This paper presents development of an innovative method for aeroplane system architecture design, based on the principles of causal networks. In light of the environmental crisis that the world faces, it is argued that the new design method should be motivated by sustainability values in the first place. This implies the necessity for a method that is evolvable, as well as for the design artefact to include an awareness of its contribution to dynamics of the higher-level systems within which it is embedded. To that end, the method is based on gradual and iterative development of an initial abstract object which represents relevant system functions over a designated life cycle. The architecture design procedure consists in evolving this abstract object by means of the pre-defined design rules towards a material architectures that satisfies multiple requirements and constraints for multiple actors. The design rules at hand represent a combination of quantitative methods such as first principles of physics and qualitative principles of systems engineering. In complement to system characteristics, rigorous book-keeping of matter and energy interfaces with the object’s surroundings is at the core of the method. To test the developed principles with the elementary method development at hand, a propulsive system architecture case study is elaborated. The case study represents a simple case of a short-medium range engine architecture designed to respond to operating requirements, whose resulting performance is book-kept and evaluated in a much broader context than the operation (in-flight performance), for which engines are commonly preliminary-designed.@en

An overwhelming abundance of innovative civil aeroplane concepts has been presented by the research community in recent decades. Their development has been motivated mainly by need for better operating energy, or in particular the fuel efficiency - the common objective variable for economic and environmental optimisation. This paper focuses on one common conceptual issue with the disruptive concepts which originates in remarkable divergence of the concept space in different directions away from the conventional Tube&Wing paradigm. As a consequence, it becomes increasingly difficult to make a meaningful comparison of any arbitrary pair of concepts by employing the conventional intuitions, definitions, or figures of merit. The objective of the paper is to elaborate a framework that could encompass the entire design space under a common conceptual umbrella. The method we employ relies on systems engineering principles of Function-to-Form mapping. Firstly, a comprehensive review of innovative concepts is provided, with emphasis on the problem of the apparent complexity of the design space arising from the conventional taxonomic intuitions. Then, the descriptive framework is presented, with relevant definitions of function, form and system architecture. First-order application of the framework to the conventional aeroplane design space implies that the Tube&Wing concept family can be represented as roughly one-to-one function-to-form mapping. By analysing the summarised pool of disruptive concepts in the same key, inference is made on existence of an extensive and continuous design space. Furthermore, and argument is presented for existence of the civil-aeroplane performance optimisation trend that aligns with parts of the design space moving away from one-to-one function-to-form mapping. In other words, parts of the design space moving towards the regions in which concepts map as many functions onto as few forms as possible. If extended to the entirety of the life cycle of the system, this framework could reveal even more possibilities for system optimisation, in line with contemporary socio-economic attempts to resolve potentially contradictory requirements and constraints of sustainable growth of the aeronautical industry.@en

Simplifications of the real world affect the validity and reliability of gaming simulations. This challenges the application of gaming simulations as an instrument for experiential learning, reflective practices and data collection. This study investigates the effects of simplification on extracting tacit knowledge from human behavior by answering the research question: Can tacit knowledge in a simplified design of a gaming simulation be transferred without compromising the validity and reliability corresponding to the real-world complexity? By applying a participatory design a gaming simulation is tested as an instrument to extract tacit knowledge. To test and evaluate the validity of this application, simulation sessions have been performed with experts from the field. In simplifying reality, participants' participation emphasized that the most accurate representation of reality is a prerequisite for capturing tacit knowledge. This in turn contributes again to the validity of the simulation design. The results show that simplification of the real world didn't affect participants' perspective on the use of the gaming simulation as an experiential tool to enable learning processes or create awareness. And that a simplified simulation design, is still valid in addressing the real-world complexity, with minimization of the level of abstraction and maximization of the truthfulness.

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This paper presents a simple explanatory framework to analyse the diverse strategies proposed by the civil aviation sector in attempts to reconcile its growth tendencies with its impact on natural environment. Despite framing the industry as a single entity that has a problem to solve, it is better represented as a diverse set of actors, each responsible for various constituent systems at different phases of their respective life cycles. To elucidate this multi-actor pursuit of higher-level emergent objectives, the paper firstly presents an overview of different development scenarios dedicated to guide the industry towards sustainability. Given that the constituent systems tackled in such strategies strongly depend on each other, the sustainability objective relies on reconciling all the different agendas and contributions in unison, making them collectively compatible with the dynamics of the socio-economic and the natural world. To analyse the problem coherently, a basic description of an arbitrary system as a coarse-grained closed causal network is formulated. A categorisation for the model parameters is proposed to help define the system boundary and interaction with the environment unambiguously, dispensing with the need to know details of the model that represents the system at hand. This formalism was previously derived for preliminary sizing and performance estimation of aeroplane engines; by virtue of recursive nature of the coarse-graining process, the same formalism can be used to describe systems at any arbitrary levels, which enables a small system (in the current paper the system of interest being the propulsive system) to be integrated into a multi-level causal dependence framework. Then, the typical industry evolution scenarios are re-framed on the common ground of the causal network formalism. Subsequently, the framework is extended with a simple quantitative energy-based representation to formulate a qualitative case of how the scenarios could be formulated more coherently to avoid conflicting local optimisation objectives in pursuit of common higher-level goals. Finally, the entirety of the presented elements are brought together in a proposal to conceptualise an industrial system as a life cycle which exchanges matter, energy and information with its large-scale environment. The paper argues that such framing of the problem can pave the way to simplification of the problem of conflicting high-level objectives, by enabling a coherent understanding of the mutual dependence between a system of interest and the much more complex system of systems that is the aeronautical industry.@en

The purpose of this paper is the introduction of a participatory systems design method to find solutions for multi-stakeholder challenges. This method, called Participatory Systems Design (PSD), aims to improve collaboration by increasing trust, engagement, and empowerment of people from different organizations and organizational levels, operating in a socio-technical setting. Participants collectively explore the challenges in their relation, define the values related to these challenges and create a continuous process of self- organization to fulfil their mission. In this way, participants increase their ability to communicate, collaborate and improve their performance. The PSD method is problem-oriented and consists of three steps to improve business relations in a business network. Following PSD, stakeholders work together on solving complex issues in business processes, resulting in more trust, engagement, and empowerment and an increased ability to collaborate at all organizational levels. The dynamic alignment of business processes leads to a better business relation, more joint business, cost savings, and sustainable solutions. The preservation business networks share a multi-stakeholder context that correlates with the specifics of a participatory design approach and could benefit from applying the PSD method. The introduction of this method allows to have a closer look at the opportunities and limitations for the application of PSD in preservation networks. This will need further research and this paper is an attempt to initiate an uptake using a well-researched case study in another domain as an important reference.@en

Challenges involving economic, environmental, and societal aspects necessitate organisations in business networks to collaborate. The scientific problem central to this paper is the difficulty of building sustainable collaborations. The research question is how to support organisations in building sustainable collaborations in their business relationships. This paper presents a new socio-technical approach to this end, i.e., PDPS (an acronym for Participatory Design of Participatory Systems) and explores its potential in a case study. PDPS is a value-based approach to the participatory design of participatory systems. Such socio-technical systems enable people working in different disciplines, departments, and organisational levels to create sustainable relationships supported by distributed information and communication technology. In a participatory system, participants gain trust, engagement, and empowerment to self-organise actions that produce results they could not have achieved alone. Following PDPS, participants collectively explore challenges in their relationship, define a joint value-based mission, and create a continuous process of self-organisation to fulfil this mission. In a case study, PDPS supported two Dutch business partners in solving recurring transport and logistics issues in retail store refurbishment projects. Turning their traditional business processes into participatory ones led to new solutions for sustainable transport and logistics, more joint business, and more profit. PDPS differs from other approaches in its involvement of all participants in a business relationship, its focus on shared values, and its capacity for creating a continuous process of self-organisation to fulfil a joint mission. This paper may support researchers, practitioners, and organisational policymakers interested in building sustainable collaborations in business networks.@en

Fast growth of cities decreases the quality of life in these places. In response, Municipalities install policies aiming to improve local livability. While literature suggests social structures to have a defining impact on policy effectiveness, current evaluation metrics are not able to take this into account. This paper presents the Social Neighbourhood model, an agent-based model used to simulate and explore how livability changes in a neighbourhood given various social structures and policies. The model is applied to a neighbourhood in The Hague, Netherlands. The main result of the modelling experiments is that social structures have a very strong influence on whether or not a policy to improve livability is effective. Three hypotheses, concerning this relationship between social structures, livability, and policy interventions are drawn up as a starting point for future research.@en

Identifying the diverse and often competing values of citizens, and resolving the consequent public value conflicts, are of significant importance for inclusive and integrated urban development. Scholars have highlighted that relational, value-laden urban space gives rise to many diverse conflicts that vary both spatially and temporally. Although notions of public value conflicts have been conceived in theory, there are few empirical studies that identify such values and their conflicts in urban space. Building on public value theory and using a case-study mixed-methods approach, this paper proposes a new approach to empirically investigate public value conflicts in urban space. Using unstructured participatory data of 4528 citizen contributions from a Public Participation Geographic Information Systems in Hamburg, Germany, natural language processing and spatial clustering techniques are used to identify areas of potential value conflicts. Four expert interviews assess and interpret these quantitative findings. By integrating quantitative assessments with the qualitative findings of the interviews, we identify 19 general public values and nine archetypical conflicts. On the basis of these results, this paper proposes a new conceptual model of ‘Public Value Spheres’ that extends the understanding of public value conflicts and helps to further account for the value-laden nature of urban space.@en

Qualitative research is a powerful means to capture human interactions and behavior. Although there are different methodologies to develop models based on qualitative research, a methodology is missing that enables to strike a balance between the comparability across cases provided by methodologies that rely on a common and context-independent framework and the flexibility to study any policy problem provided by methodologies that focus on capturing a case study without relying on a common framework. Additionally, a rigorous methodology is missing that enables the development of both theoretical and empirical models for supporting policy formulation and evaluation with respect to a specific policy problem. In this article, the authors propose a methodology targeting these gaps for ABMs in two stages. First, a novel conceptual framework centered on a particular policy problem is developed based on existing theories and qualitative insights from one or more case studies. Second, empirical or theoretical ABMs are developed based on the conceptual framework and generic models. This methodology is illustrated by an example application for disaster information management in Jakarta, resulting in an empirical descriptive agent-based model.

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“How does culture, in combination with cues, settings and affiliation, influence response-phase behaviour and time and total evacuation time?”. A questionnaire and an agent-based model for a case study of a library evacuation in Czech Republic, Poland, Turkey and the UK have been developed to answer this question. Our questionnaire, conducted among 442 respondents (N = 105 from Czech Republic, N = 106 from Poland, N = 106 from Turkey and N = 125 from the United Kingdom), shows significant differences in the number of performed response tasks per culture - whereby Turkish respondents perform the most response tasks and British the least - and the results were directly implemented in our agent-based model. Simulation results show: (1) these differences - in combination with emergent effects for task choice and agent interactions - directly translate into the average response and evacuation times being highest for Turkey, followed by Poland, Czech Republic, and the UK, (2) cues, setting and affiliation influence response and evacuation time - such as being informed by staff giving a negative correlation and evacuating in groups a positive correlation with response time -, while the magnitude of these effects differ per culture. Our results suggest that faster response times might be related to dimensions of national culture, such as weak uncertainty avoidance and high individualism.@en

Governance through self-organisation in which participation is essential has been acknowledged to be important to enable farmer organisations to perform their roles in a sustainable manner. This paper focuses on empowering farmer organisations in developing countries to self-organise their governance to deal with encountered challenges. To this purpose, a co-creation approach was implemented with a group of farmer groups located in a horticultural production centre in Indonesia. In multiple co-creation sessions organised over time, the need for a new form of governance was identified, solutions proposed, (partially) implemented, evaluated and adapted. The results show that: 1) through co-creation, farmer organisations in developing countries can be empowered to self-organise; 2) self-organisation facilitates farmer organisations to learn to adapt to change; 3) self-organisation increases the commitment of farmer members; and 4) decentralised governance is a promising solution for growing farmer organisations.

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Bioregenerative life support systems (BLSS) are vital for long-duration and remote space missions to increase mission sustainability. These systems break down human waste materials into nutrients and CO2 for plants and other edible organisms, which in turn provide food, fresh water, and oxygen for astronauts. The central idea is to create a materially closed loop, which can significantly reduce mission mass and volume by cutting down or even eliminating disposable waste. In most BLSS studies only a fraction of the resources, such as food, are provided by the system itself, with the rest taken on board at departure or provided through resupply missions. However, for autonomous long-duration space missions without any possibility of resupply, a BLSS that generates all resources with minimal or no material loss, is essential. The goal of this study is to develop a stoichiometric model of a conceptually fully closed BLSS that provides all the metabolic needs of the crew and organisms. The MELiSSA concept of the European Space Agency is used as reference system, consisting of five interconnected compartments, each inhabited by different types of organisms. A detailed review of publicly available MELiSSA literature from 1989 to 2022 revealed that no existing stoichiometric model met the study’s requirements. Therefore, a new stoichiometric model was developed to describe the cycling of the elements C, H, O, and N through all five MELiSSA compartments and one auxiliary compartment. A compact set of chemical equations with fixed coefficients was established for this purpose. A spreadsheet model simulates the flow of all relevant compounds for a crew of six. By balancing the dimensions of the different compartments, a high degree of closure is attained at steady state, with 12 out of 14 compounds exhibiting zero loss, and oxygen and CO2 displaying only minor losses between iterations. This is the first stoichiometric model of a MELiSSA-inspired BLSS that describes a continuous provision of 100% of the food and oxygen needs of the crew. The stoichiometry serves as the foundation of an agent-based model of the MELiSSA loop, as part of the Evolving Asteroid Starships (E|A|S) research project.@en

As higher education digitalises, institutions increasingly outsource the development and management of their digital infrastructure including server hardware and services such as email, shared storage, and video conferencing, to private companies. This outsourcing trend is a change in paradigm, since universities have historically been pioneers in deploying and maintaining their own digital infrastructure, a practice also known as self-hosting. Digital infrastructure has a key role in all of a university’s functions: administration, research, and education. While outsourcing infrastructure has benefits in the form of convenience and lower costs, it also erodes institutional independence, centralises points of failure, and dele- gates highly relevant value choices about privacy, data ownership and environmental impact to external actors. In this article, we provide a first quantification of a potential return to self-hosting, emphasising its effect in energy reduction and avoided e-waste. We then outline some policy actions that could enable higher education institutions to re-take control over their digital infrastructure by building local services. This mode of operation reduces waste, and has the added benefit of increased resilience to scenarios of resource scarcity and collapse of external infrastructure. As an example of what could be achieved leveraging these policies, we detail the architecture of a low-impact data centre made of upcycled hardware and resource-aware software. By exploring our main structural choices we aim to showcase how, even starting from a generally heavy-weight software stack such as Kubernetes, there is significant space to reduce digital infrastructure’s overall resource footprint. @en

COVID-19 has urged researchers to explore new options for distributed participatory design, as physical meetings and workshops became unfeasible. This situation posed new challenges but also opportunities, in particular with respect to engagement and inclusion. This paper focuses on distributed PD with Irish teenagers to support place-making during this period: to build relationships with each other and the community. In a two-week online summer school, teenagers explored a concern or highlighted a unique aspect of their local community and designed digital artworks in response. Activities and materials were designed to support reflection, empowerment, inclusiveness, emergence, and playfulness for participatory place-making. Analysis of the summer school provides insights and guidance on the design of online PD for engaging experiences, especially in the context of place-making.@en

Agent-based models (ABM) for policy design need to be grounded in empirical data. While many ABMs rely on quantitative data such as surveys, much empirical research in the social sciences is based on qualitative research methods such as interviews or observations that are hard to translate into a set of quantitative rules, leading to a gap in the phenomena that ABM can explain. As such, there is a lack of a clear methodology to systematically develop ABMs for policy design on the basis of qualitative empirical research. In this paper, a two-stage methodology is proposed that takes an exploratory approach to the development of ABMs in socio-technical systems based on qualitative data. First, a conceptual framework centered on a particular policy design problem is developed based on empirical insights from one or more case studies. Second, the framework is used to guide the development of an ABM. This step is sensitive to the purpose of the model, which can be theoretical or empirical. The proposed methodology is illustrated by an application for disaster information management in Jakarta, resulting in an empirical descriptive ABM.@en

Background: Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) refers to extreme, uncontrollable, and persistent worry and anxiety. The disorder is known to affect the social functioning and well-being of millions of people, but despite its prevalence and burden to society, it has proven difficult to identify unique behavioral markers. Interestingly, the worrying behavior observed in GAD is argued to stem from a verbal linguistic process. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate if GAD can be predicted from the language people use to put their anxious worries into words. Given the importance of avoidance sensitivity (a higher likelihood to respond anxiously to novel or unexpected triggers) in GAD, this study also explored if prediction accuracy increases when individual differences in behavioral avoidance and approach sensitivity are taken into account.

Method: An expressive writing exercise was used to explore whether GAD can be predicted from linguistic characteristics of written narratives. Specifically, 144 undergraduate student participants were asked to recall an anxious experience during their university life, and describe this experience in written form. Clinically validated behavioral measures for GAD and self-reported sensitivity in behavioral avoidance/inhibition (BIS) and behavioral approach (BAS), were collected. A set of classification experiments was performed to evaluate GAD predictability based on linguistic features, BIS/BAS scores, and a concatenation of the two.

Results: The classification results show that GAD can, indeed, be successfully predicted from anxiety-focused written narratives. Prediction accuracy increased when differences in BIS and BAS were included, which suggests that, under those conditions, negatively valenced emotion words and words relating to social processes could be sufficient for recognition of GAD.

Conclusions: Undergraduate students with a high GAD score can be identified based on their written recollection of an anxious experience during university life. This insight is an important first step toward development of text-based digital health applications and technologies aimed at remote screening for GAD. Future work should investigate the extent to which these results uniquely apply to university campus populations or generalize to other demographics.@en

Location-based games (LBGs) are becoming increasingly more popular, especially those that focus on social interaction in public space. They have been successful to various extents at bringing players together to interact in public space; yet there is lack of knowledge and consensus on how to design these games from a technical perspective. This paper proposes a software architecture that stems from a cross-game analysis of representative games of this genre, in which 6 core architectural components are identified: Augmentation, Navigation, Interaction, State Progression, Participation, and Administration. These components support the game experience of players by enabling orientation and navigation of the players’ own physical environment, their interaction with the game and other people, the traditional game-like experience, management of the entire game ecosystem, and the ability to allow players to fuel game play. An LBG prototype, Secrets of the South, is presented as proof of concept for this software architecture and its key components. This prototype shows that the identified components are pivotal to the gameplay of LBGs for natural interactions in public space and shows how practitioners can be guided in their preparation whilst maintaining their freedom to technically implement this architecture according to the given structure.@en

Location-based games invite players to have new forms of meaningful social interactions with others and provide opportunities for players to engage with their own neighbourhood’s public space. Earlier research on user requirements for such games have identified seven different activity types that have proven to initiate social interaction and capture real life exchanges for meaningful play-based social experiences. Yet, current understanding on what makes these games successful in such endeavours is still insufficient. This study furthers current understanding on the effects of location-based games for social interaction in local communities: it studies the forms of social interaction that the previously identified seven types of game activities elicit by analysing the nature and types of the exchanges they trigger. Based on this analysis, a design framework is proposed to 1) analyse existing location-based games and describe the forms of social interaction they trigger, and 2) help practitioners design new game activities that target specific forms of social interaction. This contributes to the enhancement of current understanding on the impact that these games can have in local communities, and on the way they can be better designed and used to promote social exchanges that are desired by players.@en

A prominent pathway for the aeronautical industry to meet contemporary challenges is to explore overall vehicular efficiency gains enabled by various functional and structural distributions and/or synergies between onboard systems. To that end, this paper combines analytical first-principle-based methods and principles of systems engineering and focuses on the Environmental Control System (ECS). The objective is to develop means for simple blank-sheet design of complete system architectures, which would help unlock potentially obscured parts of the system design space. Basic thermodynamics is employed, complemented with “Function-Behaviour-Structure-Experience” systems engineering framework. The method presented in the paper enables users to initialise the design from a primitive abstract system architecture described by elementary physical processes, and then carry out a sequence of decisions and design material systems architecture, i.e. concepts that respond to the system requirements. The preliminary results present development of architectures representative both of traditional pneumatic and innovative electrical ECS concepts. Energy consumption figures of merit (thermodynamic efficiency, exergy destruction rate) are used as guidelines during the design i.e. for a given flight condition, the designer can assess the influence of each choice on the overall system energy consumption. Trade-offs between architectural design choices and figures of merit are thus rendered transparent in preliminary architecture design. In this paper the figures of merit are based on thermodynamic energy efficiency; in perspectives the method can include other constraints such as e.g. weight, volume, cost, or other, with long-term objective of enabling a comprehensive multi-disciplinary multi-system aeroplane architecture design scheme.@en

This paper studies how residents in the neighbourhood Bospolder-Tussendijken (BoTu) have dealt with the COVID-19 restrictions. Prior to the pandemic, significant investments in community-building were made to increase resilience of individuals and communities in BoTu. This paper identifies the key assets BoTu residents had developed and actually during this ultimate challenge. Interviews with formal and informal actors in BoTu revealed that community leadership, engaged governance, problem-solving ability, and information sharing environment were essential to adequately respond to the crisis, and were successfully deployed. The paper concludes with five policy implications to help strengthen capacities and relationships needed for community resilience.@en