Suchergebnisse

Energy security has become a worldwide issue in recent years. Coal resources security (CRS), an important part of energy security, has been an emerging concern in many countries, due to the diminishing fossil energy reserve and unbalanced energy structure. However, there is no universally agreed method of constructing indicator system for CRS assessment. Subjectivity in the process of evaluation also affects the results of assessment. Moreover, CRS is a complex system that should be evaluated scientifically under diverse methods. Therefore, we constructed an indicator system and evaluation model of CRS and used a case study of China and 31 provinces in its mainland to evaluate CRS at both national and provincial levels. The indicator system included two subsystems&mdash ; long-term CRS and short-term CRS. We also chose a few elements and factors that are consistent with China&rsquo ; s reality. Different research methods were used: the entropy-weight-based TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution) method is applied to evaluate the degree of CRS, which avoids the subjectivity of weight determination and reflects the relative merit of each indicator ; the BP (Back-Propagation) Neural Network method is used to analyze the sensitivity of CRS to each index. The results show that the national level of CRS dropped in the early years but slowly picked up with the help of government intervention. Investment in coal industry development resulted in the immediate effect of improving CRS. The positive impact of maintaining environmental sustainability is stable over either the short, medium, or long term. The degrees of CRS vary significantly across provinces, even between those with similar coal stock levels. Extra attention should be paid to the transportation of coal resources among provinces and intervention to balance supply and demand within the regions.

[EN] Environmental conflict analysis (henceforth ECA) has become a key factor for the viability of projects and welfare of affected populations. In this study, we propose an approach for ECA using an integrated grey clustering and entropy-weight method (The IGCEW method). The case study considered a mining project in northern Peru. Three stakeholder groups and seven criteria were identified. The data were gathered by conducting field interviews. The results revealed that for the groups urban population, rural population and specialists, the project would have a positive, negative and normal social impact, respectively. We also noted that the criteria most likely to generate environmental conflicts in order of importance were: access to drinking water, poverty, GDP per capita and employment. These results could help regional and central governments to seek appropriate measures to prevent environmental conflicts. The proposed method showed practical results and a potential for application to other types of projects. ; Delgado-Villanueva, KA.; Romero Gil, I. (2016). Environmental conflict analysis using an integrated grey clustering and entropy-weight method: A case study of a mining project in Peru. Environmental Modelling & Software. 77:108-121. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2015.12.011 ; S ; 108 ; 121 ; 77

Implementing policy and forming socioeconomic conditions that support sustainable and equable growth of regions is currently an important objective both at European and national level. Regional development policy is supported by significant resources from European Union funds. As a result, a constant monitoring of the development process at regional level with application of quantitative methods is an important scientific and practical task. Thus, the aim of the article is to assess the level of economic development in Poland at the voivodeships level (NUTS 2). Economic development is considered here as a multiple-criteria phenomenon. In the case of multiple-criteria analysis a common dilemma is attributed to the problem of applying appropriate weights for variables used in the research. Therefore, in order to provide a rating of voivodeships a taxonomic measure of development with entropy weights was applied here. The research was conducted for the years 2010-2014. It was based on the data provided by Central Statistical Office of Poland. The results of the analysis confirm that in spite of a progress obtained by all voivodeships significant disparities between them are still present.

Disclosure of sustainability information is important for stockholders and governments. In order to evaluate the quality of sustainability information disclosure in heavily polluting industries, the quality of the disclosure is proposed to be evaluated from completeness, adequacy, relevance, reliability, normativeness and clarity aspects. The corresponding evaluation indicator system is constructed. Due to the ambiguity and complexity of the evaluation information, the intuitionistic fuzzy sets are applied to model the linguistic ratings. Entropy is used to derive the weight of experts, the object weight and the subject weight of the indicators. which are integrated when dealing with the evaluation information. The quality of sustainability information disclosure of seven representative companies in heavily polluting industries is evaluated. The importance of indicators and ranking of the companies are derived. Based on the evaluation results, the discussion and suggestions are also provided.

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1548512919850380 ; This article compares the entropy weight scheme to other subjective weighting schemes using various multi-attribute decision making criteria. We apply the entropy weighting scheme to improve the CARVER center of gravity analysis and targeting analysis that are currently used by Special Operations Forces. We also compare the entropy weighing schemes to other weighting schemes using the ranking of terrorist for targeting. Next, we apply several multi-attribute decision making (MADM) methods using our suggested various weighting schemes to obtain the rankings of the alternatives. We compare the results and provide sensitivity analysis to examine the robustness of each MADM analysis. We conclude that any decision methodology for CARVER and terrorist ranking that used the actual data collected to compute the weights might be a better method than subjective weights.

Guided by CALPHAD modeling, low-density and multiphase three novel High Entropy Alloys (HEAs), Al40Cu15Cr15Fe15Si15, Al65Cu5Cr5Si15Mn5Ti5 and Al60Cu10Fe10Cr5Mn5Ni5Mg5 were produced by large scale vacuum die casting. A mixture of simple and complex phases was observed in the as-cast microstructures, which demonstrates good agreement with CALPHAD results. The measured densities varied from 3.7 g/cm3 to 4.6 g/cm3 and microhardness from 743 Hv to 916 Hv. Finally, the hardness of all the light-weight HEAs (LWHEAs) with densities below 4.6 g/cm3 manufactured to date were reviewed. The hardness of Al40Cu15Cr15Fe15Si15 and hardness to density ratio of Al65Cu5Cr5Si15Mn5Ti5 are the highest of all LWHEAs reported up to date. ; This work has been partially funded by the Basque government through the Project Elkartek: KK-2017/00007