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Entwicklung eines Augmented-Reality-Prototyps zur Optimierung der Instandhaltung von Wechselbrücken
No full textZusammenfassung
Die Digitalisierung nimmt in der Domäne des Güterkraftverkehrs immer weiter Einzug. Im Instandhaltungsmanagement von Transportflotten ist die regelmäßige Prüfung des Zustands von Wechselbrücken jedoch bisher noch eine weitestgehend manuelle Tätigkeit, bei der die Dokumentation der Ergebnisse einen signifikanten Teil der Zeit in Anspruch nimmt. Dieser Beitrag zeigt durch eine praxisnahe Prototypentwicklung auf, wie erfahrene Monteurinnen und Monteure durch eine Augmented-Reality-basierte Anwendung bei der Dokumentation der Prüfergebnisse von Wechselbrücken digital unterstützt werden können. Gegenüber des bisherigen Vorgehens, die Prüfpunkte erst am Ende der Prüfung im Prüfprotokoll zu bestätigen, bietet die Augmented-Reality-Anwendung eine schrittweise Dokumentation bereits während der Arbeitsausführung. Für die Entwicklung werden zunächst praxisnah Anforderungen erhoben, die durch Fachpersonal validiert und in eine AR-basierte Anwendung überführt werden. Anhand eines Usability-Tests werden die entwickelten Funktionen und AR-Inhalte anschließend evaluiert. Um das Potenzial für eine Operationalisierung der Erkenntnisse darzulegen, werden die Ergebnisse im Einzelnen diskutiert und es werden Implikationen für die zukünftige Umsetzung verwandter Artefakte gegeben. @Digitalization is becoming increasingly prevalent in the road freight transport. In the maintenance management of transport fleets, however, the regular inspection of the condition of swap bodies is still largely a manual activity in which the documentation of the results takes up a significant amount of time. This article uses a practical prototype development to show how experienced fitters can be digitally supported in documenting the inspection results of swap bodies using an augmented reality-based application. In contrast to the previous procedure of only confirming the inspection points in the inspection report at the end of the inspection, the augmented reality application offers step-by-step documentation during the execution of the work. For the development, practical requirements are first collected, validated by specialists and transferred to an AR-based application. The developed functions and AR content are then evaluated using a usability test. In order to demonstrate the potential for operationalizing the findings, the results are discussed in detail and implications are given for the future implementation of related artefacts
Climate-smart agriculture adoption and technical efficiency of smallholder farms in Northern Togo
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Climate-smart agriculture is heralded for enhancing productivity and combating climate change. It has been purported that the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices and technologies (CSAPT) remains limited, with various reasons. A key challenge in the existing literature is conflating traditional CSAPT, such as intercropping, with innovative CSAPT, like improved seeds, obscuring critical distinctions. Recognizing that CSAPT adoption is highly context-specific, especially in regions like Northern Togo with unique agro-ecological and socio-economic challenges, this study analyzed farm production efficiency under traditional and innovative CSAPT. Using data from over 500 households in Togo’s Kozah prefecture, farmers were categorized into those who adopted only traditional CSAPT and those combining traditional and innovative CSAPT. A binary probit model identified adoption determinants, while stochastic frontier analysis evaluated farmers’ technical efficiency. The findings indicate that most farmers continue to rely only on traditional CSAPT. Probit analysis indicates that factors like gender, land tenure, farm size, organization membership, and dry spell exposure influence the likelihood of adopting traditional and innovative CSAPT. Farmers combining traditional and innovative CSAPT had higher efficiency than those using only traditional methods. These findings have important policy implications. They emphasize the need for agricultural policies that reduce barriers to adopting innovative CSAPT. Policies should ensure land access for women, empower farmer organizations to spread technology, and develop localized climate-resilience strategies. These initiatives can increase the adoption of efficiency practices, boosting agricultural productivity and food security amid climate change
Geographical Knowledge: A Catalyst for Reconfiguring Global Production Networks?
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This paper explores how geographical knowledge can foster the reconfiguration of global production networks (GPNs), particularly in agri‐food sectors reliant on Global South commodities like cocoa. These networks often reflect colonial‐era patterns, where raw materials are sourced in the Global South, yet value‐added processing occurs in the Global North. For the first time, this study examines Fairafric, a German company financed by crowdfunding, with a chocolate factory in Ghana, as a case of how geographical knowledge can reconfigure production networks. Using the GPN framework and applying a mixed‐methods approach, including qualitative interviews and a farmer survey, the findings indicate that geographical knowledge enhances customer support for products manufactured closer to the source of raw material, catalysing local development and employment in rural Ghana. This shift promotes ethical consumption, investment and value capture in producing regions but also reveals structural and regulatory global production network challenges that could limit wider transformation
Green signals of new ventures: investigating the impact of environmental orientation on funding and the moderating role of lead venture capitalists
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Drawing on signaling theory, this study investigates whether the environmental orientation of new ventures serves as an important signal related to funding outcomes. Analyzing a dataset of 2003 funding rounds completed in the U.S. during 2022, our findings reveal that the environmental orientation of a new venture positively influences pre-IPO funding outcomes. Furthermore, this effect is positively moderated by the prominence of lead venture capital investors. Our post hoc analysis offers a valuable temporal perspective and suggests that our findings generalize across both early-stage and late-stage funding rounds, but not seed funding. This study contributes to the literature on financial resource acquisition and signaling theory, and also offers valuable implications for practitioners, helping them navigate the competitive funding environment more effectively.L26;G24;M13;Q5
Process Improvement Copilot: bridging the gap between process inefficiencies and process improvement ideas
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Business process improvement (BPI) is a crucial value-adding stage of business process management, as it introduces process changes to eliminate flaws and enhance performance. However, the inherent demands of BPI on domain knowledge, process expertise, time, and creativity in conjunction with a scarcity of adequate computational support, hinder organizations from fully leveraging BPI. Recognizing this gap, recent research calls for all types of contributions to process improvement and innovation systems (PIISs), from design knowledge to software artifacts. Leveraging the latest developments in generative artificial intelligence, increased availability of process execution data, and extensive collections of BPI knowledge, we propose a new technical approach to supporting the generation of process improvement ideas in BPI initiatives. To this end, we develop the Process Improvement Copilot – a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-enhanced PIIS that generates context-specific process improvement ideas and provides related justification, thereby facilitating their further evaluation and implementation. This research contributes a novel technical approach to automated BPI by exploring a RAG-based use case, designing a corresponding system architecture, developing a software prototype to demonstrate its technical feasibility, and evaluating the Process Improvement Copilot’s usefulness in a naturalistic workshop setting
PALSYN: a method for synthetic multi-perspective event log generation with differential private guarantees
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The increasing reliance on data-driven technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Process Mining has transformed various sectors. Yet, access to real-world data is often restricted by privacy concerns. Synthetic data offers a promising solution by enabling secure data sharing while preserving key characteristics for analysis. This paper introduces the Private Autoregressive Log Synthesizer (PALSYN), a novel approach for generating synthetic event logs with differential privacy guarantees. It employs advanced deep learning techniques to capture the complexity of event data while ensuring privacy. In contrast to existing methods, PALSYN can synthesize private multi-perspective event logs. The evaluation demonstrates the approach’s ability to generate synthetic event logs that closely resemble the original data across key metrics. However, the results highlight the inherent privacy-utility trade-off, with stricter privacy settings introducing noise that strongly impacts utility. By enabling the generation of synthetic event logs with formal privacy guarantees, PALSYN demonstrates significant potential for securely sharing event data in privacy-sensitive domains
Lessons from the EU Effort Sharing Decision for Supranational Climate Cooperation: A Firm-Level Analysis
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As an example of supranational climate policy coordination for sectors not covered by carbon trading, the European Effort Sharing Decision set national targets for emission reductions for the time period 2013–2020. Member States were free to decide the national policies to implement to achieve these objectives. This is the first quantification of the impact this regulation had on the emissions of firms in the corresponding sectors. We exploit the differences along three variables: a national-level treatment intensity, an exposure index defined at the firm level and a time dimension (before or after the introduction of the policy). We find that, even in countries with no stringent target, emissions from exposed firms tended to decrease more than emissions from non-exposed firms. In addition, each percentage point increase in the stringency of the treatment leads to a 5.7% reduction in emissions for an average exposed firm. This provides interesting insights for other supranational climate agreements.D22;F53;L51;Q54;Q5
Industrielle Transformationsinfrastrukturen: Ein methodischer Ansatz mit kleinräumiger Perspektive
No full textDeutschlands industrielle Transformation folgt einem klaren Ziel: Bis 2045 sollen Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft klimaneutral sein. Der Weg dorthin hat längst begonnen, aber sowohl die Unternehmen als auch die Bevölkerung haben auf diesem Pfad noch einen weiten Weg vor sich. Dies gilt insbesondere in einem industrialisierten Bundesland wie Nordrhein-Westfalen, wo vielfach tiefgreifende Veränderungen von Produktionsprozessen, Infrastrukturen und Wertschöpfungsketten umgesetzt werden. Dabei verläuft dieser Wandel nicht überall gleichförmig, sondern konzentriert sich räumlich: Einige Regionen eignen sich besser zum dringend notwendigen Ausbau der erneuerbaren Energien, in anderen Regionen müssen bestehende Industrieanlagen umgebaut werden, und nicht zuletzt braucht es Infrastrukturen zum Transport neuer Energie- und Stoffströme. Vor diesem Hintergrund stellt sich die Frage: In welchen Regionen treten die Veränderungen in Zukunft besonders intensiv auf? Wo liegen die Schlüsselregionen der industriellen Transformationinfrastrukturen? Um diese Fragen datenbasiert und systematisch zu beantworten, wurde ein Transformationsinfrastrukturindex entwickelt. Dieser Index dient ebenso dazu, die Schlüsselregionen der industriellen Transformationsinfrastrukturen, also Räume, in denen die Veränderungen besonders intensiv auftreten werden, zu identifizieren, wie auch Regionen mit geringerer Infrastrukturrelevanz sichtbar zu machen. Der Index bildet die räumliche Infrastrukturrelevanz nicht nur anhand von Emissionen oder Branchenschwerpunkten ab, sondern berücksichtigt gezielt die infrastrukturellen und technologischen Anforderungen der Dekarbonisierung [...
Social Cohesion: A New Definition and a Proposal for Its Measurement in Africa
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Social cohesion is crucial to increasing societies’ resilience to shocks and to enabling sustainable futures. Amidst growing tensions and polarization in all world regions, social cohesion ranks high on the agendas of researchers, decision-makers and international organizations. Despite the strong interest in the topic, there are major constraints to understanding its patterns, causes and effects: the lack of a common conceptualization and measurement of social cohesion. This paper contributes to filling these research gaps in three ways. First, it provides a narrow and operationalizable definition of social cohesion, which is well rooted in the long-standing literature in the social sciences and travels across world regions. According to this definition, social cohesion encompasses three main attributes: inclusive identity, trust and cooperation for the common good. All these attributes operate in a horizontal and a vertical dimension. Second, it proposes a measurement of social cohesion in Africa, relaying on household data from the Afrobarometer surveys and expert data from the V-Dem database. Third, it applies our indicators and provides empirical evidence that social cohesion varies across countries and within countries over time, and shows that overall social cohesion cannot be reduced to just one of such indicators. Our empirical analyses do not only mark the presence of four different constellations of social cohesion in Africa but the overall approach we take provides a first step towards measuring social cohesion at the global level
Digital financial services use and life satisfaction: Is financial well‐being a mediator?
Full text linkAs digital financial services (DFS) become increasingly important in personal financial management, understanding their implications for individual well‐being is critical. Although prior research has focused on financial inclusion and digital finance access, less is known about the mechanisms through which DFS influence broader well‐being outcomes. This study examines the relationship between DFS use, financial well‐being, and life satisfaction, with financial well‐being conceptualized as a mediating factor. Data were drawn from a sample of 1552 Korean adults aged 25–59 who completed an online survey and provided valid responses for analysis. Financial well‐being was assessed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's financial well‐being scale, and life satisfaction was measured using Cantril's ladder and the feeling thermometer. Mediation analyses reveal that DFS use is positively associated with financial well‐being, which in turn significantly influences life satisfaction. Importantly, the relationship between DFS use and life satisfaction is fully mediated by financial well‐being, with no significant direct effect once financial well‐being is accounted for. This mediation pathway is driven primarily by transactional DFS—such as mobile banking, payments, and credit card management—rather than investment‐oriented DFS. These findings suggest that the well‐being benefits of DFS arise from the ways digital services enable individuals to manage routine financial matters more effectively. This study highlights the importance of designing inclusive DFS platforms that enhance financial well‐being as a pathway to improving life satisfaction