A Business Development Strategy for India's Rail Company Ircon in Expanding Businesses to Asia, Africa and Middle East

The Ircon is one of the key players in the market of transportation infrastructure development backed by Indian government and Indian railways. It has successful presence in various locations such as Malaysia, Algeria, Mozambique, Srilanka and India. The objective of the company is to expand globally to get lucrative projects simultaneously sustain competition locally and overseas. The idea is to devise a strategic marketing plan based on infrastructure spending data, location accessibility and market friendliness of the target market countries. The research design carried out was of comprehensive study of data collected from email survey, archive survey and depth interview analysis on various stages of business. The survey outcomes from exclusively selected respondents having international experience in construction business have indicated that infrastructure spending of a country is of utmost importance with 56% of survey response agreeing to it, similarly majority of respondents agreed that deciding factors like market entry plan, entry strategies and other attributes in markets.

Structure Development for Effective Medical Waste and Hazardous Waste Management System

Management of medical and hazardous wastes is a serious problem especially for developing countries. People are not aware of possible threats and/or they are afraid of the cost of application. Rapid population growth leads municipalities towards proper solid waste management applications. In this study, data were collected from the Turkish Statistical Institute and a general framework was drawn for medical and hazardous waste amounts and disposal methods. Starting from this point of view, the authors analyzed both the Regulation on Control of Hazardous Waste and the Regulation on Control of Medical Waste applied in Turkey. Taking into account all of these factors, this chapter is intended to develop the medical and hazardous waste management system economically and environmentally including waste generation, collection, transportation, disposal and treatment activities. Additionally, it investigates the reasons for lack of proper application of the regulations in light of the statistical data.

Utilization of SVM, LSSVM and GP for Predicting the Medical Waste Generation

The prediction of wastes generated in the hospital will help their management for several activities like storage, transport and disposing. This chapter adopts Support Vector Machine (SVM), Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM) and Genetic Programming (GP) in order to estimate the rate of medical waste generation. In the event of predicting the rate, type of hospital, capacity and bed occupancy has been used as inputs of SVM, LSSVM and GP. SVM is based on statistical learning theory, which provides an elegant tool for nonlinear system modeling. LSSVM is the re-formulation to the general SVM. GP, a best part of evolutionary algorithm and also the specification of Genetic Algorithm (GA). These SVM, LSSVM and GP have been used as the regression techniques. The results show the performance of the developed SVM, LSSVM and GP models were elegant and outstanding.

Selecting Demolition Waste Materials Disposal Alternatives Using Fuzzy TOPSIS Technique

This article describes how in developing countries, millions of tons of construction and demolition wastes (CDWs) are lost every year due to lack of knowledge of recycling significance and/or procedures. Despite the high value of CDWs, high percentage of this waste is either dumped illegally or disposed in the landfills. Disposal methods should consider saving natural resources and maintaining the environmental conditions through maximizing the value of CDWs. This article aims at choosing the most sustainable disposal alternative using Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Process, considering several sustainability measure indicators. The research introduces a list containing the most relevant and significant sustainable indicators that affect the selection of alternative for disposal of CDWs. Then, fuzzy TOPSIS technique is applied considering the significant indicators on each alternative to rank and choose the best alternative for disposal of CDWs.

Sustainable Environmental Service - Knowledge Management

Knowledge management (KM) is a key factor to increase effectiveness of management system. There have been researches of KM on many environmental services. Unfortunately, only a few researches have focused on sustainable service for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW). There are evidences of ineffective waste management causing socio-economic and environmental problems, especially in urban areas of developing countries. Humans live in service economy and knowledge society. Waste management is one of the most important public services that all residents should receive while knowledge is needed to make service run smoothly and sustainably. This paper combines concepts of sustainable service and KM to clarify the importance and how these concepts have impacts on societal well-being. Literature reviews and questionnaire surveys are main analysis methods of this paper. Sustainable service with KM roles will be described and co-created values are identified.

Mapping the Commons in Istanbul

In the study, bids for Üçüncü Köprü (The Third Bridge), Üçüncü Havalimanı (The Third Airport), and link roads in Northern Forests will be examined to map urban commons in Istanbul. Two coordinates will be followed for mapping urban commons. First coordinate is the conceptual one which regulates the differences of fundamental conceptions relating to urban commons. At this level, use value will be analyzed in terms of public benefit which is in regard to basic features of urban commons. In second coordinate, urban spaces including exchange value and privately owned such as bridges, roads, airports and highways will be analyzed in terms of infrastructure finance. The aim of the study is discussing the “tragedy of commons” within the context of investments to be made for the urban commons and bringing into question the future of urban commons upon the basis of Istanbul example.

Integrated Economic and Spatial Planning for the Food-Energy-Water Nexus

Infrastructure projects are being planned and implemented around the world. These projects lead to economic growth and social development, but often unexpected side effects emerge. The problem is that financial analyses for infrastructure projects do not incorporate quantified economic assessments of social and environmental impacts. Equally, social and environmental assessments for infrastructure projects rarely qualify or quantify socioeconomic outcomes for investments in mitigation practices. Our analysis builds on a review of existing methodologies and tools to propose a method for jointly applying three modeling approaches for integrated economic and spatial planning. The results of case study of the Mekong Flooded Forest landscape shows the capability of the models to anticipate desired and undesired outcomes across social, economic and environmental indicators. This shows promising potential for better informing decision making for sustainability.

Land Use, Economic Welfare and Property Values

In the paper an analysis of functional correlations of property prices with the main locational and socio-economic variables, which generally contribute to define the market value of properties, has been developed. Locational characteristics are represented by the surfaces of soil used for the main functions, borrowing the logic of the system of classification of CORINE Land Cover (European Commission). The analysis has been contextualized to the 258 municipalities of the Apulia region (Southern Italy), and has been referred to two different moments (years 2006 and 2011), and two different market segments (residential and retail). The functional relationships between property prices and explanatory variables considered, estimated through a software that implements a genetic algorithm, are particularly interesting. The methodology outlined constitutes a valuable reference for the definition of models aimed at supporting, in a more rational and convenient way, public planning decisions and private investment choices.

An Intelligent Approval System for City Construction based on Cloud Computing and Big Data

On the theoretical basis of cloud services, big data technology and case-based reasoning technology (CBR), the authors propose an Intelligent Approval System for City Construction (IASCC). The paper introduces the concept of ‘case approval cloud' and puts forward the city construction approval model based on CBR, by which the storage and computation of the urban construction approval data are concentrated in the cloud. In this system, the authors use the distributed database of HBase, making the data storage capacity of the system with high scalability, design the intelligent approval system based on CBR using the distributed programming framework of MapReduce, making full use of the large amount of historical approval data, and use the distributed full-text retrieval system of SorCloud to retrieve the approval data with a high response speed. IASCC adopts Hadoop as the development platform, using HBase, Solr and MapReduce technology to complete the prototype development of an intelligent approval system. Finally, the authors give the implementation of the system and the performance tests of some key modules.

Improving the Use of BIM Using System Engineering for Infrastructure Projects

BIM is defined and used in several ways. As standardisation is now increasing on BIM, it is time to optimise the use of BIM, especially for civil infrastructure projects. The level of detail of the information produced and exchanged is not defined enough to allow production optimisation. It concerns a lot of processes and documents in the project, not only the BIM Execution Plan. It is proposed here to use system engineering principles to complete the BIM principle, helping to optimise the use of BIM. Some of these principles are similar but they have to be merged, regarding both System Engineering and BIM paradigms. Finally, integration of systems composing the civil infrastructure is the final aim. Using BIM and System Engineering principles in an efficient way is crucial to make BIM not a constraint but a need for the project.