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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.

Goal setting is a crucial aspect of client-centered practice in occupational therapy (OT) for mental health conditions. However, it remains to be seen how goal-setting has been delivered in mental health, particularly the OT process. The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the nature and extent of goal setting delivered in mental health and informed OT practice.

The authors followed the guidelines of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and searched three databases using key search terms: “mental disorder,” “goal setting,” and “occupational therapy” and their synonyms.

After excluding duplicate records, the authors initially screened 883 records and resulted in 20 records in total after the screening process. Most of the identified articles used goal-setting delivered by both a health professional and a client (n = 14), and focused on people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (n = 13), but three interventions were delivered by occupational therapists. Further research needs on goal-setting in mental health OT, exploring the reliability and validity of different goal-setting strategies and investigating the effectiveness of goal-setting for promoting behavior change and client engagement across various mental health conditions and settings.

The scoping review has some limitations, such as not investigating the validity and reliability of goal-setting strategies identified, and excluding conference papers and non-English articles.

This scoping review presents a mapping of how goal-setting has been delivered in mental health and informed OT practice. The findings suggest limited research in OT and highlight the need for more studies to address the evidence gap in individualized client-centered OT.

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on formal stakeholder participation (or “lobbying”) in the early phase of the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB’s) standard-setting.

Drawing on a rational-choice framework, this paper conducts a content analysis of comment letters (CLs) submitted to the ISSB in response to its first two exposure drafts (published in 2022) to investigate stakeholder participation across different groups and jurisdictional origins. The analyses examine participation in terms of frequency (measured using the number of participating stakeholders) and intensity (measured using the length of CLs).

Preparers and users of sustainability reports emerge as the largest participating stakeholder groups, while the accounting/sustainability profession participates with high average intensity. Surprisingly, preparers do not outweigh users in terms of participation frequency and intensity; and large preparers outweigh smaller ones in terms of participation intensity but not participation frequency. Internationally, stakeholders from countries with a private financial accounting standard-setting system participate more frequently and intensively than others. In addition, country-level economic wealth and sustainability performance are positively associated with more participating stakeholders.

This study is of interest for organizations and stakeholders involved in or affected by standard-setting in the field of sustainability reporting. The finding of limited participation by investors and from developing countries suggests the ISSB take actions to enhance the voice of those stakeholders.

The imbalances in stakeholder participation that were found pose potential threats to an important aspect of the input legitimacy of the ISSB’s standard-setting process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explore stakeholder participation by means of CLs with the ISSB in terms of frequency and intensity.

This study aims to investigate the associations among decent work (DW), capabilities and the flourishing of employees in a South African context.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted with a convenience sample (N = 436) of early childhood development practitioners from two South African provinces. A demographic questionnaire, the Decent Work Scale, the Capability Set for Work Questionnaire and the Flourishing-at-Work Scale were administered.

Latent class analysis showed four capability sets: robust, relational, knowledge/skills and weak capability sets. Employees with a robust capability set were more inclined to report DW than those with knowledge/skills and weak capability sets. Employees with a weak capability set were significantly less inclined to report organisational values that complement family and social values than the other three capability sets. Employees with a robust capability set reported significantly higher emotional well-being (EWB), psychological well-being (PWB) and social well-being (SWB) levels than those with relational, knowledge/skills and weak capability sets. DW was significantly related to EWB, PWB and SWB.

This study contributes to the literature regarding DW, capabilities and flourishing of employees in a non-western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic and non-POSH context. The study highlights the need for well-being policies that focus on DW and the capabilities of people in disadvantaged positions. These together would strengthen their agency for converting capabilities into well-being.

This paper aims to offer a tutorial/introduction to new statistics arising from the theory of optimal transport to empirical researchers in econometrics and machine learning.

Presenting in a tutorial/survey lecture style to help practitioners with the theoretical material.

The tutorial survey of some main statistical tools (arising from optimal transport theory) should help practitioners to understand the theoretical background in order to conduct empirical research meaningfully.

This study is an original presentation useful for new comers to the field.

This paper presents Quick Changeover Design (QCD), which is a structured methodological approach for Original Equipment Manufacturers to drive and support the design of machines in terms of rapid changeover capability.

To improve the performance in terms of set up time, QCD addresses machine design from a single-minute digit exchange of die (SMED). Although conceived to aid the design of completely new machines, QCD can be adapted to support for simple design upgrades on pre-existing machines. The QCD is structured in three consecutive steps, each supported by specific tools and analysis forms to facilitate and better structure the designers' activities.

QCD helps equipment manufacturers to understand the current and future needs of the manufacturers' customers to: (1) anticipate the requirements for new and different set-up process; (2) prioritize the possible technical solutions; (3) build machines and equipment that are easy and fast to set-up under variable contexts. When applied to a production system consisting of machines subject to frequent or time-consuming set-up processes, QCD enhances both responsiveness to external market demands and internal control of factory operations.

The QCD approach is a support system for the development of completely new machines and is also particularly effective in upgrading existing ones. QCD's practical application is demonstrated using a case study concerning a vertical spindle machine.

This study aims to introduce a new methodology for generating synthetic images for facility management purposes. The method starts by leveraging the existing 3D open-source BIM models and using them inside a graphic engine to produce a photorealistic representation of indoor spaces enriched with facility-related objects. The virtual environment creates several images by changing lighting conditions, camera poses or material. Moreover, the created images are labeled and ready to be trained in the model.

This paper focuses on the challenges characterizing object detection models to enrich digital twins with facility management-related information. The automatic detection of small objects, such as sockets, power plugs, etc., requires big, labeled data sets that are costly and time-consuming to create. This study proposes a solution based on existing 3D BIM models to produce quick and automatically labeled synthetic images.

The paper presents a conceptual model for creating synthetic images to increase the performance in training object detection models for facility management. The results show that virtually generated images, rather than an alternative to real images, are a powerful tool for integrating existing data sets. In other words, while a base of real images is still needed, introducing synthetic images helps augment the model’s performance and robustness in covering different types of objects.

This study introduced the first pipeline for creating synthetic images for facility management. Moreover, this paper validates this pipeline by proposing a case study where the performance of object detection models trained on real data or a combination of real and synthetic images are compared.

This paper aims to develop and apply a service design method that allows for stronger recognition and integration of human activities into the front-end stages of the service design process.

Following a discussion of different service design perspectives and activity theory, the paper develops a method called activity-set mapping (ActS). ActS is applied to an exploratory service design project to demonstrate its use.

Three broad perspectives on service design are suggested: (1) the dyadic interaction, (2) the systemic interaction and (3) the customer activity perspectives. The ActS method draws on the latter perspective and focuses on the study of human activity sets. The application of ActS shows that the method can help identify and visualize sets of activities.

The ActS method opens new avenues for service design by zooming in on the micro level and capturing the set of activities linked to a desired goal achievement. However, the method is limited to activities reported by research participants and may exclude unconscious activities. Further research is needed to validate and refine the method.

The ActS method will help service designers explore activities in which humans engage to achieve a desired goal/end state.

The concept of “human activity set” is new to service research and opens analytical opportunities for service design. The ActS method contributes a visualization tool for identifying activity sets and uncovering the benefits, sacrifices and frequency of activities.

Medical research requires biological material and data collected through biobanks in reliable processes with quality assurance. Medical studies based on data with unknown or questionable quality are useless or even dangerous, as evidenced by recent examples of withdrawn studies. Medical data sets consist of highly sensitive personal data, which has to be protected carefully and is available for research only after the approval of ethics committees. The purpose of this research is to propose an architecture to support researchers to efficiently and effectively identify relevant collections of material and data with documented quality for their research projects while observing strict privacy rules.

Following a design science approach, this paper develops a conceptual model for capturing and relating metadata of medical data in biobanks to support medical research.

This study describes the landscape of biobanks as federated medical data lakes such as the collections of samples and their annotations in the European federation of biobanks (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure – European Research Infrastructure Consortium, BBMRI-ERIC) and develops a conceptual model capturing schema information with quality annotation. This paper discusses the quality dimensions for data sets for medical research in-depth and proposes representations of both the metadata and data quality documentation with the aim to support researchers to effectively and efficiently identify suitable data sets for medical studies.

This novel conceptual model for metadata for medical data lakes has a unique focus on the high privacy requirements of the data sets contained in medical data lakes and also stands out in the detailed representation of data quality and metadata quality of medical data sets.

This study aims to explore a self-managed action learning (SMAL) initiative undertaken by social work assessors in England, which led to insights into the practice of SMAL.

The paper draws upon the experience of the authors in relation to an actual SMAL intervention in a social care context in England.

The paper suggests that, in contrast to extant literature, it is not the absence of an “expert” facilitator, which has proved to be most challenging but rather dealing with the practicalities of managing inter-organisational sets online. Specific individual and inter-organisational learning came about as a result of the SMAL initiative, including the implementation of inter-organisational networking to support isolated assessors.

The ideas and perspectives discussed in this paper will be explored through further empirical research.

The paper illustrates how SMAL can be implemented and suggests how it can facilitate organisational and individual learning.

The paper discusses an initiative with the aim of better supporting assessors of newly qualified social workers; a task of enormous importance to the future of social work practice in England.

The paper contributes to a limited literature on the practice of SMAL. The uniqueness comes from both the multi-organisational aspect of the programme, that it is self-managed and delivered virtually.