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The purpose of this paper is to inquiry dietary behavior and the physical and mental health status of food pantry users to better understand issues related to food insecurity and to explore predictors of intentions for self-sufficiency.

The authors randomly surveyed 12 food pantries (151 consumers) sponsored by the North Texas Food Bank in USA, regarding dietary behavior, health status, reasons for food pantry use, satisfaction with services provided, and self-sufficient behavior and support.

About 37 percent of survey participants would expect to continue using food pantry services for one or more years. Reasons for food pantry use included low job earnings, unemployment, poor health, and disability. Over 83 percent of them were either overweight or obese, and over half (57 percent) of them had moderate or severe mental disorder symptoms that warrant examination by healthcare practitioners. On average, their health-related quality of life was lower than the general population. Participants’ physical health was significantly correlated with work intention. The hierarchical regression model predicting work intention had a large effect size.

This research has highlighted the importance of improving food pantry consumers’ health and self-sufficiency in order to live sufficiently and healthily.

Community health practitioners need to help food banks address the needs beyond hunger to focus on the larger ramification of food insecurity such as self-sufficiency and health-related quality of life.

This work extends the existing studies focused on food insecurity, and it will enable the collaborations among food banks, social workers, vocational rehabilitation counselors, and public health practitioners.

Flexibility and efficiency are dual attributes of the organizational structure that are crucial for project-driven enterprises to achieve sustainable development in a dynamic environment. However, there is a lack of research on the patterns by which the dual attributes of a project-driven enterprise’s organizational structure affect business model innovation. Employing organizational theory, this study aims to assess the mediating mechanisms and dynamic capabilities through which the dual attributes of the organizational structure influence business model innovation in project-driven enterprises.

Data were collected from 242 employees from four project-driven companies across 26 cities (e.g. Beijing, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shenzhen) in China. Structural equation modeling revealed the relationship between organizational structure’s dual attributes and business model innovation.

The findings show that the dual attributes (flexibility and efficiency) of the organizational structure have positive impacts on business model innovation. Moreover, dynamic capabilities mediate the relationship between the dual attributes and business model innovation in project-driven enterprises.

This study provides contributions to innovation research in the context of project-driven enterprises by revealing the influence of organizational structure on business model innovation through the firms’ dynamic capabilities. Such knowledge can enable managers of project-driven enterprises to develop effective interventions to promote business model innovation.

Modern subway transportation systems need to satisfy increasing safety demands to rapidly evacuate passengers under hazardous emergency circumstances, such as fires, accidents or terrorist attacks, to reduce passenger injuries or life losses. The emergency evacuation capacity (EEC) of a subway station needs to be revised timely, in case passenger demand increases or the evacuation route changes in the future. However, traditional ways of estimating EEC, e.g. fire drills are time- and resource-consuming and are difficult to revise from time to time. The purpose of this study is to establish an intuitive modelling approach to increase the EEC of subway stations in a stepwised manner.

This study develops an approach to combine agent-based evacuation modelling and building information modelling (BIM) technology to estimate the total evacuation time of a subway station.

Evacuation time can be saved (33% in the studied case) from iterative improvements including stopping escalators running against the evacuation flow and modifying the geometry around escalator exits. Such iterative improvements rely on integrating agent-based modelling and BIM.

The agent-based model can provide a more realistic simulation of intelligent individual movements under emergency circumstances and provides precise feedback on locations of evacuation bottlenecks. This study also examined the effectiveness of two rounds of stepwise improvements in terms of operation or design to increase the EEC of the station.