Strengthening Taiwan’s Green Building Certification System from Aspects of Productivity and Energy Costs to Provide a Healthier Workplace

This study estimates the relationship between poor indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and the increasing labor costs in green buildings in Taiwan. Specifically, poor performance of IEQ including HVAC, lighting, and indoor air quality, influences the health and well-being of occupants and leads to worse productivity, ultimately causing increased personnel cost. In Taiwan’s green building certification (GBC) system, the energy-savings category is mandatory while the IEQ category is only optional. It means that certified building cases may not reach the expected level in IEQ. Thus, this study reviews the thermal environment, indoor air quality (IAQ), and illumination performances of IEQ-certified and non-IEQ-certified buildings in 20 green buildings. Building energy and IEQ simulations were conducted to analyze the relationships between indoor comfort, energy cost, and personnel cost in green buildings. The results show that IEQ-certified green buildings averagely perform better than non-IEQ-certified ones in the aspects of IEQ and building costs. Besides, 3 of 13 non-IEQ-certified green buildings undertake extremely high additional expenditure for the poor IEQ. The results correspond to some previous findings that green-certified buildings do not necessarily guarantee good building performance. This study further inspects the pros and cons of Taiwan’s GBC system and proposes recommendations against its insufficient IEQ evaluation category. As the trade-off of energy-saving benefits with health and well-being in green buildings has always been a concern, this study aims to stimulate more quantitative research and promote a more comprehensive green building certification system in Taiwan.

A Chemistry-Oriented Cost-Effective Expert Team Formation in Social Networks

<p>The growth of social networks in modern information systems has enabled the collaboration of experts at an unprecedented scale. Given a social network and a task consisting of a set of required skills, Team Formation (TF) aims at finding a team of experts who can cover the required skills and can communicate in an effective manner. However, this definition has been interpreted as the problem of finding teams with minimum communication cost which neglects two aspect of team formation in real life. The first is that in reality experts are multi-skilled, hence communication cost cannot be a fixed value and should vary according to the channels employed. The second ignored aspect is disregarding teams with high expertise level who can still satisfy the required communication level. To tackle above mentioned issues, I introduce a dynamic formof communication for multi-facet relationships and use it to devise a novel approach called Chemistry Oriented Team Formation (ChemoTF) based on two new metrics; Chemistry Level and Expertise Level. Chemistry Level measures scale of communication required by the task andExpertise Level measures the overall expertise among potential teams filtered by Chemistry Level. Moreover, I adopt a personnel cost metric to filter costly teams. The experimental results on the corpus compiled for this purpose suggests that ChemoTF returns communicative and cost-effective teams with the highest expertise level compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. The corpus itself is a valuable output which contains comprehensive scholarly information in the field of computer science.</p>

A Chemistry-Oriented Cost-Effective Expert Team Formation in Social Networks

<p>The growth of social networks in modern information systems has enabled the collaboration of experts at an unprecedented scale. Given a social network and a task consisting of a set of required skills, Team Formation (TF) aims at finding a team of experts who can cover the required skills and can communicate in an effective manner. However, this definition has been interpreted as the problem of finding teams with minimum communication cost which neglects two aspect of team formation in real life. The first is that in reality experts are multi-skilled, hence communication cost cannot be a fixed value and should vary according to the channels employed. The second ignored aspect is disregarding teams with high expertise level who can still satisfy the required communication level. To tackle above mentioned issues, I introduce a dynamic formof communication for multi-facet relationships and use it to devise a novel approach called Chemistry Oriented Team Formation (ChemoTF) based on two new metrics; Chemistry Level and Expertise Level. Chemistry Level measures scale of communication required by the task andExpertise Level measures the overall expertise among potential teams filtered by Chemistry Level. Moreover, I adopt a personnel cost metric to filter costly teams. The experimental results on the corpus compiled for this purpose suggests that ChemoTF returns communicative and cost-effective teams with the highest expertise level compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. The corpus itself is a valuable output which contains comprehensive scholarly information in the field of computer science.</p>

Design and Implementation of Energy Management System Based on Spring Boot Framework

This paper designs and implements an energy management system based on the Spring Boot framework. The system mainly includes three layers, which are the data collection layer, the business logic layer, and the display interface layer from bottom to top. The data collection layer is based on the RS-485 electrical standard and the MODBUS communication protocol. The two protocols connect all energy consumption monitoring points into a mixed topology communication network in the enterprise. The programs in the data collection layer poll each energy consumption monitoring point in the network to collect the data and transmit to the business logic layer. The business logic layer is developed on the basis of the Spring Boot framework and mainly includes two parts: the MySQL database and Tomcat server. In the MySQL database, the stored data are horizontally split according to the time column and stored in different data tables. The split of data reduces the load of a single data table and improves the query performance of the database. The Tomcat server is built into the Spring Boot framework to provide a basic environment for system operation. The Spring Boot framework is the core component of the system. It is responsible for collecting, storing, and analyzing data from energy consumption monitoring points, receiving and processing data requests from the display interface layer. It also provides standard data interfaces to the external programs. The display interface layer is developed on the basis of the Vue framework and integrated into the Spring Boot framework. The display layer combines an open-source visualization chart library called ECharts to provide users with a fully functional and friendly human–computer interaction interface. Through the calculation of hardware and software costs, considering the personnel cost in different regions, the total cost of the energy management system can be estimated. The cost of construction was approximately 210,000 USD in this paper. Since the system was actually deployed in a manufacturing company in December 2019, it has been operating stably for more than 600 days.

Site Characterization and Associated Disposal Costs for Illegal Dumpsites Located in the Municipality of La Granja, Chile

Chilean legislation dictates that Municipalities are responsible for household solid waste management, but this doesn’t include the clean-up of illegal dumpsites. These in-city dumpsites usually are located on public roads, parks or abandoned sites; have a wide variety of origins, from household trash to business waste, and feature a high component of construction debris. One of the main problems that municipalities have managing these sites is that when they are cleaned, the dumpsites immediately reappear. Therefore, a site survey and visual characterization was performed for these illegal dumpsites at the Municipality of La Granja, and a cost analysis associated with the constant clean-up costs was performed. La Granja Municipality has an established clean-up program with a frequency that varies from one to three withdrawals a week per dumpsite. Santiago is Chile's capital and is divided into 32 municipalities, the general population of the city is 5.250.565 habitants according to the 2017 census. La Granja is one of Santiago’s municipalities; according to the last census, it has 116.571 inhabitants and a total of 34.423 households divided into 69 neighbourhoods. The social economical income of the municipality corresponds to medium low to lower level. The study detected 35 critical sites that were catalogued as recuring dumpsites. The mayor cause of these dumpsites corresponds to illegal dumping of construction waste, mayor appliance and household waste, and only one dumpsite didn’t present construction debris during the length of the study. The average volume measured in site, for most of the dumpsites varied from 1 to 3 m3 and only 2 sites exceeded 8 m3. The most important characteristics of the dumpsites were the ease accessibility (82,4%), followed by the total lack of public illumination, high vehicular traffic and to or more intersections (67,7%). The equipment and personnel cost were estimated for the clean-up service of the 35 dumpsites. The cost analysis showed that the associated cost of the clean-up corresponds to a 5,8% of the municipal budget for solid waste management. As a result of the study, 4 sites were intervened through the generation of green area or small parks, with an emphasis in the protection or blocking of the access and roadside.

Cost analysis of a coaching intervention to increase use of transradial percutaneous coronary intervention

Background The transradial approach (TRA) to cardiac catheterization is safer than the traditional transfemoral approach (TFA), with similar clinical effectiveness. However, adoption of TRA remains low, representing less than 50% of catheterization procedures in 2015. Peer coaching is one approach to facilitate implementation; however, the costs of this strategy for cardiac procedures such as TRA are unclear. Methods We conducted an activity-based costing analysis (ABC) of a multi-center, hybrid type III implementation trial of a coaching intervention designed to increase the use of TRA. We identified the key activities of the intervention and determined the personnel, resources, and time needed to complete each activity. The personnel cost per hour and the activity duration were then used to estimate the cost of each activity and the total variable cost of the implementation. Fixed costs related to designing and running the implementation were calculated separately. All costs are reported in 2019 constant US dollars. Results The total cost of the coaching intervention implementation was $374,863. Of the total cost, $367,752 were variable costs due to travel, preparatory work, in-person coaching, post-intervention evaluation, and administrative time. We estimated fixed costs of $7112. The mean marginal cost of implementing the intervention at only one additional medical center was $52,536. Conclusions We provide granular cost estimates of a conceptually rooted implementation strategy designed to increase the uptake of TRA for cardiac catheterization. We estimate that implementation costs stemming from the coaching approach would be offset after the conversion of approximately 409 to 1363 catheterizations from TFA to TRA. Our estimates provide benchmarks of the expected costs of implementing evidence-based, but expertise-intensive, cardiac procedures. Trial registration ISRCTN, ISRCTN66341299. Registered 7 July 2020—retrospectively registered

Assessing the Efficacy of Budget in Controlling Fraudulent Personnel Cost Figure in Borno State Civil Service, Nigeria

The Borno State Government in its effort to rid the state civil service of the ghost worker syndrome made a lot of efforts such as verification of staff by consultants and physical head count of staff by committee. The present administration and its predecessors have all made that effort, but the syndrome seems far from over. It is in light of the above that this study seeks to investigate the Personnel Cost Budget of the state government in respect of education and health sectors to see if it assisted in controlling fraud in personnel cost. Both primary and secondary data were used for this research. Closed ended questionnaire was administered to personnel depart of the education and Health sectors, while the Borno state budget figure for these sectors are extracted from the State budget document of 2015 to 2019. These data were analysed by the use of Benford’s Law. The study found out that budget is being prepared annually on incremental basis using the previous year’s budget figure as basis. It also found out that the budgeted figure is always higher than the actual giving rise to favourable variance, and do not usual follow the pattern of Benford Law in which figures are supposed to appear in a numeric data setup in line with its rule.

Episode-of-Care Costs for Revision Total Joint Arthroplasties by Decadal Age Groups

The demand for revision total joint arthroplasties (rTJAs) is expected to increase as the age of the population continues to rise. Accurate cost data regarding hospital expenses for differing age groups are needed to deliver optimal care within value-based healthcare (VBHC) models. The aim of this study was to compare the total in-hospital costs by decadal groups following rTJA and to determine the primary drivers of the costs for these procedures. Time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) was used to capture granular hospital costs. A total of 551 rTJAs were included in the study, with 294 sexagenarians, 198 septuagenarians, and 59 octogenarians and older. Sexagenarians had a lower ASA classification (2.3 vs. 2.4 and 2.7; p < 0.0001) and were more often privately insured (66.7% vs. 24.2% and 33.9%; p < 0.0001) as compared to septuagenarians and octogenarians and older, respectively. Sexagenarians were discharged to home at a higher rate (85.3% vs. 68.3% and 34.3%; p < 0.0001), experienced a longer operating room (OR) time (199.8 min vs. 189.7 min and 172.3 min; p = 0.0195), and had a differing overall hospital length of stay (2.8 days vs. 2.7 days and 3.6 days; p = 0.0086) compared to septuagenarians and octogenarians and older, respectively. Sexagenarians had 7% and 23% less expensive personnel costs from post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) to discharge (p < 0.0001), and 1% and 24% more expensive implant costs (p = 0.077) compared to septuagenarians and octogenarians and older, respectively. Sexagenarians had a lower total in-hospital cost for rTJAs by 0.9% compared to septuagenarians but 12% more expensive total in-hospital costs compared to octogenarians and older (p = 0.185). Multivariate linear regression showed that the implant cost (0.88389; p < 0.0001), OR time (0.12140; p < 0.0001), personnel cost from PACU through to discharge (0.11472; p = 0.0007), and rTHAs (−0.03058; p < 0.0001) to be the strongest associations with overall costs. Focusing on the implant costs and OR times to reduce costs for all age groups for rTJAs is important to provide cost-effective VBHC.

Strategi Peningkatan Profit Melalui Pengendalian Biaya Kesempatan (Opportunity Cost) pada Kasus Panggilan Jatuh (Drop Call) BTS di Telkomsel, Karawang

Persaingan antara operator seluler di Indonesia cukup ketat, ditandai dengan saling menawarkan tarif murah bagi pengguna layanan telekomunikasi. Telkomsel sebagai operator seluler terbesar dituntut untuk melakukan efisiensi biaya agar profitnya meningkat signifikan ditengah persaingan ketat untuk tetap mempertahankan dominasinya diantara operator seluler. Akan tetapi, biaya itu sendiri bermacam jenisnya, mulai dari total operational cost (operational dan maintenance cost, depreciation cost, general affair cost, personnel cost, marketing cost) dan opportunity cost. Harus tepat menentukan jenis biaya apa yang harus menjadi fokus untuk menjadi sasaran efisiensi, agar profit meningkat signifikan. Untuk mengetahuinya, maka digunakanlah metode penelitian deskriptif yaitu memaparkan biaya data berdasarkan jenisnya dan fakta harga aslinya, untuk menganalisa jenis jenis biaya dan korelasinya terhadap peningkatan profit, dengan data dari Telkomsel area Karawang sebagai sumber penelitian. Dari analisa didapatkan jenis biaya yang paling tepat untuk menjadi sasaran efisiensi adalah opportunity cost yang merupakan biaya yang timbul akibat drop call BTS Telkomsel area Karawang. Karena estimasi kenaikan profit dari efisiensi opportunity cost ini besarnya sekitar 0,48% dari revenue (pendapatan), dibandingakan operational dan maintenance cost yang hanya sebesar 0,2% dari total operational cost. Artinya sebesar 0,48% peluang pendapatan hilang (opportunity cost) akibat drop call. Kesimpulan dari penelitian ini adalah, manajemen Telkomsel harus fokus pada efisiensi opportunity cost untuk meningkatkan profit nya secara signifikan.

Economic Analysis of a New Business for Liposome Manufacturing Using a High-Pressure System

Supercritical assisted Liposome formation (SuperLip) is a lab-scale process for the production of liposomes. SuperLip was recognized as being a versatile supercritical assisted technique for the encapsulation of molecules for different industrial applications, such as pharmaceutic, cosmetic, textile, and nutraceutic purposes. The aim of this work was to perform an economic analysis to assess the profitability of the SuperLip process. The liposomes market was analyzed and the SuperLip process was compared to other techniques in terms of manufacturing advantages using the Canvas and Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Treats (S.W.O.T.) models. SuperLip Plant Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) were estimated, and plant Operating Expenditures (OPEX) were also evaluated and integrated with personnel cost and other plant goods and services. A profit and loss statement was generated, together with a cash flow analysis. According to the market average selling price, liposome price is 1.8 €/mL; in order to join the market rapidly, the selling price of liposomes produced using SuperLip was set at 1.1 €/mL. A payback time has been identified at the fourth year of business. Economic indexes such as ROI and ROS were calculated on a 10-year business prospect, obtaining about a 230% return on investment and a 26.7% return on sales.