Recommendations for the selection of parameters for shunting locomotives

Shunting is an integral part of the partial process. In 1520 mm gauge countries, shunting operations are performed by outdated locomotives, which are being replaced by modern models; the technical parameters best match the conditions of the shunting work performed. The article analyzes recommendations for the selection of parameters of shunting locomotives and the actual indicators of their work. On the basis of this analysis, a requirement was made on the necessity of compulsory consideration of the operating conditions of the locomotive when determining its technical characteristics. As the main technical parameters of shunting locomotives, the tractive power and starting tractive force are taken and their influence on the duration of an elementary shunting movement of the "acceleration-deceleration" type is investigated. This approach advises the regulatory documentation for the organization of shunting work. Tha developed mathematical model allows to carry out research on the influence of tractive power and starting tractive force on the time of acceleration and deceleration. Calculations of the time of the train's acceleration are carried out with varying their mass and the slope of the track at different values of the tractive power starting tractive force. The calculations were carried out for the mass of compositions 1000...5000 Mg for the profile slopes equal to 0 and 1.5 ‰. The speed of the finish of acceleration was taken equal to 15 and 25 km/h. The thrust starting tractive force varied in the range of 150...300 kN, the tractive power - 200 ... 1100 kW. According to the results of calculations, it was found that the reduction in the duration of the elementary shunting movement is more significantly affected by the power of the locomotive than by the starting traction force. The “saturation” effect was noted, in which a significant increase in power or traction force during starting does not cause a significant reduction in the acceleration time. In this regard, for shunting locomotives with AC traction drive, it is recommended to take a pulling force of an equal continuous traction force.

AI Trust in Business Processes: The Need for Process-Aware Explanations

Business processes underpin a large number of enterprise operations including processing loan applications, managing invoices, and insurance claims. The business process management (BPM) industry is expected to grow at approximately 16 Billion dollar by 2023. There is a large opportunity for infusing AI to reduce cost or provide better customer experience with a $15.7 trillion “potential contribution to the global economy by 2030”. To this end, the BPM literature is rich in machine learning solutions including unsupervised learning to gain insights on clusters of process traces, classification models to predict the outcomes, duration, or paths of partial process traces, extracting business process from documents, and models to recommend how to optimize a business process or navigate decision points. More recently, deep learning models including those from the NLP domain have been applied to process predictions.Unfortunately, very little of these innovations have been applied and adopted by enterprise companies. We assert that a large reason for the lack of adoption of AI models in BPM is that business users are risk-averse and do not implicitly trust AI models. There has, unfortunately, been little attention paid to explaining model predictions to business users with process context. We challenge the BPM community to build on the AI interpretability literature, and the AI Trust community to understand what it means to take advantage of business process artifacts in order to provide business level explanations.

Structural Features of Triethylammonium Acetate through Molecular Dynamics

I have explored the structural features and the dynamics of triethylammonium acetate by means of semi-empirical (density functional tight binding, DFTB) molecular dynamics. I find that the results from the present simulations agree with recent experimental determinations with only few minor differences in the structural interpretation. A mixture of triethylamine and acetic acid does not form an ionic liquid, but gives rise to a very complex system where ionization is only a partial process affecting only few molecules (1 over 4 experimentally). I have also found that the few ionic couples are stable and remain mainly embedded inside the AcOH neutral moiety.

Geographical transition of urban areas. When regeneration not necessarily means gentrification. A case study from Bologna (Italy)

Some cities or neighborhoods with a specific socio-economic vocation suffer the phenomenon of change and abandonment, which generates socio-functional and economic redefinitions. This has also happened to the city of Bologna which, over the last 150 years, has experienced a rapid process of economic development, moving from a primary sector economy to a economy based on the industry, to then end up with the most advanced specializations in the tertiary sector. Thus, industries and factories (which had attracted a substantial national workforce) were closed. This has produced the formation of numerous «urban voids», which have turned into abandoned and degraded areas, such as in the Bolognina neighborhood. The consequence was initially the abandonment by the resident population: dwellings remained empty were subsequently occupied by new arrived inhabitants. At first this transition generated contrasts between the pre-existing citizens and the new ones. For this reason, the municipal administration has initiated a series of interventions, aimed on the one hand at the regeneration of the neighborhood in its ethno-socio-economic peculiarities, on the other at the refunctionalization of abandoned areas, to the point of generating a partial process of gentrification. With reference to the territorial Municipality data and according to some published essays and field researches through the Bolognina neighborhood (site inspections and conversation with residents), this article confirms the idea that urban gentrification, urban transition, and urban regeneration are territorial processes in opposition to each other. Each of them can have characteristics and features that are appearently typical of the others, but which, taking shape in a particular territory, are complex geographical phenomena.

Past, Present and Future of the Innovation Process

In the modern globalized world, innovation is a basic prerequisite for economic development and the preservation of competitiveness. However, there is still no generally accepted definition of innovation or the innovation process; individual authors use their own definitions, often formed from different concepts. This paper compares these definitions using methods of analysis and synthesis, constructing its own conceptual framework of the innovation process reflecting the key characteristics that are identical or similar in many of the compared definitions. When constructing a new definition and model, it is necessary to bear in mind that innovation is not an isolated activity but rather an entire process or even sequence of processes. With true innovation, every partial process must be successfully completed. This process as a whole becomes the starting point for further research, measurement and the management control of innovation performance under the postdoc research project “Innovation Process Performance Assessment: a Management Control System Approach in the Czech Small and Medium-sized Enterprises” No. 13-20123P of the Czech Science Foundation.