless sensor networks, mobile phones, crowd sourcing, RFID and Bluetooth technologies are being used. We surveyed innovations that were transformed from ideas in research labs into commercial systems in practical use. In this paper, we present some innovative mobile technologies, services and platforms that are being used in modern transportation applications including traffic data acquisition, traffic management and control, route optimizations, infrastructure redesign, road safety and enhancing user experience.

Infrastructure Redesign and Instructional Reform in Mathematics

Designing infrastructures to support instruction remains a challenge in educational reform. This article reports on a study of one school system's efforts to redesign its infrastructure for mathematics instruction by promoting teacher leadership. Using social network and interview data from 12 elementary schools, we explore how the district's infrastructure redesign efforts were internally coherent with and built upon existing infrastructure components. We then explore relations between infrastructure and school practice as captured in the instructional advice- and information-seeking interactions among school staff, finding that teacher leaders emerged as central actors and brokers of advice and information about mathematics within and between schools. Further, changes in school advice and information networks were associated with shifts in teachers' beliefs about and practices in mathematics toward inquiry-oriented approaches consistent with district curriculum. We argue that the district's redesign efforts to support teacher leadership coupled district curriculum and school and classroom practice in mathematics.

Synthetic Biology Guides Biofuel Production

The advancement of microbial processes for the production of renewable liquid fuels has increased with concerns about the current fuel economy. The development of advanced biofuels in particular has risen to address some of the shortcomings of ethanol. These advanced fuels have chemical properties similar to petroleum-based liquid fuels, thus removing the need for engine modification or infrastructure redesign. While the productivity and titers of each of these processes remains to be improved, progress in synthetic biology has provided tools to guide the engineering of these processes through present and future challenges.

Application of grey relational analysis for evaluating road traffic safety measures: advanced driver assistance systems against infrastructure redesign

Two of the main approaches to improve traffic safety are extensive redesign of the physical road infrastructure and large-scale implementation of advanced driver assistance systems. These approaches are to a large extent substitutes, but also partly complementary. Evaluation of alternative strategic investments in either of the two, and combinations, is complicated by limitations in availability, reliability and accuracy of data. Some of the evaluation methods most commonly used in transportation research are reviewed, and a method that is rather unknown in the western world and that is especially capable of dealing with part of these limitations is introduced. Grey relational analysis (GRA) – a normalisation-based method – provides a simple and transparent evaluation procedure from which a clear-cut ranking order of strategies derives. The application of ̇GRA to the stated evaluation problem is illustrated with a case study in The Netherlands.

Forecasting and evaluation of traffic safety impacts: driving assistance systems against road infrastructure measures

The authors examine the use of a one-variable first-order grey model ( GM( 1,1)), to model and forecast the trend of the level of cumulative traffic accident severity for strategic scenarios for implementation of driving assistance systems, physical infrastructure redesign and combinations of the two categories of measures. The accident severity levels ( in terms of fatalities and hospitalisations) of five scenarios for the period 2003-2007 are analysed and modelled. In addition, the trend of fatalities and hospitalisations for each scenario for the years 2008 until 2010 is forecasted. For further policy evaluation, the costs of each scenario ( for the years 2003 2010) are estimated. By using cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) the five scenarios for improving road traffic safety are compared. (Less)

Effective Schools: A Review

Effective Schools: A Review