Effectively managing the diversity and complexity of human settlements is pivotal in tackling the sustainability challenges we face in the Anthropocene. Conceptualizing a city’s human settlement as a unified social–ecological system and i...
Product-service systems (PSS) enable product-oriented manufacturing companies to differentiate their offerings and become more competitive, while creating more value for customers along with improved economic performance and, in some cases, reduced e...
Hydropolitics is defined as the systematic study of conflict and cooperation in transboundary water basins, affecting around 40% of the world’s population. There has been great advancement in studies endeavoring to explore linkages between hydr...
This paper introduces and fleshes out a systemic method designed to develop a holistic understanding of states’ behavior in transboundary water conflict and cooperation. Such an approach leverages causality analysis to capture the deep structur...
Over the last several decades, policymakers and stakeholders in the European Union (EU) have put considerable effort into increasing the adoption of organic farming, with the overall objective of its sustainable development. However, the growth of th...
Smart Mobile Devices (SMD)—including hardware devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables; the software systems that animate them; and the data-communication infrastructure that connects them—pose increasing sustainability challe...
The digital transformation in the treatment of mental health and emotional disharmony requires artificial intelligence architectures that overcome the limitations of purely neural approaches, such as temporal inconsistency, opacity, and lack of theor...
This paper utilizes the Shifting the Burden Archetype (Senge/Stroh) to document a systemic pattern that is unfortunately, often unconscious to the parties involved and inadvertently leads to the undermining of corporate or government/Indigenous relat...
Crises are a relevant element of the modern political, economic, and social landscape. To better understand them and their potential dynamic evolution, and thus allow decision makers in turn to design more effective intervention measures, a more comp...
Bovine respiratory disease (BRD) is recognized as a complex multifactorial disease often resulting in significant economic losses for the stocker industry through reduced health and performance of feeder calves. Conventional approaches to manage BRD...
Indiscriminate expansion of agricultural activities into wetlands affects the sustainability of wetland-dependent livelihoods. Systems research is an important tool for identifying and dealing with the underlying drivers of wetland degradation; howev...
Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) in the agri-food sector have been overcoming internationalization barriers. However, research is scarce, specifically to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, despite t...
This paper aims to analyze national policies of Pakistan taking into account the complexity of electric power generation, growth, and complying with multilateral agreements. Systems thinking has been applied to understand the complexity of energy sce...
Ghana is predominantly an agricultural country with a clear majority of its population depending partly or fully on agriculture for their livelihoods. Pork consumption in Ghana is on the increase and the livestock industry is a key sector of alternat...
1 March 2018
Many indices have been proposed for cardiovascular risk stratification from electrocardiogram signal processing, still with limited use in clinical practice. We created a system integrating the clinical definition of cardiac risk subdomains from ECGs...
Groundwater resource management involves complex socio-hydrological systems characterized by dynamic feedback, uncertainty, and common misconceptions among decision-makers. While deterministic models like MODFLOW simulate physical hydrology effective...
A persistent problem in UK hospitals is that of delayed discharges, where patients who are fit for discharge continue to occupy beds whilst awaiting care packages from Social Care. Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) in which Health and Social Care collab...
This study examines the identity of nanostores—micro, independent grocery retailers—through a systemic, stakeholder-informed lens to promote their survivability and competitiveness. Moving beyond traditional operational descriptions, it i...
South Africa’s overlapping crises, namely ecological overshoot, energy insecurity, unemployment, and inequality, are not isolated challenges but systemic outcomes of a political economy dependent on growth. This article advances a degrowth by d...
Due to tightly coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes that often behave in nonlinear, counterintuitive ways, it is argued that soil is an archetype of a complex system. Unfortunately, human intuition and decision making has been shown t...
Previous research regarding PhD students’ well-being (PhD-WB) has lacked a comprehensive and systemic analysis. This research engages with a systems approach to examine the multiple variables, including feedback mechanisms, which influence PhD-WB ove...
Veterinary telemedicine has existed since the late 1990s. Various scholars have predicted its growth, others its decline. We constructed a system dynamics model of a veterinary telemedicine company providing services in one specialty in the industry....
The introduction of an intermediate discontinuity in frame structures is commonly named inter-storey isolation. Inter-storey isolation is an effective technique for the seismic protection of new or existing frame structures. The devices that are used...
Much of the literature on sustainability has tried to define the “virtuous behaviour” of “agents” (man and his social and economic organizations) so that it respects the “sustainability constraint.” This paper provides a “mirror-image” approach, base...
Energy renovation in buildings is one of the major challenges for the decarbonisation of the building stock. To effectively prioritise decision making regarding the adoption of the most efficient solutions and strategies, it is imperative to develop...
This work presents methods to combine data from the Semantic Web into existing EHRs, leading to an augmented EHR. An existing EHR extract is augmented by combining it with additional information from external sources, typically linked data sources. T...
Bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) archetypes extracted from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) BRDF/Albedo product over the global Earth Observing System Land Validation Core Sites can be used to simplify...
Engineering design is a knowledge intensive activity for both new and mature technical systems, such as mechanical transmissions. However, design knowledge is often transferred with conservative and unstructured approaches, although knowledge managem...
Information sharing across medical institutions is restricted to information exchange between specific partners. The lifelong electronic health records (EHR) structure and content require standardization efforts. The existing standards such as openEH...
The Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC highlights that global surface temperatures have risen by 1.1 °C above pre-industrial levels, with a marked increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme heat events in hot–humid regions. Buildin...
The Western genre has traditionally been associated with American identity and male-dominated narratives. However, recent decades have seen increasing attention to female protagonists, particularly the European woman as a cultural mediator within the...
In recent years, several tools and models have been developed and used for the design and analysis of future national energy systems. Many of these models focus on the integration of various renewable energy resources and the transformation of existi...
The construction industry is a major consumer of raw materials and a significant contributor to global waste. In Canada, the construction, renovation, and demolition (CRD) sector diverts only 16% of its waste from landfills, underscoring the urgent n...
Background: Poor lifestyle choices contribute significantly to non-communicable chronic diseases. Given the family’s influence on health behaviours, this study aimed to identify distinct family archetypes based on family health climates for phy...
This study presents the performance-based seismic assessment of low-rise reinforced concrete archetype buildings, considering repair costs for ordinary moment-resistant frames (OMF) and dual systems consisting of OMF plus special shear walls (SSW). H...
The performance of base-isolated steel structures having special moment frames is assessed. The archetypes, which are designed per ASCE/SEI 7–2016, are simulated in the Finite Element (FE) computational platform, OpenSees. Adopting nonlinear dy...
The incessant reportage of cost overruns and abandoned projects in contemporary literature have accentuated the need for a re-examination of the nature of the cost management strategies deployed to these projects. This study explores the potential of...
Diverse factors influence the energy profile of an urban development including density, shape of buildings and their types, energy demand, and available energy resources. A systematic investigation of the energy characteristics of urban areas, involv...
To address sustainable development goals (SDGs), national and international strategies have been increasingly interested in the bioeconomy. SDGs have been criticized for lacking stakeholder perspectives and agency, and for requiring too little of bus...
The selection of an appropriate allocation procedure for co-production and recycling in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) depends on the goal and scope of the analysis. However, it is not always clear when partitioning or system expansion can be applied, o...
Tourism offers many economic benefits but can have long-lasting ecological effects when improperly managed. Tourism can cause overwhelming pressure on wastewater treatment systems, as in Belize, where some of the over 400 small islands (cayes) that w...
The emergence of InsurTech has significantly transformed the traditional insurance industry, leading to the development of a new ecosystem characterized by digital intermediation, strategic partnerships, and increasing interdependence among actors. T...
The aim of this conceptual paper is to revisit the relationship between leadership and bureaucracy. The dominant and unquestioned way of thinking about leadership is to equate it as an undertaking exercised by leaders, those officers who occupy hiera...
Global warming will affect the heating and cooling energy demands of houses. Thus, it is necessary to measure this impact in different areas of a country to influence future public policies, guidelines, and regulations. This paper proposes to forecas...
As an early vehicle for the spread of Western architectural culture in China, Catholic churches from the late 19th to the early 20th century exhibited unique Sino-Western fusion characteristics, serving as tangible witnesses to modern cultural encoun...
16 April 2021
This paper explores technostress and its dimensions, assessing the relationship with possible negative effects in the individual, social and professional sphere. The study uses a self-reported approach of undergraduate students in Spain (n = 337), fo...
JC Polyomavirus (JCPyV) is a non-enveloped virus with circular double stranded DNA responsible for the rare but fatal demyelinating disease known as progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). In its host, this virus exists in two different for...
The superior mechanical characteristics of ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) have attracted the interest of many researchers worldwide. Researchers have attempted to perform comparative analyses on the behavior of UHPC versus conventional and hi...
In this paper, a novel symmetrical three-wavelength toggling archetype for measuring the concentration of gases using a tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS) system is introduced and demonstrated. The system was operated at 1.5714 &micr...
In Chile, office buildings are typically reinforced concrete (RC) structures whose lateral load-resisting system comprises core structural walls and perimeter moment frames (i.e., dual wall-frame system). In the last 20 years, nearly 800 new dual wal...
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