ALBERT

Description: Publication date: 2014 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 22 Author(s): Herman van Os , Rien Herber , Bert Scholtens The decision-making process for subsurface activities in the Netherlands has been unable to cope with the driving forces related to social acceptance in several recently proposed subsurface activities. We therefore investigated the possibility to include the triangle of social acceptance in the decision-making process. Our conceptual model relates the stakeholders, their goals and the driving forces to each other. We developed a framework, which describes the interaction between eleven design criteria for a Decision Support System (DSS). This framework will enable us to design a better, from a social acceptance perspective, DSS for subsurface activities in the Netherlands. Since the goals addressed in the decision-making process are very broad and the stakeholders are quite diverse, a single uniform DSS is not able to provide a satisfactory solution. We therefore suggest to design a DSS that is matched with each class of social acceptance.

Description: Publication date: 2014 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 22 Author(s): Yoshie Inada , Shinobu Izumi , Motoya Koga , Shigehito Matsubara We are developing a planning support system for welfare urban design. If we quantify the optimal route (the route that is the easiest to pass through) for challenged people, we will be able to select the areas that require adjustment in terms of accessibility with greater efficiency. In this paper we report on our development of the prototype system to present an optimal route for wheelchair users, and also, the two workshops we had for evaluating the accuracy of the resulted optimal route.

Description: Publication date: 2014 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 22 Author(s): Erfaneh Allameh , Mohammadali Heidari , Bauke De Vries , Harry Timmermans , Mohammad Masoud , Farhang Mozaffar Almost everyone would agree that teleworking is increasingly growing; but beyond this broad statement, we know little about how people behave when they work at home and how they balance their work and life. User comfort and productivity cannot be addressed properly, without a deep understanding of usersʼ working behavior. This gap is even deeper when it comes to the domain of smart homes as new types of housing which aim to enhance working at home. Hence, more user-centered studies are needed to comprehend the interrelationships among housing, technology, daily life and the work activities. In this paper, we use the outputs of an experiment to model usersʼ work activities in a smart home. The experiment was conducted among 254 respondents, who were asked to explore a smart home in a virtual environment and then to arrange their daily activities including work related activities in the virtual smart home. A choice modeling approach, based on the Multinomial Logit Model (MNL), is applied to model how an individual works at a smart home given influential factors such as the individualsʼ socio-demographic profile and their current lifestyle. Two features of working in a smart home are covered in this paper, namely, “the integration of work activities with other daily activities” and “the location of work activities in the house”. The results give better insight into the future trends of working at home and the effects of smart homes on working behavior of people. The results can be used in further developments of both smart homes and teleworking.

Description: Publication date: 2014 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 22 Author(s): Jinhee Kim , Soora Rasouli , Harry Timmermans Hybrid choice models have been developed as an extension of discrete choice models, particularly multinomial logit models, in an attempt to include attitudinal variables. The quintessence of hybrid choice models is that a model of attitude formation is estimated and the estimated attitudes are added to the commonly used set of attributes in discrete choice models: attributes of the choice alternatives and socio-demographic variables. The most commonly applied model is based on linear specifications, both for the attitude model and the utility function. In this review paper, we discuss the principles underlying the hybrid choice model, summarize the specifications used in previous applications of the model and then continue discussing recent progress that added social influence to the model specification and replaced the linear specification of the utility function with a nonlinear function.

Description: Publication date: 2014 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 22 Author(s): Yountaik Leem , Sang Ho Lee , Jungho Yoon To overcome many difficulties in sustaining the satisfying quality of life for a large population 1 , urban spaces are evolving toward more efficient spaces by combination with ICTs (information and communication technologies) and raising the possibility to provide improved urban services which can enrich the quality of life of the citizen. In many cities over the world, a good number of public and private services in transportation, environment, urban safety from crime or disaster, health and other fields are designed and implemented with IT infrastructure. In spite of the expectation of cost-effective urban services based on the linkage between data and systems, obstructions in administrative and technical domains have made it difficult to be implemented. In this study, two advanced ICTs based urban services, which were developed by linkage and convergence of urban information and systems of Korea were introduced and analysed. The structural design of system convergence and data sharing scheme of Carbon Emission Monitoring System (CEMS) in Sejong City uses UIS (Urban Information System for local authorities), GIS data and other data provided by the public agencies, such as Korea Meteorological Administration for the monitoring and analysing the characteristics of the energy consumption of household 2 . Another system, Urban Integrated CCTV Control System (ICCS) in Anyang City, shows integrated CCTV networks for crime prevention, traffic control and public facility management to provide extended urban services, such as disaster prevention, police investigation and others. Qualitative and Quantitative effects analyses with technical and policy directions were suggested for the development and improvement of future urban services for a liveable city.

Description: Publication year: 2011 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 6, 2011, Pages 112-121 Simon N., Gosling , Nigel W., Arnell , Jason A., Lowe We present simulations of the impact of climate change on global water scarcity for five greenhouse gas emissions mitigation policy scenarios and compare them with a business-as-usual emissions scenario. A global water scarcity model is driven by climate change projections from 21 global climate models (GCMs). An aggressive policy scenario that gives a 50% chance of avoiding a 2°C global-mean temperature rise from pre-industrial times could avoid almost 40% of the business as usual global impacts by 2100. However, mitigation policy does not completely eliminate the impacts of climate change. For any given GCM, the avoided impacts are affected more...

Description: Publication year: 2011 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 6, 2011, Pages 136-145 Eleni, Karali , Mark D.A., Rounsevell , Ruth, Doherty Although there is a large body of research into complex land-use/cover change (LUCC), the mechanisms that underlie land transformation are still poorly understood. To a large extent this results from the limited attention that has been paid to the human dimension in LUCC studies. While environmental processes are described by detailed and sophisticated frameworks, human behaviour has often been theorised in oversimplified ways. This paper presents a novel approach to the analysis of rural LUCC that integrates agent-based models (ABMs) with a multi-phase social survey. Findings from the application of the latter to a farming area in Switzerland are used...

Description: Publication year: 2011 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 6, 2011, Pages 146-152 Etsushi, Kato , Michio, Kawamiya , Tsuguki, Kinoshita , Akihiko, Ito In the preparatory phase of IPCC AR5 development, Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) have been constructed by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) groups as new forcing scenarios used for climate modeling and earth system modeling groups. In the process of RCP 6.0 scenario development, which has been conducted by the Asia-Pacific Integrated Model (AIM), we constructed a scenario of spatially explicit long-term aerosol emissions from biomass burning and net land-use change CO2 emissions in order to complement energy use and industrial emissions scenarios projected by socio-economic component of AIM.To estimate the emissions from biomass burning, we incorporate a vegetation fire component into...

Description: Publication year: 2011 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 6, 2011, Pages 153-161 Nikolinka G., Koleva , Uwe A., Schneider , Bruce A., McCarl This study uses mathematical programming to examine alternative assumptions about regulations of external costs from pesticide applications in US agriculture. We find that, without external cost regulation, climate change benefits from increased agricultural production in the US may be more than offset by increased environmental costs. The internalization of the pesticide externalities increase farmers’ production costs but increase farmers’ income because of price adjustments and associated welfare shifts from consumers to producers. Our results also show that full internalizations of external pesticide costs substantially reduces preferred pesticide applications rates for corn and soybeans as climate change.

Description: Publication year: 2011 Source: Procedia Environmental Sciences, Volume 6, 2011, Pages 15-26 Muhammad, Afzal , Martin G., Mansell , Alexandre S., Gagnon The objective of this research is to analyse temporal changes in historic rainfall variability across Scotland using different measures of variability. The CUSUM and sequential Mann-Kendall test applied to records from 28 weather stations with up to 80 years of daily precipitation data reveal the occurrence of abrupt changes in the rainfall trends. Most weather stations show a turning point between 1978 and 1985, although some stations situated in Eastern Scotland have more than one turning point. The temporal changes in rainfall variability across Scotland are presented using a number of measures of variability.