Search results

In alignment with the European Union’s Vision Zero initiative to eliminate road fatalities by 2050, leveraging technological advancements becomes crucial for addressing the challenges of vulnerable road users (VRUs), and for mitigating the impact of human error. Despite increasing scholarly interest in applications of extended reality (XR), a research gap persists, particularly in the role of XR in transportation safety. Therefore, the aim of the study was to fill this gap through a systematic literature review to evaluate comprehensively the potential scope and practical applicability of XR technologies in enhancing the safety of VRUs.

A systematic review was undertaken, following PRISMA guidelines meticulously, in which 80 relevant articles from databases, such as Scopus and Science Direct, were identified and analysed.

The results of the analysis revealed the potential of XR beyond pedestrians and cyclists, and highlighted a lack of research about the impact of XR with regard to the personal traits or abilities of VRUs. The results of a thorough analysis confirmed the potential of XR as a promising solution for an approach to collaborative co-creation in addressing the safety challenges of VRUs. In addition, the integration of eye-tracking with virtual reality emerged as a promising innovation for enhancing the safety of vulnerable road users.

Theoretical implications include enhancing the understanding of applications of XR in VRUs’ safety and providing insights into future research possibilities and methodological approaches. Valuable insights into search strategies and inclusion-exclusion criteria can guide future research methodologies.

Practically, the findings from the study offer insights to assist urban planners and transportation authorities in incorporating XR technologies effectively for VRUs safety. Identifying areas for further development of XR technology could inspire innovation and investment in solutions designed to meet the safety needs of VRUs, such as enhanced visualisation tools and immersive training simulations.

The findings of previous research underscore the vast potential of XR technologies within the built environment, yet their utilisation remains limited in the urban transport sector. The intricacies of urban traffic scenarios pose significant challenges for VRUs, making participation in mobility studies hazardous. Hence, it is crucial to explore the scope of emerging technologies in addressing VRUs issues as a pre-requisite for establishing comprehensive safety measures.

In the recent post-pandemic era, the globe has been anxious for the sustainable disposal of healthcare waste to protect public health, protect the environment and enhance future preparedness. Developing countries, in particular, have struggled to dispose of healthcare waste (HCW) to eradicate the hazardous effects of medical waste generated during and after the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. Hence the purpose of the research paper is to develop a hybrid decision-making framework to identify various barriers for sustainable disposal of healthcare waste use of Grey-Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (G-DEMATEL) and Analytical Network Process (ANP).

A hybrid framework of Grey-Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (G-DEMATEL) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) has been used to rank barriers and sub-barriers in the disposal of healthcare waste.

The study’s findings suggest that lack of segregation practices, absence of green procurement policy, obsolete technologies and resistance to adopting change management are the topmost causal barriers influencing the remaining barriers. Lack of commitment among healthcare administrations, lack of standard performance measures and resistance to adopting change appear to be the topmost crucial barriers.

The study’s finding enables all stakeholders to prioritize the barriers systematically for better performance and save resources during the process. The policymakers can use the results to design a clear regulatory framework.

The literature has highlighted the factors and their association with the disposal of healthcare waste mainly in isolation. The results are validated against the Grey-Analytical Hierarchy Process (G-AHP) to ensure the robustness of the proposed framework. This paper is one of the preliminary attempts to propose a framework of the interrelationships of the factors that have a direct role in survival for management education.

This study aims to examine the relationship between institutional logics and specifications quality, and how this relationship is mediated by the legitimacy of the procurement process and stewardship behaviour.

This study draws on insights from institutional logics theory, and legitimacy and stewardship behaviour literature. We conducted an extended literature review to gain a comprehensive understanding of “institutional logics” and their manifestations in organizational contexts, utilizing the 2000–2024 data collected from the EBSCO, Scopus and Web of Science databases, complemented with Google Scholar. We gather that institutional logics manifest in several forms, and that while some organizations may thrive on a single logic, in certain contexts institutional logics can manifest in combinations – “multiple logics or hybrids”. Based on this understanding, we developed testable research hypotheses, predicting the influences of institutional logics – professional logic, efficient service logic and delivery (market) logic, on legitimacy, stewardship behaviour and specifications quality. We then carried out an empirical study, adopting a quantitative cross-sectional survey design with a self-administered questionnaire to test the hypothesized relationships. The empirical data were obtained from 162 procuring and disposing entities in Uganda and analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modelling technique.

The study findings reveal that institutional logics exert a strong positive effect on the legitimacy of the procurement process and on stewardship behaviour, which, in turn, both positively influence specifications quality.

The study findings have implications for theory and practice. The study findings provide useful insights that support the conceptual and theoretical development of institutional logics theory and applications in procurement literature. In addition, the study findings enhance procurement managers’ understanding of the mechanisms through which institutional logics can foster specifications quality. However, considering the fact that the study was conducted in a single country context, and focused on the public sector only, the findings of the study might not be generalizable globally.

This study contributes to established knowledge about quality management and procurement by examining the legitimacy of the procurement process and stewardship behaviour of those involved in procurement processes as mechanisms through which procuring entities are able to use institutional logics to enhance specifications quality. In addition, the study highlights areas for future research that may be explored to increase understanding of the value of institutional logics in ensuring specifications quality, and the link between specifications quality and the general performance of procuring entities.

This study aims to examine the various internal and external factors affecting the financial stability of Indian Commercial Banks. The aim is to improve the effectiveness of the Indian banking system in facilitating the transmission of monetary policy and to strengthen its resilience in the event of a banking crisis.

A panel data regression analysis is employed on unbalanced panel data of Indian commercial banks including public sector, private sector and foreign sector banks for the period of 2005–2022.

This study revealed that Indian banks with higher profits and high capitalization are more stable than others. However, banks with large bank size and high management costs are less stable as compared to other banks. In the case of macroeconomic variables, foreign exchange reserves have a significant positive impact on banking stability. Moreover, the unemployment rate has a significant negative impact on the banking stability of India.

Research identifies relevant micro and macroeconomic drivers pertaining to India’s banking stability, a developing economy. These findings have significant implications and can attract the attention of analysts, regulators, bankers and academicians in this area. Nevertheless, the scope of the study is limited to the variables chosen to evaluate their contribution to banking stability, but other variables may influence Indian banking conditions.

Indian banks are advised by the research to place a high priority on profitability, capitalization and effective risk management. Customers and investors should choose banks with strong metrics. The priorities for policymakers should be preserving robust reserves and tackling unemployment with focused initiatives. Adopting digitalization can improve banks’ customer service and operational effectiveness, which is important for overcoming economic obstacles. These tactics provide doable measures to improve the resilience and stability of the banking industry in India and other emerging nations.

This research differentiates from the rest by focusing solely on the Indian banking system, in contrast to previous ones that often treated India as part of a bigger part like the BRICS or South Asia continent. It acknowledges the need to comprehending the unique traits and difficulties faced by the Indian banking system. Moreover, the current study distinguishes itself by focusing on the combined impact of microeconomic and macroeconomic indicators in the Indian context, unlike earlier research that concentrated on assessing the effects of individual variables. The current study also investigated new variables like corporate governance and foreign exchange reserves in the context of Indian banking which have not been explored by existing literature. Research is also crucial in the context of the analysis’s time frame, since it captures the period of economic transformation that included demonization, implementation of GST, major mergers and global COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the reputation of the metal-based porous media for their ability to augment heat transfer as widely witnessed in the literature and practically operating heat exchanging applications, the coexisting penalty of the increased pressure drop demanding increased pumping power poses a major concern that invites the need for an alternate solution to handle this unsought outcome. Therefore, this study aims at providing a better solution to the existing cost and benefit scenarios to benefit a plethora of engineering applications including energy transfer, energy storage and energy conversion.

This work highlights on the property of stacked woven wire mesh porous media such as their stacking types, porous conditions and thickness scenarios that can potentially result in distinct trade-off scenarios. A vertical channel is numerical modelled by using REV scaled modelling technique using Darcy-Forchheimer and local thermal non-equilibrium models to illustrate the possibilities of this variety of trade off scenarios between the desirable heat transfer and the unsought flow resistance.

This work illustrates the advantages of wire mesh-based porous medium and its distinct potential in controlling the existing trade-offs between the cost and benefit aspects. It is found that by varying the features of wire mesh porous media, the interplay between the conflictingly existing characteristics can be much easily handled specific to distinct requirements associated with variety of engineering applications.

The study emphasizes on a new solution or methodology to handle the penalty of pressure drop associated with metal-based porous media. Through this study, a novel approach to control the ultimately costing pumping power at the benefit of increased heat transfer is provided considering various requirements that could be associated with any thermal management systems. Various possibilities and potentials of wire mesh porous media are illustrated highlighting on their benefit of ease with which the mentioned goals can be achieved.

The purpose of this research is to establish a robust numerical framework for the calibration of macroscopic constitutive parameters, based on the analysis of polycrystalline RVEs with computational homogenisation.

This framework is composed of four building-blocks: (1) the multi-scale model, consisting of polycrystalline RVEs, where the grains are modelled with anisotropic crystal plasticity, and computational homogenisation to link the scales, (2) a set of loading cases to generate the reference responses, (3) the von Mises elasto-plastic model to be calibrated, and (4) the optimisation algorithms to solve the inverse identification problem. Several optimisation algorithms are assessed through a reference identification problem. Thereafter, different calibration strategies are tested. The accuracy of the calibrated models is evaluated by comparing their results against an FE2 model and experimental data.

In the initial tests, the LIPO optimiser performs the best. Good results accuracy is obtained with the calibrated constitutive models. The computing time needed by the FE2 simulations is 5 orders of magnitude larger, compared to the standard macroscopic simulations, demonstrating how this framework is suitable to obtain efficient micro-mechanics-informed constitutive models.

This contribution proposes a numerical framework, based on FE2 and macro-scale single element simulations, where the calibration of constitutive laws is informed by multi-scale analysis. The most efficient combination of optimisation algorithm and definition of the objective function is studied, and the robustness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by validation with both numerical and experimental data.

This paper aims at assessing the impact of a number of behavioral interventions on the willingness of informal businesses, in the Egyptian informal sector, to join the formal sector.

This paper uses an experimental methodology to examine the impact of behavioral interventions on the formalization of the Egyptian informal sector. Specifically, it conducts a survey experiment on a total of 240 informal businesses, operating in the Egyptian informal sector. The primary data collected from the survey experiment is then analyzed using a binary logistic regression to assess the impact of the behavioral primes on the probability of joining the formal market.

The empirical findings of the survey experiment indicate that the biggest obstacle facing informal businesses is finding a formal source of finance that could help them in penetrating the market. Providing informal businesses with information on funding opportunities offered by the ministry of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) significantly increased the probability of joining the formal sector to benefit from this opportunity.

This paper is the first to apply behavioral primes, in the form of informational cues, to the Egyptian case of informal business owners. Previous research on the use of behavioral nudges and primes has focused mainly on the western economies.

The transition from fossil fuel-based energy systems to renewable energy sources, commonly referred to as the energy transition, is essential for combating climate change. However, comprehensive studies that thoroughly examine the financial mechanisms involved in this process are lacking. Despite the availability of various financial tools, there is a notable absence of extensive research that synthesizes and categorizes these mechanisms into broad groups.

A systematic literature review is used to explore a comprehensive framework for financial mechanisms related to the energy transition and their application across six stages of the process.

The framework of financial mechanisms for energy transition encompasses these six factors: public financing mechanisms, private financing mechanisms, market-based mechanisms, innovative financing mechanisms, risk mitigation instruments and institutional support and capacity building.

This is the first study that thoroughly reviewed the financial mechanisms involved in the energy transition process.

This paper aims to provide a full introduction, new classification, comparison and investigation of the challenges as well as applications of layerless 3D printing, which is one of the industry 4.0 pioneers.

Given the significance and novelty of uniform 3D printing, more than 250 publications were collected and reviewed in an unbiased and clear manner.

As a result, the majority of uniform parts printed in polymer form are known up to this point. In a novel division for better researchers’ comprehension, uniform printing systems were classified into three categories: oxygen inhibition (OI), liquid lubrication (LL) and photon penetration (PP), and each was thoroughly investigated. Furthermore, these three approaches were evaluated in terms of printing speed, precision and accuracy, manufacturing scale and cost.

The parameters of each approach were compared independently, and then a practical comparison was conducted among these three approaches. Finally, a variety of technologies, opportunities, challenges and advantages of each significant method, as well as a future outlook for layerless rapid prototyping, are presented.

This paper aims to synthesize a novel series of monoazo disperse dyes based on N-(1-phthalimidyl)-naphthalimides by coupling with substitute anilines, naphthylamines and naphthol derivatives.

The purification of the intermediates and the dyes was carried out by recrystallization. The structures of the synthesized intermediates and the dyes were elucidated by spectroscopic techniques. The absorption maxima, molar extinction coefficient and halochromic properties of the dyes were determined spectrophotometrically using solvents of different polarity.

The dyes were applied on polyester using a high-temperature high-pressure dyeing machine, and the dyeing performance parameters such as colour build-up on fabrics, wash fastness, perspiration fastness and light fastness were evaluated. The colour build-up was found to be very good and the wash fastness (4–5) and perspiration fastness (4–5) were excellent, whereas the light fastness was found to vary from moderate to very good (3–6).

It is not possible to investigate the structure of the synthesized dyes by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopic analysis due to the low solubility of dyes in deuterated solvents.

A novel method for the synthesis of a new category of monoazo disperse dyes based on N-(1-phthalimidyl)-naphthalimides was developed. These dyestuffs could be used in textile printing of polyester fabrics.