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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the way technology affects the provision of prehospital emergency care, upgrading the quality of services offered and significantly reducing the risk of premature termination of the patients.

The paper presents the development of the eEKAB, a pilot emergency medical information system that simulates the main services offered by the Greek National Instant Aid Centre (EKAB). The eEKAB was developed on an agile system methodology. From a technical perspective, the features and the technology were mainly chosen to provide reliable and user-friendly interfaces that will attract many users. eEKAB is based on three important pillars for offering health care to the patients: the “On-time Incident Reporting”, the “On-time Arrival at the Incident” and “Transfer to the Health Center”. According to the literature review, the emergency medical services (EMS) systems that combine all the features are very few.

It reduces the total time of the EMS procedures and it allows for an easier management of EMS, by providing a better allocation of human resources and a better geographical distribution of ambulances. The evaluation displayed that it is a very helpful application for the ambulance drivers as it reduces the ambulance response time to arrive in the patient's location and contributes significantly to the general performance of the prehospital medical care system. Also, the survey verified the importance of implementing eEKAB on a larger scale beyond the pilot usage. It is worth mentioning that the younger ambulance drivers had a more positive view for the purpose of the application.

The paper clearly identifies implications for further research. Regarding interoperability, the mobile app cooperates with the Operational Center of EKAB, while further collaboration could be achieved with other operational ambulance handling center, mainly, of the private sector. The system can evolve to include better communications among the EKAB departments. Particularly, the ambulance crew as well as the doctors should be informed with more incident features such as the emergency signal so that they know whether to open the siren, the patient's name, etc. The authors are currently working on implementing some features to provide effective medical health services to the patient in the ambulance.

eEKAB will have very significant implications in case of its enforcement, such as the reduction of the total time of EMS procedures with a corresponding reduction of the operating costs of an accident management system and an ambulance fleet handling system while in parallel informing in time the doctors/clinics. It will provide better distribution of ambulances as well as of total human resources. It will greatly assist ambulance drivers, while reducing ambulance response time to reach the patient's location. In other words, the authors will have a better performance of the whole prehospital care system.

Providing emergency care before the hospital is of great importance for upgrading the quality of health services provided at the accident site, thus significantly reducing the risk of premature death of patients. This in itself has a significant social implication.

The paper demonstrates a solid understanding in the field of the EMS systems and the corresponding medical services offered. It proposes the development of an effective, feasible and innovative EMS information system that will improve the existing emergency health care system in Greece (EKAB). An in depth literature review and presentation of the adopted new technologies and the respective architecture take place. An evaluation and statistical validation were conducted for proving the high applicability of eEKAB in case of real-life running.

Notwithstanding the Geographical Information System (GIS) being a fast-emerging green area of a digital revolution, the available studies focus on different subject areas of application in the construction industry, with no study that clarifies its knowledge strands. Hence, this systematic review analyses GIS core area of application, its system integration patterns, challenges and future directions in the construction industry.

A systematic review approach was employed, using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) checklist. A total of 60 articles published between 2011 and 2022 were identified, thoroughly reviewed and analysed using thematic analysis.

The analysis revealed spatial planning and design, construction-task tracking, defect detection and safety monitoring as its four main application-based areas. The findings showed that the adoption of GIS technology is rapidly expanding and being utilised more in building projects to visual-track construction activities. The review discovered an integrated pattern involving data flow from a device and window-form application to GIS, the pathways to data exchange between platforms to platforms, where ArcGIS is the most used software. Furthermore, the study highlighted the lack of interoperability between heterogeneous systems as the crux impediment to adopting GIS in the built environment.

The research provides a deep insight into possible areas where GIS is adopted in the construction industry, identifying areas of extensive and limited application coverage over a decade. Besides, it demystifies possible pathways for future integration opportunities of GIS with other emerging technologies within the construction industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed many challenges in almost all sectors around the globe. Because of the pandemic, government entities responsible for managing health-care resources face challenges in managing and distributing their limited and valuable health resources. In addition, severe outbreaks may occur in a small or large geographical area. Therefore, county-level preparation is crucial for officials and organizations who manage such disease outbreaks. However, most COVID-19-related research projects have focused on either state- or country-level. Only a few studies have considered county-level preparations, such as identifying high-risk counties of a particular state to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to prioritize counties in a state based on their COVID-19-related risks to manage the COVID outbreak effectively.

In this research, the authors use a systematic hybrid approach that uses a clustering technique to group counties that share similar COVID conditions and use a multi-criteria decision-making approach – the analytic hierarchy process – to rank clusters with respect to the severity of the pandemic. The clustering was performed using two methods, k-means and fuzzy c-means, but only one of them was used at a time during the experiment.

The results of this study indicate that the proposed approach can effectively identify and rank the most vulnerable counties in a particular state. Hence, state health resources managing entities can identify counties in desperate need of more attention before they allocate their resources and better prepare those counties before another surge.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to use both an unsupervised learning approach and the analytic hierarchy process to identify and rank state counties in accordance with the severity of COVID-19.

This study aims to raise awareness of the key challenges, opportunities and priorities for evidence-based strategies’ application to inform building and urban design decisions.

This study uses deductive qualitative content and manifest analysis, using semi-structured interviews undertaken with building and urban design professionals who represent a UK-based organisation.

The challenges associated with the practical implementation of frameworks, potential application areas and perceived areas of concern have been identified. These not only include the need to practically test their use, but also to identify the most appropriate forums for their use. Participant responses indicate the need to further develop engagement strategies for their practical implementation, clearly communicating the benefits and efficiencies to all stakeholders.

Implications/ limitations of this study come with the fact that some of the respondents may possess inadequate professional experience in properly evaluating all the questions. Additionally, the information gathered is restricted to the UK geographical context, as well as coming from one organisation, because of data accessibility.

The findings of the study can be adopted by designers in the strategic definition level to overcome the key challenges associated with the use of evidence-based strategies, enhancing their decision-making processes.

As a theoretical contribution to knowledge, this study enhances the body of knowledge by identifying the challenges associated with the practical implementation of evidence-based strategies to inform building and urban design decisions. In practice, the findings aid urban planners, designers and academics in embedding and adopting strategies that enhance decision-making processes.

The aim of this research is to understand the relationship between cultural buildings, economic powers and social justice and equality in architecture and how this relationship has evolved over the last hundred years. This research seeks to identify architectural and urban elements that enhance social justice and equality to inform architectural and urban designs and public policies.

The author explores the relationship between case studies of museums, cultural centers and libraries, and economic powers between 1920 and 2020 in Stockholm, Sweden. The author conducts a historical analysis and combines it with statistical and geographically referenced information in a Geographic Information System, archival data and in situ observations of selected buildings in the city. The author leverages the median income of household data from Statistics Sweden, with the geographical location of main public buildings and the headquarters of main companies operating in Sweden.

This analysis presents a gradual commercialization of cultural buildings in terms of location, inner layout and management, and the parallel filtering and transforming of the role of users. The author assesses how these cultural buildings gradually conformed to a system in the city and engaged with the market from a more local and national level to global networks. Findings show a cluster of large public buildings in the center of Stockholm, the largest global companies' headquarters and high-income median households. Results show that large shares of the low-income population now live far away from these buildings and the increasing commercialization of cultural space and inequalities.

This research provides a novel image of urban inequalities in Stockholm focusing on cultural buildings and their relationship with economic powers over the last hundred years. Cultural buildings could be a tool to support equality and stronger democracy beyond their primary use. Public cultural buildings offer a compromise between generating revenue for the private sector while catering to the needs and interests of large numbers of people. Therefore, policymakers should consider emphasizing the construction of more engaging public cultural buildings in more distributed locations.

This paper aims to propose a simulation-based performance evaluation model for the drone-based delivery of aid items to disaster-affected areas. The objective of the model is to perform analytical studies, evaluate the performance of drone delivery systems for humanitarian logistics and can support the decision-making on the operational design of the system – on where to locate drone take-off points and on assignment and scheduling of delivery tasks to drones.

This simulation model captures the dynamics and variabilities of the drone-based delivery system, including demand rates, location of demand points, time-dependent parameters and possible failures of drones’ operations. An optimization model integrated with the simulation system can update the optimality of drones’ schedules and delivery assignments.

An extensive set of experiments was performed to evaluate alternative strategies to demonstrate the effectiveness for the proposed optimization/simulation system. In the first set of experiments, the authors use the simulation-based evaluation tool for a case study for Central Florida. The goal of this set of experiments is to show how the proposed system can be used for decision-making and decision-support. The second set of experiments presents a series of numerical studies for a set of randomly generated instances.

The goal is to develop a simulation system that can allow one to evaluate performance of drone-based delivery systems, accounting for the uncertainties through simulations of real-life drone delivery flights. The proposed simulation model captures the variations in different system parameters, including interval of updating the system after receiving new information, demand parameters: the demand rate and their spatial distribution (i.e. their locations), service time parameters: travel times, setup and loading times, payload drop-off times and repair times and drone energy level: battery’s energy is impacted and requires battery change/recharging while flying.

Urban communities can be faced with many destructive events that can disrupt the daily functioning of activities and livelihood of people living in the communities. In this regard, during the last couple of years, many governments have put a lot of efforts into building resilient urban communities. Essentially, a resilient urban community has the capacity to anticipate future disasters, prepare for and recover timely from adverse effects of disasters and unexpected circumstances. Considering this, it is therefore important for the need to continuously review the existing urban community resilience indicators, in order to identify emerging ones to enable comprehensive evaluation of urban communities in the future against unexpected events. This study therefore aims to conduct a systematic review to develop and critically analyse the emerging and leading urban community resilience indicators.

Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRSIMA) protocol, 53 journal articles were selected using Scopus. The selected papers were subjected to thorough content analysis.

From the review, 45 urban community resilience indicators were identified. These indicators were grouped into eight broad categories namely, Socio-demographic, Economic, Institutional Resilience, Infrastructure and Housing Resilience, Collaboration, Community Capital, Risk Data Accumulation and Geographical and Spatial characteristics of community. Further, the results indicated that the U.S had the highest number of publications, followed by Australia, China, New Zealand and Taiwan. In fact, very few studies emanated from developing economies.

The outputs of this study will inform policymakers, practitioners and researchers on the new and emerging indicators that should be considered when evaluating the resilience level of urban communities. The findings will also serve as a theoretical foundation for further detailed empirical investigation.

This study aims to investigate the spatial distribution of housing prices and identify the affecting factors (independent variable) on the cost of residential units (dependent variable).

The method of the present study is descriptive-analytical and has an applied purpose. The used statistical population in this study is the residential units’ price in Tehran in 2021. For this purpose, the average per square meter of residential units in the city neighborhoods was entered in the geographical information system. Two techniques of ordinary least squares regression and geographically weighted regression have been used to analyze housing prices and modeling. Then, the results of the ordinary least squares regression and geographically weighted regression models were compared by using the housing price interpolation map predicted in each model and the accurate housing price interpolation map.

Based on the results, the ordinary least squares regression model has poorly modeled housing prices in the study area. The results of the geographically weighted regression model show that the variables (access rate to sports fields, distance from gas station and water station) have a direct and significant effect. Still, the variable (distance from fault) has a non-significant impact on increasing housing prices at a city level. In addition, to identify the affecting variables of housing prices, the results confirm the desirability of the geographically weighted regression technique in terms of accuracy compared to the ordinary least squares regression technique in explaining housing prices. The results of this study indicate that the housing prices in Tehran are affected by the access level to urban services and facilities.

Identifying factors affecting housing prices helps create sustainable housing in Tehran. Building sustainable housing represents spending less energy during the construction process together with the utilization phase, which ultimately provides housing at an acceptable price for all income deciles. In housing construction, the more you consider the sustainable housing principles, the more sustainable housing you provide and you take a step toward sustainable development. Therefore, sustainable housing is an important planning factor for local authorities and developers. As a result, it is necessary to institutionalize an integrated vision based on the concepts of sustainable development in the field of housing in the Tehran metropolis.

Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, is one of the fastest growing capital cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Recently, the city is experiencing an alarming rate of burglary and violent crimes, while the city planning management frameworks lacks adequate and effective crime mapping, monitoring and management techniques necessary for achieving liveable and safe environment for habitation despite its grandiose spatial planning and aesthetically appealing architectural design as a modern city. Based on police crime records (2007–2018) and geospatial analysis, this paper aims to provide adequate understanding on the interplay of land use configuration and burglary crime formation in residential neighbourhoods of Abuja, Nigeria.

The methods used for the purpose of data collection includes; field survey, Block Environmental Inventory, while inferential statistics and Geographic Information System tools was used for data analysis. The analysis established that Lagos, Nsukka and Enugu Streets are hotspots; while Chief Palace street, Ladoke Akintola and Oka-Akoko streets were found to be cold spots.

This study, however, established the applicability of crime pattern, opportunity theory and routine activity theory in understanding the rising burglary crime events in the study areas and the link between physical characteristics of street block typology and burglary crime pattern. The results of the analysis has in a way affirmed the positions of the theories, while disagreed with them in cases where the results indicated contrary outcome.

This paper concluded with inference drawn from the results that supported mixed-use development but with built-in crime prevention through environmental design strategies as effective burglary crime prevention mechanisms that contribute to crime rate reduction.

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the digital development and utilization of China’s intangible cultural heritage resources, research on the theft of intangible cultural heritage resources and knowledge integration based on linked data is proposed to promote the standardized description of intangible cultural heritage knowledge and realize the digital dissemination and development of intangible cultural heritage.

In this study, firstly, the knowledge organization theory and semantic Web technology are used to describe the intangible cultural heritage digital resource objects in metadata specifications. Secondly, the ontology theory and technical methods are used to build a conceptual model of the intangible cultural resources field and determine the concept sets and hierarchical relationships in this field. Finally, the semantic Web technology is used to establish semantic associations between intangible cultural heritage resource knowledge.

The study findings indicate that the knowledge organization of intangible cultural heritage resources constructed in this study provides a solution for the digital development of intangible cultural heritage in China. It also provides semantic retrieval with better knowledge granularity and helps to visualize the knowledge content of intangible cultural heritage.

This study summarizes and provides significant theoretical and practical value for the digital development of intangible cultural heritage and the resource description and knowledge fusion of intangible cultural heritage can help to discover the semantic relationship of intangible cultural heritage in multiple dimensions and levels.