Energy Efficient Lighting in Plant Factories: Addressing Utilance

Vertical farming is considered to play a crucial role in future food supply. Until today, the high amount of electrical energy required for artificial lighting has been problematic in this context. Various possibilities for increasing efficiency through adapted lighting conditions have been and are being investigated. However, comparably little attention is paid to increasing utilance, i.e., the amount of photons that can effectively be used by the plant. In this work, a novel targeted lighting strategy is therefore proposed that allows for a dynamic adaptation of the luminaires’ light distribution to match the effective crop size at each stage of plant growth in a fully-automated manner. It is shown that the resulting utilance can significantly be increased compared to standard full-coverage lighting. Moreover, it is found that the proposed strategy is likely to consume less than half of the electrical energy usually required for the latter. An additional increase in system efficiency can be prognosticated and the potential energy savings are estimated based on assumptions of future LED generations derived from literature.

Reconfigurable Neighborhood—Mechatronisation of the Urban Design

Today more than half of the world’s population lives in cities not yet ready for the massive growth and adaptation required to meet global urbanization predicted for the next decades. The planning, design, and urban governance must urgently evolve. Future cities should become more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable. The intelligent town we anticipate combines the concepts of new information flow as well as research proposals for the design, upgrade of buildings and municipal infrastructure using robots and mechatronic systems at the scale of dwelling, building, neighborhood, district or town. This article presents the conceptual framework for the role of kinetic and responsive design at the scale of small urban areas, taking into account dynamic adaptation to users’ needs and changing environmental conditions across a day, week, month and year.

How Can Transactional Semantics Enhance the Commit Rate of Context-aware Service Composition in Advanced Pervasive Systems?

Context-aware composition of services exhibiting transactional properties poses several challenges. A major challenge is the transactional behavior of candidate services which is subject to perpetual change while the composition is running. Compositions of services displaying transactional properties must be dynamically adapted at run time to cope with context fluctuations. By dynamic adaptation, we refer to the ability to alter the composition behavior in response to changes affecting its execution. We focus on changes impacting the successful commit rate of transactional service composition. This has led us to explore the trail of a flexible homeomorphism between alternative behaviors. We propose a behavioral adaptation approach that adjusts the behavior of transactional compositions of services in a proactive and transparent manner. This strategy is based on the Profiled Task Class concept. A service composition generator has also been developed for the performance evaluation of components implementing the behavioral adaptation strategy in order to identify its impact on the commit rate of CATS compositions.

Chinese Translation Strategies of Japanese Mental Cultural Vocabulary from the Perspective of Adaptation Theory

Mental cultural vocabulary is a type of cultural vocabulary. This kind of vocabulary is a valuable carrier of the spiritual material culture of a nation or a country. The translation of these words can directly reflect the differences between different cultures, which plays an important role in cross-cultural communication. The translation strategies in dealing with mental cultural vocabulary translation is emphasized as it is a difficulty faced in translation practice. Based on the adaptation theory, this study analyzes the examples and translation from the perspective of dynamic adaptation as well as explains the adaptation at all levels in translation practice.

Alpinist adaptive potential and the dynamics of adaptation in Janusz Klarner’s „Nanda Devi”

Alpinist expedition to the Nanda Devi was the first Polish successfully ended hiking in the Himalaya. Nanda Devi was a very tough challenge for Polish team but after many dangerous situations they finally reached the peak. As a next step alpinists wanted to reach Tirsuli peak. Unluckily, two of the expeditors were buried in an avalanche on the slopes of a glacier. Janusz Klarner (the member of the Polish alpinists team) after few years wrote a book Nanda Devi which is based on his private expedition journal. The main thesis of the article is that reaching Nanda Devi was possible by the accurate speed of adaptation. The Himalaya was a completely different and unknown place for Polish alpinists. Alpinists were forced to various adaptations in many different situations. In the article author analyses emerging changes and adaptations. Among them are symbolic, cultural, technical and axiological adaptations. Using Deleuze's findings from Bergsonizm, the author recognizes that the capacity for appropriately dynamic adaptation is the result of an appropriate arrangement occurring at a point in time. To sum up, an author considers various connections between cultural patterns, personal causality and environmental considerations.

Dynamic Adaptation Method of Business Process Based on Hierarchical Feature Model

With the continuous complexity and frequent changes in business application scenarios, companies urgently need to establish a flexible business process management mechanism that includes dynamic rules, in which dynamic adaptation methods of business processes play a vital role. Aiming at the problem that the current methods only use the preset process template and the decision-making database, it cannot respond quickly to business changes and reconfigure the business process. This research proposes a dynamic adaptation method of business process based on the hierarchical feature model, builds a hierarchical feature model of complex processes, then establishes a hierarchical business policy set to achieve an agile response to business emergencies. By constructing a mapping model, the feature model is associated with the BPMN model to realize the rapid execution of the reconfiguration process model. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by process examples and the developed business process dynamic adaptation tool.