An Activity-Based Costing decision model for life cycle assessment in green building projects

Carbon emissions are an increasingly important consideration in sustainable environmental development. In the green building industry, green construction cost controls and low-carbon construction methods are considered to be the key barriers encountered. Based on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy, management of carbon emissions from green building projects contributes to the acquisition of accurate building cost information and to a reduction in the environmental impact of these projects. This study focuses on the CO₂ emission costs and low-carbon construction methods, and proposes a 0–1 mixed integer programming (0–1 MIP) decision model for integrated green building projects, using an Activity-Based Cost (ABC) and life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The major contributions of this study are as follows: (1) the integrated model can help construction company managers to more accurately understand how to allocate resources and funding for energy saving activities to each green building through appropriate cost drivers; (2) this model provides a pre-construction decision-making tool which will assist management in bidding on environmentally-friendly construction projects; and (3) this study contributes to the innovation operation research (OR) literature, especially in regard to incorporating the life cycle assessment measurement into construction cost management by utilizing a mixed decision model for green building projects.     

Green supply chains with carbon trading and environmental sourcing: Formulation and life cycle assessment

Industry practitioners and policy makers are under increasing pressure to continuously reduce the negative environmental impact of their supply chains. An original equipment manufacturer that is concerned with minimizing the environmental impact of its activities should choose its suppliers based on the trade-off between costs and respective emissions. This decision requires the manufacturer to coordinate closely with its suppliers in order to achieve the required level of emissions. In this paper, we develop a mixed integer program for the carbon-sensitive supply chain that minimizes emissions throughout the supply chain by taking into consideration green procurement also known as environmental sourcing. A sample case study is presented with a life cycle assessment of three scenarios based on different carbon emissions costs.     

How to treat strict preference information in multicriteria decision analysis

This paper addresses the use of incomplete information on both multi-criteria alternative values and importance weights in evaluating decision alternatives. Incomplete information frequently takes the form of strict inequalities, such as strict orders and strict bounds. En route to prioritizing alternatives, the majority of previous studies have replaced these strict inequalities with weak inequalities, by employing a small positive number. As this replacement closes the feasible region of decision parameters, it circumvents certain troubling questions that arise when utilizing a mathematical programming approach to evaluate alternatives. However, there are no hard and fast rules for selecting the factual small value and, even if the choice is possible, the resultant prioritizations depend profoundly on that choice. The method developed herein addresses and overcomes this drawback, and allows for dominance and potential optimality among alternatives, without selecting any small value for the strict preference information. Given strict information on criterion weights alone, we form a linear program and solve it via a two-stage method. When both alternative values and weights are provided in the form of strict inequalities, we first construct a nonlinear program, transform it into a linear programming equivalent, and finally solve this linear program via the same two-stage method. One application of this methodology to a market entry decision, a salient subject in the area of international marketing, is demonstrated in detail herein.     

A dual-interval vertex analysis method and its application to environmental decision making under uncertainty

In this study, a dual-interval vertex analysis (DIVA) method is developed, through incorporating the vertex method within an interval-parameter programming framework. The developed DIVA method can tackle uncertainties presented as dual intervals that exist in the objective function and the left- and right-hand sides of the modeling constraints. An interactive algorithm and a vertex analysis approach are proposed for solving the DIVA model. Solutions under an associated α-cut level can be generated by solving a series of deterministic submodels. They can help quantify relationships between the objective function value and the membership grade, which is meaningful for supporting in-depth analyses of tradeoffs between environmental and economic objectives as well as those between system optimality and reliability. A management problem in terms of regional air pollution control is studied to illustrate applicability of the proposed approach. The results indicate that useful solutions for planning the air quality management practices have been generated. They can help decision makers to identify desired pollution-abatement strategies with minimized costs and maximized environmental efficiencies.     

Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA): Central Porto high-speed railway station

Over recent years, Portugal has been working towards their integration in the trans-European high-speed railway network. While in Spain several new high-speed lines are already under construction or beginning operation, in Portugal the necessary studies are still being carried out. One of these studies concerned the location of one of the high-speed railway stations to be built in the city of Porto, meant to connect the second most populated metropolitan area in Portugal to the high-speed railway network. The goal for the study was to compare alternative siting strategies, defined by the Portuguese high-speed railway authority. These strategies were materialized in a set of location alternatives, which were evaluated from a range of technical, economical, social and environmental criteria. This paper describes the multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) approach by which the best alternative was identified from the given set of possible alternatives.     

再谈应用数学的发展——对“试谈”的补充意见

本文采用校勘的格式对 [1]提出补充意见     

How (Not) to design strong-RSA signatures

This paper considers strong-RSA signature schemes built from the scheme of Cramer and Shoup. We present a basic scheme encompassing the main features of the Cramer-Shoup scheme. We analyze its security in both the random oracle model and the standard model. This helps us to spot potential security flaws. As a result, we show that a seemingly secure signature scheme (Tan in Int J Security Netw 1(3/4): 237?C242, 2006) is universally forgeable under a known-message attack. In a second step, we discuss how to turn the basic scheme into a fully secure signature scheme. Doing so, we rediscover several known schemes (or slight variants thereof).     

Domain structuring for knowledge-based multiattribute classification (a verbal decision analysis approach)

Classification problems in decision making are, at least, ill-structured or even unstructured ones, since, among other things, human judgments (i.e., Decision Maker preferences and/or expert knowledge) are the primary sources of information for their solving. Thus, not only the classification rules eliciting, but the application domain structuring as well, is a complex problem itself. The paper focuses on knowledge-based classification problem structuring in the context of complete (up to the expert knowledge) and consistent knowledge base construction for a Diagnostic Decision Support System. Two structuring techniques are proposed as expert aids, as well as an approach to large-size problem decomposition. It is asserted that application domain structuring and classification rules eliciting have to be arranged as interconnected procedures.     

On the reduction to a complete class in multiple decision problems (2)

Summary As a criterion for the reduction to a complete class of decision rule in case where actions, samples and states are finite in number, “regret-relief ratio” criterion and “incremental loss-gain ratio” criterion were introduced in 2-state of nature case [2]. In this paper, “generalized regret-relief ratio” criterion ink-state of nature case is introduced as an extension of “regret-relief ratio” criterion and its usefulness is shown with an example. The Institute of Statistical Mathematics     

How to use a definite integral to find area(1)

Integration has a wide variety of applications.Today you’ll learn to use a definite integral to find the area of a region bounded by two curves.Area is nonnegative number.When we find the area of a region above theχ-axis,the area is positive.When we find the area of a region below theχ-axis,the area is negative.     

How to use a definite integral to find area(2)

Another example,the sine and cosine curves intersect fromx=π/4to x=5π/4.However,we want to find the area of the region bounded by the sine and cosine curves fromx=0to x=2π.Analysis:Let f(x)=sinx,and g(x)=cosx.Let f(x)=g(x),and find xin sinx=cosxas x∈[0,2π]x=π/4 or x=5π/4.     

How to measure the impact of environmental factors in a nonparametric production model

The measurement of technical efficiency allows managers and policy makers to enhance existing differentials and potential improvements across a sample of analyzed units. The next step involves relating the obtained efficiency estimates to some external or environmental factors which may influence the production process, affect the performances and explain the efficiency differentials. Recently introduced conditional efficiency measures (,  and ), including conditional FDH, conditional DEA, conditional order-m and conditional order-α, have rapidly developed into a useful tool to explore the impact of exogenous factors on the performance of Decision Making Units in a nonparametric framework. This paper contributes in a twofold fashion. It first extends previous studies by showing that a careful analysis of both full and partial conditional measures allows the disentangling of the impact of environmental factors on the production process in its two components: impact on the attainable set and/or impact on the distribution of the efficiency scores. The authors investigate these interrelationships, both from an individual and a global perspective. Second, this paper examines the impact of environmental factors on the production process in a new two-stage type approach but using conditional measures to avoid the flaws of the traditional two-stage analysis. This novel approach also provides a measure of inefficiency whitened from the main effect of the environmental factors allowing a ranking of units according to their managerial efficiency, even when facing heterogeneous environmental conditions. The paper includes an illustration on simulated samples and a real data set from the banking industry.     

How to make a linear network code (strongly) secure

A linear network code is called k-secure if it is secure even if an adversary eavesdrops at most k edges. In this paper, we show an efficient deterministic construction algorithm of a linear transformation T that transforms an (insecure) linear network code to a k-secure one for any k, and extend this algorithm to strong k-security for any k . Our algorithms run in polynomial time if k is a constant, and these time complexities are explicitly presented. We also present a concrete size of \(|\mathsf{F}|\) for strong k-security, where \(\mathsf{F}\) is the underling finite field.     

Data envelopment analysis for environmental assessment: Comparison between public and private ownership in petroleum industry

Environmental assessment recently becomes a major policy issue in the world. This study discusses how to apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for environmental assessment. An important feature of the DEA environmental assessment is that it needs to classify outputs into desirable (good) and undesirable (bad) outputs because private and public entities often produce not only desirable outputs but also undesirable outputs as a result of their production activities. This study proposes the three types of unification for DEA environmental assessment by using non-radial DEA models. The first unification considers both an increase and a decrease in the input vector along with a decrease in the direction vector of undesirable outputs. This type of unification measures “unified efficiency”. The second unification considers a decrease in an input vector along with a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs. This type of unification is referred to as “natural disposability” and measures “unified efficiency under natural disposability”. The third unification considers an increase in an input vector but a decrease in the vector of undesirable outputs. This type of unification is referred to as “managerial disposability” and measures “unified efficiency under managerial disposability”. All the unifications increase the vector of desirable outputs. To document their practical implications, this study has applied the proposed approach to compare the performance of national oil firms with that of international oil firms. This study identifies two important findings on the petroleum industry. One of the two findings is that national oil companies under public ownership outperform international oil companies under private ownership in terms of unified (operational and environmental) efficiency and unified efficiency under natural disposability. However, the performance of international oil companies exhibits an increasing trend in unified efficiency. The other finding is that national oil companies need to satisfy the environmental standard of its own country while international oil companies need to satisfy the international standard that is more restricted than the national standards. As a consequence, international oil companies outperform national oil companies in terms of unified efficiency under managerial disposability.     

Cost-benefit analysis, benefit accounting and fuzzy decisions. (II). A hypothetical application to mental illness

The essay presents a computational example to illustrate the development of comprehensive benefit information by using the algorithms presented in part I of the above title [Fuzzy Sets and Systems 92 (1992) 275–287]. The area of application is a treatment regime for mental illness in a hypothetical community. The objective is to show how the theory and algorithms developed in part I can be used to assemble a comprehensive benefit information for cost-benefit analysis, benefit-risk analysis or benefit-effectiveness analysis.