Accessibility and transport provision have played a key role in shaping the development patterns of major urban areas internationally. While future urban development patterns are subject to fluctuations of the economy and resulting resource decisions we can at a minimum explore potential likely future development scenarios based on current evidence and projections. In this study developed with ...

This paper addresses the problem of system design for diagnosability. Specifically, it focuses on design of built-in self-tests (BISTs) for subsystems based on electronic control units (ECUs). The BISTs play a major role in diagnosis of the systems and in particular in determining if the failure is in the ECU or externally in the sensors, detectors, or actuators. The design of BISTs involves a ...

The importance of user benefits in transport projects assessments is well-known by transport planners and economists. Generally they have the greatest impact on the result of costbenefit analysis. It is common practice to adopt the consumer surplus measure for calculating transport user benefits. Normally the well-known “Rule of a Half”, as a practical approximation for the integral of the dema...

Benefit transfer is a collection of methods widely used in costbenefit analysis and policy analysis to assess environmental values in contexts where original valuation work is deemed too expensive and/or too time-consuming. The essence of benefit transfer is conditional or unconditional prediction of environmental values in a new context. This paper proposes a hierarchical Bayesian method for b...

Various decision support methods are used to support the sustainable use of natural resources, but there is little evidence about these methods’ actual performances. In this study, 35 carefully selected papers assessing the sustainable use of natural resources were evaluated. The evaluated papers utilized one of the following methods: optimization, costbenefit analysis (CBA) and monetary valuat...

The social cost of carbon – or marginal damage caused by an additional ton of carbon dioxide emissions – has been estimated by a U.S. government working group at $21/tCO2 in 2010. That calculation, however, omits many of the biggest risks associated with climate change, and downplays the impact of current emissions on future generations. Our reanalysis explores the effects of uncertainty about ...

Social capital is a concept that can facilitate a friendly merger between sociological and economic theories of political behavior. Rational-choice theories emphasize resources and constraints, and political-cultural theories focus on normative rules and habitual behavior; social capital integrates both. Mutual obligations instituted among members of society function as “credit slips” which are...

Year over year, the majority of IT projects fail to deliver the required features on time and budget, costing billions of dollars. The task of portfolio managers is to make a selection of prospective projects, given only rough costbenefit estimates for them. In this paper, we present LearnIT, a tool to aid portfolio managers in their portfolio selection job. LearnIT identifies past or current I...

The main goal of this study was to offer data about the efficacy of virtual reality exposure (VRE) in the treatment of panic disorder with or without agoraphobia (PDA). The study was a between-subject design with three experimental conditions (VRE group, in vivo exposure [IVE] group and waiting-list [WL] group) and repeated measures (pre-treatment, post treatment and 12 month follow-up). The tr...

This study examines the feasibility of indirect solar desalination in oil producing countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. It relies on value engineering (VE) and costbenefit with sensitivity analyses to identify optimal coupling configurations of desalination and solar energy technologies. A comparative return on investment was assessed as a function of water costs for va...