Production Services Research Articles

The use of cavity-nesting wild birds as agents of biological control in vineyards of Central Chile

Insectivorous birds provide key ecosystem services for agricultural production, such as biological pest control. However, habitat loss and degradation by agriculture are among the main causes of biodiversity loss globally, including the recent decline in bird populations. Habitat loss has particularly affected insectivorous birds due to the associated decrease in the availability of suitable nesting sites. Our study assessed a tool of ecological intensification to increase insectivorous bird abundance and biological control in vineyards. We evaluated the effects of nest boxes on prey removal by insectivorous birds in five vineyards in central Chile, using a two-year sentinel prey experimental trial. Our results showed significantly more sentinel larvae removal by birds in plots with nest boxes than control plots. Deploying the nest boxes resulted in a 43% higher consumption of sentinel prey. Therefore, we recommend using nest boxes as an environmentally-friendly method to increase native predators and enhance biological control in agricultural fields. This would have the potential to improve biodiversity conservation and maximize crop yields.

Does China’s green economic recovery generate a spatial convergence trend: an explanation using agglomeration effects and fiscal instruments

China’s urbanization process has entered a period of rapid development, and cities have become key to driving regional economic development. This paper uses data from 286 cities in China in the period 2005–2018 to construct an urban economic growth quality index system and examine the influence of spatial factors on the convergence trend of China’s urban economic growth quality. It is found that there is a β absolute convergence trend of economic growth quality in Chinese cities across the whole country. After controlling for the initial conditions of individual economies, spatial factors strengthen the spatial convergence trend of urban economic growth quality and significantly increase the corresponding convergence rate. Among the areas studied, the western region has the fastest convergence rate, followed by the central and eastern regions, and the convergence rates of both the central and western regions are higher than the national average. Agglomeration economies and fiscal policy tools are important for the promotion of the urban economic growth quality. The agglomeration of productive service industries significantly improves the spatial convergence rate of urban economic growth quality. This effect is mainly due to the spatial spillover of industrial agglomeration. The expansion of government fiscal expenditure also contributes to the spatial convergence trend of urban economic growth quality. Local economic growth quality is also affected by government fiscal expenditure in neighboring cities.

Strategi Pengembangan Usaha Mikro, Kecil dan Menengah (UMKM) yang Dilakukan Dinas Koperasi dan UMK Kabupaten Labuhanbatu Dalam Meningkatkan Perekonomian Masyarakat Sekitar


 The purpose of this research is to develop cooperation strategies for Labuhanato Regency and the Small and Medium Enterprises Office in small business development efforts in Labuhanbato Regency during the Covid-19 pandemic. This search uses quantitaif with a descriptive approach. This type of research is field research. The results of this study in the analysis use inference methods that start with general data and end with conclusions. Based on the results of the study, it can be concluded that the strategy of small business development in Labuhanbato Regency during the Covid-19 outbreak is through a program for Micro business problem services from commercial production processes, development of promoting small business products, network improvement between institutions, micro strandarization commercial product production services.
 Keywords: strategy, MSME Development, Covid-19 Pandemic

A Strategy for Managing the Operation of Technical Infrastructure Based on the Analysis of “Bad Actors”—A Case Study of LOTOS Group S.A.

The article covers issues related to the selection of a management strategy for the operation of technical infrastructure. It contains the approaches, methodology and a general model of the system of operation of the Maintenance Services of the LOTOS Group production company, which is an example of a large oil concern. Nowadays, an increasing aspect is put on the efficiency of individual repair processes, as well as the operation of equipment. Doubts often arise as to which strategy is the right one and which one to choose. With numerous machines, there are problems related to work planning and optimal use of resources. In addition, there are frequently difficulties in identifying the devices that interfere with the processes. The aim of this article is to present the maintenance strategy of the LOTOS production company and to introduce a procedure that allows for the assessment of the efficiency of machinery and equipment operation. It includes a method extending the identification of “Bad Actors” used so far, based on data from the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system, with a solution based on reports made after device repairs. MTBR (Mean Time Between Repair) coefficients were calculated for particular Complexes, Plants and Machines, which allowed for the identification of troublesome areas and the most difficult devices in production processes. This made it possible to select the equipment that should be repaired in the first place. After the implementation of the method and service activities, a decrease in the number of problematic machines was observed.

A Methodology for Automatic Identification of Units with Ecological Significance in Dehesa Ecosystems

The dehesa is an anthropic complex ecosystem typical of some areas of Spain and Portugal, with a key role in soil and biodiversity conservation and in the search for a balance between production, conservation and ecosystem services. For this reason, it is essential to have tools that allow its characterization, as well as to monitor and support decision-making to improve its sustainability. A multipurpose and scalable tool has been developed and validated, which combines several low-cost technologies, computer vision methods and RGB aerial orthophotographs using open data sources and which allows for automated agroforestry inventories, identifying and quantifying units with important ecological significance such as: trees, groups of trees, ecosystem corridors, regenerated areas and sheets of water. The development has been carried out from images of the national aerial photogrammetry plan of Spain belonging to 32 dehesa farms, representative of the existing variability in terms of density of trees, shrub species and the presence of other ecological elements. First, the process of obtaining and identifying areas of interest was automated using WMS services and shapefile metadata. Then, image analysis techniques were used to detect the different ecological units. Finally, a classification was developed according to the OBIA approach, which stores the results in standardized files for Geographic Information Systems. The results show that a stable solution has been achieved for the automatic and accurate identification of ecological units in dehesa territories. The scalability and generalization to all the dehesa territories, as well as the possibility of segmenting the area occupied by trees and other ecological units opens up a great opportunity to improve the construction of models for interpreting satellite images.

Design Driven Research for Countryside Revitalization of a Rural Settlement of the Fujian Province, China

Countryside development is receiving paramount attention in China, where political and cultural agendas promote rural revitalization as the core campaign to mitigate rural–urban disparities. The driving idea is that the rural can emancipate from its agricultural dependence to embrace more complex and integrated cycles of activities, such as leisure, health, productivity, market, and cultural services. The momentum reached by rural development in China has opened a new dimension for contemporary design culture, where the countryside has materialized as a frontier of architectural research. The paper synthesizes research by design experience carried out between 2017 and 2020 against the backdrop of the development program for a rural settlement of the Fujian Province, China. From the site reading to the experimental transformation proposal, the different phases offer sparks and arguments to put forward new understandings of designing in transitional rural contexts.

Ecosystem services in conservation planning: Assessing compatible vs. incompatible conservation

The compatible conservation of ecosystem services (ES) refers to the sustainable development of a region and the multiple dimensions of the region population's well-being. Applying the ES relationship to systematic conservation planning (SCP) can help determine the protection priorities associated with ES and support good zoning decisions. This study uses Nanchang, China as a case study to construct a multi-scenario ES protection scheme. This includes evaluating the spatial distribution characteristics of four core ES, and the ES relationships in the subregion in Nanchang. The ES relationship is then used to construct three ES conservation scenarios (synergetic, trade-off and incompatible), and the SCP tool is used for zoning. The results show the following. First, the incompatible scenario prioritizes the conservation of supporting services and provisioning services, which support ecological protection and cultivated land security. Second, given a land management and control threshold, the management zones can be compatible with a large proportion of secondary services in the synergetic scenario (22%). Fewer secondary services are compatible under the trade-off scenario (8%). As the compatible secondary service targets increase, each management zone area experiences a nonlinear change. The spatial change is more stable in the synergetic scenario compared to the trade-off scenario, and the space of management zone becomes discrete under the trade-off scenario. Third, the compatibility process has a feedback effect on the ES relationship. Compared with the trade-off scenario, compatible synergetic services are more stable with respect to changes in the ES relationship. Constructing ecological buffer zones takes up cultivated land, decreasing the synergy between carbon sequestration services and food production services. However, ecological buffer zones should play a role in certain areas. The compatibility of increased food production services and habitat services in priority conservation and controlled development zones enhance ES trade-offs. An increase in cultural services is compatible with carbon sequestration services in the ecological buffer zone. This changes the relationship between ES, from having a weak trade-off to having a weak synergy. Creating a compatible ES is a spatial trade-off process; these synergies and trade-offs should be considered in spatial planning. An appropriate proportion of ES should be allocated to each zone, to increase the coordinated management of the urban-rural ecology.

Analysis in the Influencing Factors of Climate-Responsive Behaviors of Maize Growers: Evidence from China.

Due to the natural production properties, agriculture has been adversely affected by global warming. As an important link between individual household farmers and modern agriculture, it is crucial to study the influence of agricultural productive services on farmers’ climate-responsive behaviors to promote sustainable development and improve agricultural production. In this paper, a questionnaire survey has been conducted among 374 maize farmers by using the combination of typical sampling and random sampling in Jilin Province of China. Moreover, the Poisson regression and the multi-variate Probit model have been used to analyze the effects of agricultural productive services on the choices of climate-responsive behaviors as well as the intensity of the behaviors. The results have shown that the switch to suitable varieties according to the frost-free period have been mostly common among maize growers in Jilin province. Agricultural productive services have a significant effect on the adoption intensity of climate- responsive behaviors, at the 1% level. Based on this conclusion, this paper proposes policy recommendations for establishing a sound agricultural social service system and strengthening the support for agricultural productive services. It has certain reference significance for avoiding climate risk and reducing agricultural pollution in regions with similar production characteristics worldwide.

Comprehensive understanding of smart product service system from multi-dimension and multi-perspective: An innovative service model for Customer-product Interaction Life Cycle (CILC)

With the improvement of living standards and the rapid development of the Internet, customers gradually pursue personalized smart products and services. Traditional smart product service system is mainly aimed at the service of customers and products in one or several interactive links. Furthermore, in the mass personalization model, in order to give full play to the customer experience and participation satisfaction, it is necessary to study the smart product service system based on the interaction between customers and products. However, there is a gap in the research on integrating the whole life cycle of customer-product interaction. In order to meet this industrial need, the innovation of this paper is to construct an innovative service model for Customer-product Interaction Life Cycle (CILC) and analyse the service impact factors and countermeasures using fuzzy DEMATEL method. The study can provide enterprises with the top-level framework and decision-making of smart product service system based on CILC, and realize the effective integration, expansion and value-added of service resources. At the same time, the application of this research methods can shorten the distance between customers and products, improve customer satisfaction.

Assessment Of Job Satisfaction Among Doctors And Nurses Of Federal Teaching Hospital Gombe, Northeast Nigeria

Background:Job satisfaction refers to how people feel about their jobs and the different aspects of their jobs. Job satisfaction has been associated with benefits that range from giving an employee the motivation to work, improving the performance of employees, efficiency, commitment, and reduction of burnout level. Job satisfaction is an important determinant of productivity and effective service delivery in the workplace. Objective:To assess the level of job satisfaction, factors associated with it and the difference in job satisfaction between doctors and nurses in Federal Teaching Hospital, Gombe, Nigeria Methodology: A cross-sectional descriptive study was carried out among doctors and nurses of the federal teaching hospital Gombe. A Cluster sampling technique was implored to select the study participants. Data was collected using a semi-structured, self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaire was divided into two sections; socio-demographic data and evaluation of job satisfaction which has five domains (general satisfaction, opportunity to develop and responsibility, patient care, time pressure, and staff relation). Results were presented in the form of tables, and charts and described using mean and standard deviation. The analysis was carried out using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) program. The level of job satisfaction was measured on a five-point Likert scale. The association between the independent variable with overall job satisfaction was then determined using the chi-square test, taking p-value <0.05 to be statistically significant. Results: The mean age, length of service, and working hours were found to be 35.6±8.7 years, 8.2±5.9 years, and 8.5±1.9 hours respectively. Only 37.1% of the respondents were nurses, and 62.9% of the respondents were doctors. The study showed that the overall job satisfaction of respondents was 90.0%, of which 82.7% of respondents were satisfied with the general aspect of their job. The study also found that job satisfaction amongst nurses and doctors was associated with younger age and shorter working hours per day with p values of <0.001 and 0.002 respectively. Conclusion: Job satisfaction among the doctors and nurses in this study is high. The younger staff and those working shorter hours daily are more satisfied with their jobs. We recommend that the daily working hours should also be reviewed and those working longer hours be compensated for the additional hours done daily

Assortment of Airports’ Sustainability Strategy: A Comprehensiveness Analysis Framework

Global sustainability challenges are transforming 21st century business. Economic, social, and environmental sustainability impacts regulatory agencies and enterprises, particularly in the air transport industry, which facilitates access to productive services and market linkage. Stakeholders, shareholders, consumers, employees, and society are increasingly pressuring businesses to examine their socioeconomic consequences and manage them sustainably and resiliently. In this competitive and economically sensitive climate, good management is a primary responsibility for airport operators and authorities, as well as national and local economies. An assessment tool for airport strategic plans is developed in this research. Corporate activities can encourage responsible infrastructure development and company sustainability. The assessment methodology is based on a comparative analysis between airports and regulatory authorities’ threshold. The role of sustainability in the air transport business ecosystem is depicted using a systemic approach, demonstrating that its relationship to business performance is a significant barrier to business resilience and competition for planners, managers, and decision makers. The numerical application considers a group of European, U.S, and Asian airports serving international flights. Conventional wisdom is to provide the evaluation analysis framework for planning and managing capital-intensive transport hubs such as airports.

Evaluating the Comprehensive Benefit of Public Transport Service – The Perspective of Three Stakeholders

Most studies investigate the benefit of public trans-port service from either the perspective of the operators or the public individually, failing to bind them together. Furthermore, they have not considered the significance of the government in quantifying the benefit. This pa-per explores the comprehensive benefit of public trans-port service from the perspectives of three stakeholders; namely, the operators, the public, and government. We develop a comprehensive benefit evaluation tool that is able to quantify production efficiency, service effect, and environmental effect, and test the effectiveness of the tool through a case study in 36 central cities of China. A network data envelopment analysis (NDEA) is used to evaluate the efficiency of the production and service sub-process, and comprehensive benefits. The results re-veal the following: (1) during the period 2010–2017, the production efficiency in 36 central cities showed a down-ward trend; (2) the service effectiveness did not change considerably from 2010 to 2013 but declined gradual-ly during the period 2014–2017; (3) the comprehensive benefits rarely changed during the period 2010–2013, but gradually got worse in response to reductions in the production efficiency and service effectiveness during the period 2014–2017. This study offers a robust tool to mea-sure the benefits of public transport in China for better decision-making, in terms of transit operation and man-agement.

Forest fire susceptibility prediction using machine learning models with resampling algorithms, Northern part of Eastern Ghat Mountain range (India)

Periodic forest fires destruct to biodiversity, ecosystem productivity and multiple ecosystem services. Forest fires are currently turning a leading cause of forest degradation. The principal objective of this research is to predict forest fire vulnerable zones over Similipal biosphere reserve (SBR; Odisha) using different machine learning (ML) models, such as support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS). Different resampling methods (CV and bootstrap) have also been applied for optimizing the result and better accuracy. Results show that 10-fold cross validation (CV) technique performed best on SVM model (AUC = 0.83) whereas bootstrap performed best on RF (AUC = 0.80) and MARS model (AUC= 0.84). The main advantage of MARS model is that it only uses input variable and significantly increases the performance of the model. The novelty of this research is application of various ML algorithms through resampling techniques to reduce the biasness and improves the reliability of the models.

Value Chain and Technology-Based Complexity Analysis of China’s Manufacturing Exports

In recent years, China’s manufacturing industry has developed rapidly, but numerous studies have shown that China is not a manufacturing powerhouse. In recent years, the division of labor in global value chains has been booming, and the Chinese manufacturing industry has been actively integrated into it with its labor cost advantage and achieved rapid development. There is an urgent need to transform and upgrade to high value-added links in the value chain. This paper measures the upstream degree of China’s manufacturing industry through the world input-output table and uses it as an indicator to measure the global value chain status, focusing on the heterogeneous impact of different types of productive services on the upgrading of China’s manufacturing industry’s global value chain status. This study examines the impact of global value chain boundary lessness and institutional quality on the technological complexity of China’s equipment manufacturing exports, using panel data of six types of Chinese equipment manufacturing industries from 2007 to 2018 as a sample. The findings show that intermediate manufactured goods from intermediate imports and intermediate products from developing economies make the strongest contribution to imported intermediate manufactured goods from developing economies. By industry, the impact areas of Graph Visualization (GV) embedding and institutional quality are different. GV embedding has a stronger contribution to the manufacturing of communication, computer, and other electronic equipment, while institutional quality has a stronger contribution to the manufacturing of special office machinery, and the interaction between the two is the same as that of institutional quality.

An Integrated Approach to Assess the Water Efficiency of Introducing Best Management Practices: An Application to Sugarcane Mechanisation in Brazil

Management practices reputed to be the best are being introduced widely in the agricultural sector. The identification of what these best management practices are for a given cultivation area requires thorough assessment, using indicators that reduce the risk of unintended impacts and that help manage environmental and economic trade-offs. We propose an integrated assessment that includes two indicators in water footprint sustainability assessment: water apparent productivity and ecosystem services value, thereby considering the trade-offs in the two ecosystem services of water provisioning and erosion potential. The approach was tested in Mogí-Guaçú Pardo (Brazil), a basin that has been subjected to intensive land-use changes through the expansion of sugarcane plantations. Here, regulatory changes have also promoted the introduction of the new management practice of mechanised harvesting, thereby phasing out the practice of burning the fields before manual harvest. A probabilistic approach was applied to account for uncertainty in model parameters. The results reveal that sugarcane has a comparably high economic value but is a less efficient land-use type from a water-use perspective. The total green and blue water footprint in the basin increased by 12% from 2000 to 2012, mainly due to the increase in sugarcane area (+36%). The intensification in sugarcane harvesting practices led to improved economic water-use efficiency and also lowered erosion costs. Adding the new indicators and considering trade-offs linked to new management practices and/or land-use changes allow for more robust decision making.

Impacts of Different Rural Settlement Expansion Patterns on Eco-Environment and Implications in the Loess Hilly and Gully Region, China

While the eco-environmental effects of rural settlement expansion are of great significance to rural sustainable land use, the relationship between rural settlement expansion and eco-environment under different expansion patterns is still unclear. To fill this gap, the current study used Baota district of the loess hilly and gully region as a case study area. We first investigated the spatiotemporal expansion patterns of rural settlements from 1990 to 2015 and then estimated their impacts on ecosystem services by implementing the Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs (InVEST) model and the global agro-ecological zones (GAEZ) model. Results showed the following: 1) edge expansion was the primary pattern of rural settlement expansion in Baota district from 1990 to 2015, and the area of edge expansion was 757.40 h m2, accounting for 71.76% of the total expansion area of rural settlements. 2) Rural settlement expansion caused 1744.60 t loss of crop yield, 40,155.78 Mg C loss of carbon storage, and a significant decline in habitat quality of water areas during 1990–2015. 3) According to the unit expansion area, the edge expansion and leapfrog expansion patterns contributed more to ecosystem services loss than the infilling expansion pattern. 4) There were gradient differences in the impacts of three expansion patterns on ecosystem services, and the impacts were gradually weakened by the increased distance. Accordingly, we concluded that the expansion of rural settlements reduced surrounding ecosystem services, especially food production service, and that the edge expansion and leapfrog expansion patterns had higher levels of stress on ecosystem services.

Analysis of Operational Efficiency of Wooden Chair Manufacturing Companies in Serbia using DEA

This paper deals with the operational efficiency of companies engaged in the production of wooden chairs using selected statistical and DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) methods. Indicators that typically characterise the supply chain in the production of selected companies were taken as input and output variables for the DEA method. They included three input variables: inventories, material costs and production services costs and one output variable: company’s net profit. The obtained coefficients of correlation pointed to a high degree of correlation between the variables, which justified the performance of an efficiency analysis using the DEA method. The study included 12 companies engaged in the production of wooden chairs. The results of the conducted analyses show that only one company had a relatively satisfactory operational efficiency (efficiency coefficient of 0.83) for the nine-year period. All other companies, especially micro and small enterprises, had unsatisfactorily low operational efficiency. Micro enterprises had the lowest operational efficiency, with an efficiency coefficient of only 0.14. Small enterprises reached the value of 0.3, and large companies 0.67. Medium companies had the most favourable efficiency coefficient of up to 0.83.

SCM-IoT: An Aproach for Internet of Things Services Integration and Coordination

Today, new applications demand an internet of things (IoT) infrastructure with greater intelligence in our daily use devices. Among the salient features that characterize intelligent IoT systems are interoperability and dynamism. While service-oriented architectures (SOA) offer a well-developed and standardized architecture and protocols for interoperability, answering whether SOA offers enough dynamism to merge IoT with artificial intelligence (AI) is still in its beginnings. This paper proposes an SOA model, called SCM-IoT (service composition model for IoT), for incorporating AI into IoT systems, addressing their coordination by a mediator offering services for storage, production, discovery, and notification of relevant data for client applications. The model allows IoT systems to be incrementally developed from three perspectives: a conceptual model, platform-independent computational model, and platform-dependent computational model. Finally, as a case of study, a domotic IoT system application is developed in SCM-IoT to analyze the characteristics and benefits of the proposed approach.

Trusted Data Storage Architecture for National Infrastructure.

National infrastructure is a material engineering facility that provides public services for social production and residents’ lives, and a large-scale complex device or system is used to ensure normal social and economic activities. Due to the problems of difficult data collection, long project period, complex data, poor security, difficult traceability and data intercommunication, the archives management of most national infrastructure is still in the pre-information era. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a trusted data storage architecture for national infrastructure based on blockchain. This consists of real-time collection of national infrastructure construction data through sensors and other Internet of Things devices, conversion of heterogeneous data source data into a unified format according to specific business flows, and timely storage of data in the blockchain to ensure data security and persistence. Knowledge extraction of data stored in the chain and the data of multiple regions or fields are jointly modeled through federal learning. The parameters and results are stored in the chain, and the information of each node is shared to solve the problem of data intercommunication.

The biodiversity and ecosystem service contributions and trade-offs of forest restoration approaches.

Forest restoration is being scaled up globally to deliver critical ecosystem services and biodiversity benefits; however, there is a lack of rigorous comparison of cobenefit delivery across different restoration approaches. Through global synthesis, we used 25,950 matched data pairs from 264 studies in 53 countries to assess how delivery of climate, soil, water, and wood production services, in addition to biodiversity, compares across a range of tree plantations and native forests. Benefits of aboveground carbon storage, water provisioning, and especially soil erosion control and biodiversity are better delivered by native forests, with compositionally simpler, younger plantations in drier regions performing particularly poorly. However, plantations exhibit an advantage in wood production. These results underscore important trade-offs among environmental and production goals that policy-makers must navigate in meeting forest restoration commitments.