Despite extensive growth in recent years, the field of "quality-of-life" appraisal still evokes debate about basic perception of the concept and is accompanied by a plethora of indexes for measurement. One prime reason for the problems is that the measurements have been transferred from two separate sources - medical health status indexes and social-science population indexes - neither of which...

Considerable attention has been devoted to environmental assessment and monitoring, primarily by physical and biological scientists, and more recently by social scientists. However, population growth and global change have resulted in an imperative to assess the resiliency of the environment to adapt to large scale changes and to continue to produce goods and services for future generations (su...

Work related to the first-principle modeling of a feedwater heater operating in a coal-fired power unit is presented, along with theoretical discussion concerning its structural simplifications, parameter estimation, and dynamical validation. The objectives of this work are as follows: (i) formulate and deploy a moderately complex first-principle model of a feedwater heater to reproduce operati...

—Performance measurement and analysis is crucial for steering the organization to realizing its strategic and operational goals. Relevant performance indicators and their relationships to goals and activities need to be determined and analyzed. Current organization modeling approaches do not reflect this in an adequate way. This paper attempts to fill the gap by presenting a framework for model...