Towards Sustainable and Smart Cities: Replicable and KPI-Driven Evaluation Framework

Sustainability is pivotal in the urban transformation strategy in order to reach more resource-efficient, resilient and smarter cities. The goal of being a sustainable city should drive the decisions for city interventions. Nonetheless, impacts need to be quantified, lacking of standard and/or common methodologies that could be replicable across multiple cities. There exist many initiatives aiming at defining indicators and assessment procedures, but without convergence in the definition of terms and application methodologies, making complex its real implementation. Within mySMARTLife project (GA#731297), a KPI-driven evaluation framework is defined with the aim of covering the multiple pillars of a city (i.e. energy, mobility, citizens, economy) in a holistic way. This methodology also defines the concepts and terms to guide urban planners and/or experts at time of implementing the framework in a specific city. The evaluation framework has been deployed in the three cities of Nantes, Hamburg and Helsinki and some lessons learnt have been extracted, such as the necessity of providing a definition of measurement boundary to avoid interpretations. Thanks to a co-creation strategy, the main difficulties and issues from the cities have been taken into consideration for increasing the replicability.

Digital Transformation

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the digitization of traditional businesses. In the retail sector, e-commerce played a fundamental role and promoted major changes in the consumer pattern. This evolution and its impact can be studied through the digital transformation lens, which is a multidisciplinary and holistic concept that encompasses a new strategy and new ways of strategizing. The present study aims to describe the digital transformation strategy implementation path at a Brazilian pre-digital retail company and discusses the role the COVID-19 pandemic had played. Moreover, the case highlights important strategic issues and provides the opportunity to analyze whether it is a strategic process or a strategic practice. Thus, it can enlighten which theory best supports DTS studies. This study also increases the understanding of the strategic configuration of digital transformation embracing context, process, and outcomes. And it also sheds light on the dilemma between brick-and-mortar stores and digital ones.

π∙∙∙π interaction directed 2D FeNi-LDHs nanosheets from 2D Hofmann-MOFs for oxygen evolution reaction

Layered double hydroxides (LDHs) have attracted much attention for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) in electrochemical water splitting. In this work, we use a two-dimensional (2D) MOFs transformation strategy to...

Adoption of Integrated Asset Modeling Approach to Kick-Start the Corporate Digital Transformation Strategy

The adoption of an integrated asset modeling approach was explored to kick-start the corporate digital transformation strategy for its oil and gas section. Besides the integrated asset model, the digital initiatives included predictive maintenance, well performance optimization, and a flow assurance advisor aimed at daily production operations and maintenance, creating a pathway to the digital oilfield (DOF). The integrated asset model would be the main pillar of DOF realization and implementation, its offered technology aimed at short-term, medium-term, and long-term planning. The adopted well-proven integrated asset modeling methodology enabled a geological complex with a high-fidelity physics reservoir model, multiple interdependent wells, pipeline networks, process facility models to be integrated seamlessly on a single platform for validation of its existing production operation strategy and field development plan. The black-oil reservoir model was history matched, and the production network models had detailed wellbore and pipeline hydraulics calibrated with the latest well-test data. The compositional fluid modeling allowed the capture of any flow assurance issues that arose across the networks, which were mapped to the corresponding process facility models with physical specifications and operational constraints defined. A fully integrated asset model was developed for the studied asset, where liquid/vapor tables were prepared for black-oil delumping (Ghorayeb and Holmes, 2005) of the reservoir models to surface network models (Mora et al. 2015), while fluid models of both production network and process models were validated before mapping to ensure fluid fidelity. The availability of this integrated asset model with an embedded spreadsheet program incorporating some simple economic calculations allowed the flexibility of short-term production optimization and long-term asset planning, which was focused to provide all the vital valuable inputs to better field management, fast and accurate decision making, and optimum safe operation of process units in meeting the sales contract. The integrated asset model offered a platform for engineers from different domains to collaborate with aligned common operational and planning objectives. It empowered assessments of production operation strategy and field development scenarios conducted at full field level from pore to process. The customized reporting, the ability to connect to other tools, and to push results to dashboards helped to kick-start the corporate digital transformation strategy.

A Smart Assistance System for Visually Impaired People

Resolving the problems of individuals with Visual, Hearing, and Vocal Impairment through a solitary serving framework could be a tough task. Various current investigations focus on the resolution of the problems of 1 of them on top of challenges however not all. The work centers around chase down a noteworthy procedure that guides the externally weakened by permitting them to listen to what's self-addressed as text and it's accomplished by the tactic that catches the image through a camera and converts the content accessible as voice signals. This planned framework provides a path to people with Hearing weakening to image scan that is in morphology by discourse to message modification procedure and that we, in addition, provides a route to the vocally disabled to handle their voice by the guide of text to voice transformation strategy. each one of those 3 arrangements was regulated to be in an exceedingly solitary exceptional framework. each one of those exercises consists of the employment of Raspberry Pi. The outwardly barred individual's unit of measurement is helped by the cycle whereby the image to text and text to discourse is given by the Tesseract OCR (online character acknowledgment). The deaf individuals assist with the cycle of associate application that creates them grasp what the individual says is also shown attributable to the message. Vocally hindered individuals can pass on their message by text. Therefore totally different individuals will hear the message in an exceeding speaker.

Corporate Culture and Digital Transformation Strategy in Universities in Indonesia

All business entities, including private universities, have always to deal with changes in their environment. One of the keys to address such changes is digital technology. The present study examines the extent to which corporate culture affects the implementation of a digital transformation strategy in private universities. Data were collected through a survey addressed to 39 top management executives from different private universities in Garut, West Java, Indonesia. Data analysis was carried out by means of SmartPLS. The results showed that corporate culture in private universities had a significant effect on the implementation of digital transformation strategy in their organizations. This is associated with factors other than technological aspects such as human resources, behavior, and organizational culture.