Rethinking Enterprise Architecture for Sustainable Energy System Development

The development of a sustainable energy system throughout an enterprise is a complex task, which requires an agile holistic approach. Such an approach needs to include a variety of objectives including energy strategy formation and strategic decision-making, which are directly related to the analysis and management of the main areas of sustainable development:The economic, technological, environmental, and social. These multidimensional requirements of sustainability are often difficult to achieve within the enterprise, because these aspects are interrelated and influenced by various internal and external environment factors. This paper first reviews the main challenges for an energy system, and then demonstrates how a strategic agile enterprise architecture driven approach could effectively guide the sustainable energy system development. The study presented in this paper provides a holistic approach that contributes to the advancement and usage of literature dealing with issues of sustainable energy system development and agile enterprise architecture, which has not been discussed before to any great extent.     

Energy indicators for tracking sustainability in developing countries

Due to the fact that human activities and most sustainability issues are closely related to energy use, the energy system is a sound framework for providing lead indicators for sustainable development. Common energy-economic models enable the estimation of future states of the energy system. An energy system-based lead indicator set can be used to develop consistent and coherent future indicator estimates and to track sustainability, a clear advantage over existing sets.     

Urban growth and environmental degradation: The case of Cairo, Egypt

The immense growth of cities, especially in developing countries, is resulting in the urbanization of both poverty and environmental degradation to a greater degree than ever before. This paper examines the processes of growth and degradation in the Greater Cairo Metropolitan Region (GCMR), currently the world’s tenth largest mega-city. It reviews the region’s growth and selected environmental issues as well as impacts of current efforts on managing the region. The assertion of this paper is that current management policies and bodies lack a comprehensive view of urban governance for the region, which does not bode well for the future environmental and economic sustainability of the region.     

Desalination and the commons: tragedy or triumph?

A policy is more likely to be economically efficient when its costs and benefits fall on the same group, but politicians can allocate costs and benefits to different groups within their jurisdictional commons. This article examines the distribution of costs and benefits from desalination projects using examples from San Diego, Almería and Riyadh. The examples illustrate how mismatches between costs and benefits can persist or change as politicians adjust the policy portfolio to balance inefficiency and political risk.     

Design of new catalysts for ecological high-quality transportation fuels by combinatorial computational chemistry and tight-binding quantum chemical molecular dynamics approaches

Recently, we introduced a concept of combinatorial chemistry to computational chemistry and proposed a new method called “combinatorial computational chemistry”, which enables us to perform a theoretical high-throughput screening of catalysts. In the present paper, we reviewed our recent application of our combinatorial computational chemistry approach to the design of new catalysts for high-quality transportation fuels. By using our combinatorial computational chemistry techniques, we succeeded to predict new catalysts for methanol synthesis and Fischer–Tropsch synthesis. Moreover, we have succeeded in the development of chemical reaction dynamics simulator based on our original tight-binding quantum chemical molecular dynamics method. This program realizes more than 5000 times acceleration compared to the regular first-principles molecular dynamics method. Electronic- and atomic-level information on the catalytic reaction dynamics at reaction temperatures significantly contributes the catalyst design and development. Hence, we also summarized our recent applications of the above quantum chemical molecular dynamics method to the clarification of the methanol synthesis dynamics in this review.     

模糊C-均值聚类分析研究大亚湾水质空间分布规律

模糊C-均值聚类方法研究人类活动影响下大亚湾海域水体生态环境空间分布规律．揭示大亚湾水体生态环境空间分布分成两类区域：其一为受人类活动影响为主的大鹏澳、澳头以及大亚湾东北部区域;其二为受湾外南海海水交换影响较大的大亚湾南部、中部和东部海域。模糊C-均值聚类分析作为一种数据信息提取方法,为海洋环境生态研究提供新的方法。     

临川区土地生态环境安全评价研究

通过对临川区土地生态环境的研究,采用德尔菲法、等距划分法、加权指数法,确定该区域生态环境评价指标、权重、以及安全等级,得出临川区各乡镇的生态环境安全指数,为临川区土地生态环境安全建设提出建议。     

新农村社区建设的空间布局设计

通过分析我国农村社区空间布局的现状及特点,探讨了新农村社区空间布局的可持续发展对策,并就可持续性空间布局设计的一些具体内容进行了阐述,以期为新农村社区建设提供一些有益的借鉴.     

可持续发展的挑战与过程系统工程的机遇

可持续系统是一种全局性的系统工程,按规模大小可分为4个层次:全球性的系统,地理边界为特征的系统,局部的或分布的业务系统,可持续发展技术。本文从这4个层次上探讨了可持续发展带来的挑战。今后任何工业过程,包括化学工程,不可能再作为一个孤立的对象来对待,必须考虑工业过程、人类社会及生态环境的交互作用。过程系统工程处于独特位置,最适合把各学科的成果汇集到一个系统工程框架中,来应对这种挑战。     

Mobilising information systems scholarship for a circular economy: Review,synthesis, and directions for future research

One of today's grand societal challenges is to replace the current ‘take‐make‐waste’ economic model with a circular economic model that allows a gradual decoupling of economic activities from the consumption of finite virgin resources. While circular economy (CE) scholars have long lauded digital technologies such as sensors, distributed ledgers, or platforms as key enablers, our own community has not fully explored the potentials of information systems (IS) for a CE. Considering recent technological advances in software and hardware and our history of helping address wicked challenges, we believe the time is ripe to mobilise IS scholarship for a CE. Our findings from an interdisciplinary literature review show that research has primarily examined IS potentials for increasing efficiency of isolated intra‐organisational processes while neglecting the larger sustainability potential of IS to establish circular material flows—that is, slow down and close material loops across entire product lifecycles. In response, we propose directions for IS research that develop our knowledge of how IS can help understand and enact circular material flows to intensify and extend use of products and components and recycle waste materials. Our directions offer pathways to building and evaluating the problem‐solution pairing that could characterise a prolific CE‐IS relationship.