Improving Social Capital, A Solution to Manage Water Conflicts

Water systems are categorized as coupled human-natural systems. It is argued that extreme events are primarily associated with the natural component of the system, while conflicts are considered as part of the human component of the water systems. Since the system is coupled, both human and natural components interact with each other. For instance, extreme events such as droughts can trigger conflict among societies. What needs to be noted here is that such disturbances in both systems are, to some extent, inevitable. However, by using the proper mechanisms and leverages, they can be alleviated. Enhancing social capital among stakeholders is one of those leverages to reduce the conflicts' likelihood or at least intensity. Social capital reflects people’s collective level of awareness on the issues, their reciprocal relationships, and public participation. In other words, social capital captures three concepts of “Public Justice,” “Public Cohesion,” and “Public Participation.” This paper aims to descriptively analyze the effect of social capital in social conflicts in the context of water systems. The results of this study indicated that social capital is effective in alleviating water conflicts, but requires large and long-term investments. Therefore, it can be used to alleviate conflicts to reduce vulnerability, and achieve development. Keywords: Social capital, Water systems, Conflict, Vulnerability

Stimulation and motivation of personnel in the project management system

Project management requires attention to planning and providing operations with resources of all kinds, including intellectual and human resources. Human resources in many projects are responsible for most of their success or failure, as they are able to think, make independent, including creative decisions, and coordinate the involvement and use of all other types of resources. The authors introduce the concept of “human component of project resources”, which is understood more broadly than labor resources, and analyze the methods and stages of managing this element of project support. This provision is the greatest problem in organizations, the main activity of which is based on a cyclical principle, however, one-time final projects are not rare in them. If the organization does not have the opportunity to hire external specialists to implement them, it is extremely important to rationally organize the involvement of employees in the work on the project and stimulate their work. The authors identified the most difficult stages of staffing projects in terms of organizing activities and motivating the people involved. For each stage, the sources and formats of problems and obstacles to the successful implementation of projects are described, as well as some recommendations for their mitigation are given. However, the authors emphasize that a single methodology for eliminating the identified potential problems cannot exist due to objective reasons. However, understanding of the main aspects that can generate these problems can make it easier for managers to diagnose, prevent or correct them in a timely manner.

Fault Tolerant Strategies for Automated Insulin Delivery Considering the Human Component: Current and Future Perspectives

Automated Insulin Delivery (AID) are systems developed for daily use by people with type 1 diabetes (T1D). To ensure the safety of users, it is essential to consider how the human factor affects the performance and safety of these devices. While there are numerous publications on hardware-related failures of AID systems, there are few studies on the human component of the system. From a control point of view, people with T1D using AID systems are at the same time the plant to be controlled and the plant operator. Therefore, users may induce faults in the controller, sensors, actuators, and the plant itself. Strategies to cope with the human interaction in AID systems are needed for further development of the technology. In this paper, we present an analysis of potential faults introduced by AID users when the system is under normal operation. This is followed by a review of current fault tolerant control (FTC) approaches to identify missing areas of research. The paper concludes with a discussion on future directions for the new generation of FTC AID systems.

Common irrigation drivers of freshwater salinisation in river basins worldwide

Freshwater salinisation is a growing problem, yet cross-regional assessments of freshwater salinity status and the impact of agricultural and other sectoral uses are lacking. Here, we assess inland freshwater salinity patterns and evaluate its interactions with irrigation water use, across seven regional river basins (401 river sub-basins) around the world, using long-term (1980–2010) salinity observations. While a limited number of sub-basins show persistent salinity problems, many sub-basins temporarily exceeded safe irrigation water-use thresholds and 57% experience increasing salinisation trends. We further investigate the role of agricultural activities as drivers of salinisation and find common contributions of irrigation-specific activities (irrigation water withdrawals, return flows and irrigated area) in sub-basins of high salinity levels and increasing salinisation trends, compared to regions without salinity issues. Our results stress the need for considering these irrigation-specific drivers when developing management strategies and as a key human component in water quality modelling and assessment.

Towards a reverse world in automation: human as a sensor

Automation is more and more shifting towards a technologic world where the human component is however still involved. The autonomous cars represent an example where the shift towards a fully automated vehicle still requires the presence of the human component, that is a human-in-the-loop, which may represent the failure or the added value of such systems. Stress and fatigue represent the main concerns in safety issues during workloads, above all, in situations where the person’s behaviour represents a potential source of harm in human–computer interaction. After a brief survey of the recent literature on the human as a sensor concept, in this paper, some examples of an electroencephalography (EEG) based brain-computer interface showing the still limited but potentially challenging effectiveness of such an approach in systems engineering. The aim is to explore brain activities when a subject is conditioned by external stimuli during the execution of a cognitive task and to evaluate the human capability to react to the unexpected event faster than a machine.Different experiment tests have been designed to evaluate the human reactions under simulated driving scenarios and workload sessions. Accordingly, different methodologies to use this information are shown. Driver’s performance has been evaluated by EEG power spectrum analysis when unpredicted acoustic stimuli or breaking emergency situations are simulated during the driving session. A Fine Gaussian Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach has been carried out to classify the human’s brain activities when the participant has to drive a car along a challenging curvilinear path in a virtual simulated scenario or when he is exposed to visual disturbances while performing a common task.The results demonstrate an interesting potential correlation between external stimuli and driver’s brain wave activities in virtual driving environment. In addition, the EEG pattern recognition in the visual external stimulus test and in the driver’s stress simulation to tackle a road with different curve angles generated promising outcomes. However, despite the wide literature on the subject, the effective use of such signal still represents a hard although challenging task.

How the Tower Air Traffic Controller Workload Influences the Capacity in a Complex Three-Runway Airport

Air traffic controllers aim to optimize airport capacity, that is to increase the number of aircraft movements per hour maintaining a limited delay. There are several definitions of capacity, which depend on the considered airport element. This study focused on the development of a method that allows evaluating the impact of tower air traffic controllers’ workload on airport capacity. It adapts a model for the workload of sector controllers designed by Eurocontrol to tower controllers and tests it on a heavily busy international airport. In order to collect controllers’ working times, a campaign of data collection has been carried out from the radio frequency occupation. The results allowed us to extrapolate the hourly percentage of work of the various tower controllers using a fast-time simulation software. By imposing an hourly working threshold on tower air traffic controllers, it was possible to obtain a maximum number of manageable aircraft, which was compared with the airside capacity of the airport. The results show that the maximum traffic manageable from the airside would produce unacceptable workload for tower controllers, highlighting the link between airport capacity and the human component.

Simulation and Projection of Global Mean Surface Temperature Using the Empirical Model of Global Climate and Comparison to CMIP6 GCMs

<p>The Empirical Model of Global Climate (EM-GC) (Canty et al., ACP, 2013, McBride et al., ESDD, 2020) is a multiple linear regression, energy balance model that accounts for the natural influences on global mean surface temperature due to ENSO, the 11-year solar cycle, major volcanic eruptions, as well as the anthropogenic influence of greenhouse gases and aerosols and the efficiency of ocean heat uptake. First, we will analyze the human contribution of global warming from 1975-2014 based on the climate record, also known as the attributable anthropogenic warming rate (AAWR). We will compare the values of AAWR found using the EM-GC with values of AAWR from the CMIP6 multi-model ensemble. Preliminary analysis indicates that over the past three decades, the human component of global warming inferred from the CMIP6 GCMs is larger than the human component of warming from the climate record. Second, we will compare values of equilibrium climate sensitivity inferred from the historical climate record to those determined from CMIP6 GCMs using the Gregory et al., GRL, 2004 method. Third, we will use the future abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols provided by the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) to project future global mean surface temperature change. We will compare the projections of future temperature anomalies from CMIP6 GCMs to those determined by the EM-GC. We will conclude by assessing the probability of the CMIP6 and EM-GC projections of achieving the Paris Agreement target (1.5°C) and upper limit (2.0°C) for several of the SSP scenarios.</p>

The challenges, approaches, and used techniques of CPS for manufacturing in Industry 4.0: a literature review

This work aims to review literature related to the latest cyber-physical systems (CPS) for manufacturing in the revolutionary Industry 4.0 for a comprehensive understanding of the challenges, approaches, and used techniques in this domain. Different published studies on CPS for manufacturing in Industry 4.0 paradigms through 2010 to 2019 were searched and summarized. We, then, analyzed the studies at a different granularity level inspecting the title, abstract, and full text to include in the prospective study list. Out of 626 primarily extracted relevant articles, we scrutinized 78 articles as the prospective studies on CPS for manufacturing in Industry 4.0. First, we analyzed the articles’ context to identify the major components along with their associated fine-grained constituents of Industry 4.0. Then, we reviewed different studies through a number of synthesized matrices to narrate the challenges, approaches, and used techniques as the key-enablers of the CPS for manufacturing in Industry 4.0. Although the key technologies of Industry 4.0 are the CPS, Internet of Things (IoT), and Internet of Services (IoS), the human component (HC), cyber component (CC), physical component (PC), and their HC-CC, CC-PC, and HC-PC interfaces need to be standardized to achieve the success of Industry 4.0.