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The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the concept of early warning signs in projects and explain how a performance measurement system can be utilized as a source of data for an early warning approach signaling that a project is about to experience problems at some stage in the future.

Combination of action research and semi‐structured interviews and document analysis supplemented by a post‐mortem analysis after project close‐out.

Detection of early warning signals in projects can be better enabled through the application of a performance measurement system with properly defined key performance indicators. Utilization of this tool can positively affect the overall success of the project.

The case study involved only one project from the oil and gas industry.

The empirical case study was developed to illustrate the usefulness of exploiting a performance measurement system in a project. A procedure was demonstrated for developing and implementing an early warning system based on performance measurement, and specific performance indicators have been described for other projects to copy.

This paper highlights the gap in the literature concerning the link between early warning and project management and the link between early warning and performance measurement. It offers a new idea on how performance measurement can be used as an effective early warning system and is intended to be primarily of use to project management practitioners and practically‐oriented academics who are interested in developing fresh insights into new approaches for better management of projects.

Although No Secrets suggests that adult protection practices should seek to prevent abuse, it can be argued that such practice predominately focuses on pursuing effective responses to abuse that has already happened, rather than preventing the onset of abuse. This research sought to contribute to the prevention of abuse, through the identification of ‘early indicators’. Early indicators were identified, and this knowledge has been applied to equip families and practitioners to report concerns at an early stage and seek protective responses.

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the severity of public events in real time from the perspective of social media and to construct the early warning mechanism of public events.

This study constructed the severity assessment system of public events from the dimensions of the netizens' role, the Internet media's role, the spread of public events and the attitudes and feelings of netizens. The method of analyzing the influence tendency of the public event severity indicators was proposed. A total of 1,107,308 microblogging entries regarding four public events were investigated. The severity of public events was divided into four levels.

It is found that serious public events have higher indicator values than medium level events on the microblogging platform. A quantitative severity classification standard for public events was established and the early warning mechanism of public events was built.

Microblogging and other social media platforms provide rich clues for the real-time study and judgment of public events. This study only investigated the Weibo platform as the data source. Other social media platforms can also be considered in future.

Different from the ex-post evaluation method of judging the severity of public events based on their physical loss, this study constructed a quantitative method to dynamically determine the severity of public events according to the clues reflected by social media. The results can help the emergency management departments judge the severity of public events objectively and reduce the subjective negligence and misjudgment.

This study uses computer-aided design to improve the ecological and environmental sustainability of early-stage landscape designs. Urban expansion on open land and natural habitats has led to a decline in biodiversity and increased climate change impacts, affecting urban inhabitants' quality of life and well-being. While sustainability indicators have been employed to assess the performance of buildings and neighbourhoods, landscape designs' ecological and environmental sustainability has received comparatively less attention, particularly in early-design stages where applying sustainability approaches is impactful.

The authors propose a computation framework for evaluating key landscape sustainability indicators and providing real-time feedback to designers. The method integrates spatial indicators with widely recognized sustainability rating system credits. A specialized tool was developed for measuring biomass optimization, precipitation management and urban heat mitigation, and a proof-of-concept experiment tested the tool's effectiveness on three Mediterranean neighbourhood-level designs.

The results show a clear connection between the applied design strategy to the indicator behaviour. This connection enhances the ability to establish sustainability benchmarks for different types of landscape developments using parametric design.

The study allows non-expert designers to measure and embed landscape sustainability early in the design stages, thus lowering the entry level for incorporating biodiversity enhancement and climate mitigation approaches.

This study expands the parametric vocabulary for measuring landscape sustainability by introducing spatial ecosystem services and architectural sustainability indicators on a unified platform, enabling the integration of critical climate and biodiversity-loss solutions earlier in the development process.

Several developing economies witnessed a large number of systemic financial and currency crises since the 1980s that resulted in severe economic, social, and political problems. The devastating impact of the 1982 and 1994–1995 Mexican crises, the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis, the 1998 Russian crisis, and the ongoing financial crisis of 2008–2009 suggests that maintaining financial sector stability through reduction in vulnerability is highly crucial. The world is now witnessing an unprecedented systemic financial crisis originated from the USA in September 2008 together with a deep worldwide economic recession, particularly in developed countries of Europe and North America. This calls for devising and using on a regular basis an appropriate and effective monitoring and policy formulation system for detecting and addressing vulnerabilities leading to crisis. This chapter proposes a macroprudential/financial soundness monitoring, analysis, and remedial policy formulation system that can be used by most developing countries with or without crisis experience as well as with limited data. It also discusses a process for identifying and compiling a set of leading macroprudential/financial soundness indicators. An empirical illustration using Philippines data is presented. There is an urgent need for increased coordination, collaboration, and partnership among central banks, banking and financial market supervision agencies, and ministries of finance, economic, and planning for proper macroprudential monitoring. A high-level national financial stability committee under the auspices of the head of the state as well as a ‘‘regional financial stability board’’ needs to be established to complement and support the activities of an “international stability board.”

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the potential risks of copyright infringement in digital library based on the extension theory.

At first, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine the weights of the existing indicator system for early warning. Second, a model is built to evaluate the potential risks of copyright infringement based on the extension theory in digital library. Finally, a real-world application is presented to show the effectiveness and usefulness of this approach.

The main findings of this paper are as follows: the early warning extension theory model is effective in distinguishing the degree of the potential risks of copyright infringement in digital library; the ranges of the value and the values of the indicators can directly affect the results while using this approach, so the accuracy of these two aspects is a crucial question.

The social impact is that copyright infringement risks of digital library is reduced; the lawsuit rate and economic loss due to copyright infringement are thereby decreased as well.

This paper introduces the evaluation of the potential risks of copyright infringement based on the extension theory in digital library. The results provide support for the decision-makers in handling the potential risks of copyright infringement in digital library.

Large or increasing stocks of non-performing loans in the banking sector constitute threats to financial stability. This paper considers to which extent various macroeconomic and macro-financial factors may serve as leading indicators for the dynamics of the ratio of non-performing loans to total loans.

The paper estimates panel data models for all EU countries and two groups of EU countries using quarterly data over approximately 20 years.

The estimations show that many macroeconomic and macro-financial variables are leading indicators for non-performing loans in the EU countries, even years ahead. Higher GDP growth, lower inflation and lower debt are robust leading indicators of a lower ratio of non-performing loans in the future. The current account balance and real house prices are important indicators for the Western European group but not for the Central and Eastern European group.

The estimations are carried out for panels of EU countries and the effects may hence be seen as averages for the countries in the particular panel and may not apply for individual countries.

National and international authorities have brought in systems to detect and address imbalances and emerging problems in the financial sectors. Many of the measures operate with long lags, and so it is important to assess whether various macroeconomic and macro-financial variables may serve as leading indicators for future developments of non-performing loans.

The main contribution of the paper is that it estimates models meant expressly for predicting non-performing loans several years ahead. The results are thus of practical use for national and international authorities which typically have access to measures that operate with a long delay. The analysis also includes more macroeconomic and macro-financial variables as leading indicators than have typically been used in earlier studies.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: the authors initially survey a sample of literature published after the Great Recession that address macroeconomic and commercial real estate forecasting methods related to the Great Recession and compare significant lessons learned, or lack thereof. The authors then seek to identify new models to improve the predictability of commercial real estate early warning signals regarding cyclical turning points which result in negative appreciation rates.

The authors develop a probit model to estimate quarterly probabilities of negative office appreciation returns using an alternative methodology to Tsolaco et al. (2014). The authors’ alternative method incorporates generally publicly available macroeconomic and real estate variables such as gross domestic product, office-related employment sectors, cap rate spreads, and commercial mortgage flow of funds into a probit model in order to estimate the probability of future quarterly negative office appreciation rates.

The authors’ models demonstrate the predictive power of macroeconomic variables typically associated with office demand. The probit model specification shows probabilities of negative office appreciations rates greater than 50 percent either as the quarterly office returns become negative, or in some cases several quarters before office returns become negative, for both the Great Recession and the recession occurring in the early 1990s. The models fail to show probabilities greater than 50 percent of negative office returns until after they occur for the recession in 2001. While this indicates need for further improvement in early warning models, the models do predict the more severe periods of negative office returns in advance, indicating the findings useful to real estate investors to monitor the changes in economic and real estate data identified as statistically significant in the results.

The Great Recession is a unique laboratory of significant contractions, recessions, and recoveries that challenge pre-recessionary real estate cycle models. The models provide guidance on which historical economic indicators are important to track, and gives a framework with which to calculate the probability that office prices are likely to decline. Because the models use macroeconomic indicators that are publicly available from at least one quarter in the past, the models or variations of them may provide real estate professionals with some indication of an impending decrease in office prices, even if that indication comes only one quarter in advance. Armed with this information, property owners, investors, and brokers can make more informed decisions on whether to buy or sell, and how sensitive their real estate transactions may be to timing.

The authors introduce several new models that examine the ability of historical macroeconomic indicators to provide early warning signals and identify turning points in real estate valuations, specifically negative office appreciation rates caused by the Great Recession. Using data from at least one quarter in the past, all the data in the models are publicly available (excluding National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries data) at the observed return quarter being predicted, which gives practitioners rational insights that can provide at least one source of guidance about the likelihood of an impending decrease in office prices.