In the last few decades the competitive context development trajectory is leading companies to increase their contribution for sustainable development. Stakeholders' accountability demands are being reflected in p...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9780983762430
In the last few decades the competitive context development trajectory is leading companies to increase their contribution for sustainable development. Stakeholders' accountability demands are being reflected in present multidisciplinary regulatory framework that is formed by standards, guidelines and guidance reports, and allows markets and society to have evidences from sustainable behavior, which is certified or formally agreed or signatory by companies. Operations strategy performance information could be addressed to a set of evolutionary performance indicators, which could represent sustainability present performance, and also could orient companies in reaching higher performance levels according to a preset maturity trajectory. The objective of this paper is to develop a process for generating an integrated set of performance measures for managing sustainability at value chain or operations system level. An applied research was conducted based on action research approach, operationalized by Cambridge process or engineering approach, and managed in research process management cycle. Performance measures are formally and detailed defined as metadata. Process application not only allows a better understanding on how sustainability indicators could be integrated and related to a maturity model, but also created an information system that could be used for auditing, assessment and reporting sustainability performance.
Background: Decades of steady improvements in life expectancy in Europe slowed down from around 2011, well before the COVID-19 pandemic, for reasons which remain disputed. We aimed to assess how changes in risk factor...
Background: Decades of steady improvements in life expectancy in Europe slowed down from around 2011, well before the COVID-19 pandemic, for reasons which remain disputed. We aimed to assess how changes in risk factors and cause-specific death rates in different European countries related to changes in life expectancy in those countries before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We used data and methods from the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2021 to compare changes in life expectancy at birth, causes of death, and population exposure to risk factors in 16 European Economic Area countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden) and the four UK nations (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales) for three time periods: 1990–2011, 2011–19, and 2019–21. Changes in life expectancy and causes of death were estimated with an established life expectancy cause-specific decomposition method, and compared with summary exposure values of risk factors for the major causes of death influencing life expectancy. Findings: All countries showed mean annual improvements in life expectancy in both 1990–2011 (overall mean 0·23 years [95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·23 to 0·24]) and 2011–19 (overall mean 0·15 years [0·13 to 0·16]). The rate of improvement was lower in 2011–19 than in 1990–2011 in all countries except for Norway, where the mean annual increase in life expectancy rose from 0·21 years (95% UI 0·20 to 0·22) in 1990–2011 to 0·23 years (0·21 to 0·26) in 2011–19 (difference of 0·03 years). In other countries, the difference in mean annual improvement between these periods ranged from –0·01 years in Iceland (0·19 years [95% UI 0·16 to 0·21] vs 0·18 years [0·09 to 0·26]), to –0·18 years in England (0·25 years [0·24 to 0·25] vs 0·07 years [0·06 to 0·08]). In 2019–21, there was an overall decrease in mean annual life expectancy a
In the present work we introduce a system identification framework where no a priori information on the system to be identified is available. Focusing in the specific case of radial basis functions neural networks mod...
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In the present work we introduce a system identification framework where no a priori information on the system to be identified is available. Focusing in the specific case of radial basis functions neural networks models, we insert the choice of the model complexity and its inputs in the optimization procedure together with the model parameters, aiming at accuracy, model validity and regularization in a multiobjective approach. The multicriteria problem is solved by means of the multiobjective cuckoo search, which is based on an archiving technique and the crowding distance metric. Simulation results are promising when the methodology is applied to identify a robot arm given solely input and output data.
In order to improve equipment efficiency in terms of performance, energy consumption and degradation for example, the industry has increased the use of control systems as the PID (proportional-integral-derivative) to ...
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Chronic care manages long-term, progressive conditions, while acute care addresses short-term conditions. Chronic conditions increasingly strain health systems, which are often unprepared for these demands. This study...
Virtual Humans (VHs) have been employed in multidisciplinary fields to advance interpersonal skills critical to many professional, including law enforcement agents, military personnel, managers, doctors, lawyers and o...
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Background: High-resolution estimates of HIV burden across space and time provide an important tool for tracking and monitoring the progress of prevention and control efforts and assist with improving the precision an...
Background: High-resolution estimates of HIV burden across space and time provide an important tool for tracking and monitoring the progress of prevention and control efforts and assist with improving the precision and efficiency of targeting efforts. We aimed to assess HIV incidence and HIV mortality for all second-level administrative units across sub-Saharan Africa. Methods: In this modelling study, we developed a framework that used the geographically specific HIV prevalence data collected in seroprevalence surveys and antenatal care clinics to train a model that estimates HIV incidence and mortality among individuals aged 15–49 years. We used a model-based geostatistical framework to estimate HIV prevalence at the second administrative level in 44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for 2000–18 and sought data on the number of individuals on antiretroviral therapy (ART) by second-level administrative unit. We then modified the Estimation and Projection Package (EPP) to use these HIV prevalence and treatment estimates to estimate HIV incidence and mortality by second-level administrative unit. Findings: The estimates suggest substantial variation in HIV incidence and mortality rates both between and within countries in sub-Saharan Africa, with 15 countries having a ten-times or greater difference in estimated HIV incidence between the second-level administrative units with the lowest and highest estimated incidence levels. Across all 44 countries in 2018, HIV incidence ranged from 2·8 (95% uncertainty interval 2·1–3·8) in Mauritania to 1585·9 (1369·4–1824·8) cases per 100 000 people in Lesotho and HIV mortality ranged from 0·8 (0·7–0·9) in Mauritania to 676·5 (513·6–888·0) deaths per 100 000 people in Lesotho. Variation in both incidence and mortality was substantially greater at the subnational level than at the national level and the highest estimated rates were accordingly higher. Among second-level administrative units, Guijá District, Gaza Province, Mozambique,
The gravitational search algorithm (GSA) is a stochastic population-based metaheuristic inspired by the interaction of masses via Newtonian gravity law. In this paper, we propose a modified GSA (MGSA) based on logarit...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450328814
The gravitational search algorithm (GSA) is a stochastic population-based metaheuristic inspired by the interaction of masses via Newtonian gravity law. In this paper, we propose a modified GSA (MGSA) based on logarithm and Gaussian signals for enhancing the performance of standard GSA. To evaluate the performance of the proposed MGSA, well-known benchmark functions in the literature are optimized using the proposed MGSA, and provides comparisons with the standard GSA.
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