Rural Development is a priority in Europe and it is supported by specific, financial programmes. At the same time, sustainability is the key word for the European Union to construct programmes and policies for all human activities. However, measuring sustainability of rural areas is not easy, due to their particular features. The improvement of knowledge on sustainability in rural areas is impo...

Building construction challenge, in recent years, is the reduction of social, economical and environmentalimpacts along with economical nature and increasing life quality, as here sustainable construction is important. Pre-fabrication and industrialization are referred as a solution of sustainable construction due to some of its main characteristics consisting of many sustainability aspects. Du...

The challenges of how to respond to climate change and ensure sustainable development are currently high on the political agenda among the world’s leading nations. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is part of the global carbon market developing rapidly as part of the Kyoto response towards mitigation of global warming. One of the aims of the CDM is to achieve sustainable development in deve...

Global mental health (GMH) is a growing domain with an increasing capacity to positively impact the world community's efforts for sustainable development and wellbeing. Sharing and synthesizing GMH and multi-sectoral knowledge, the focus of this paper, is an important way to support these global efforts. This paper consolidates some of the most recent and relevant 'context resources' [global mu...

An untraditional multi-objective programming approach, called as fuzzy game multi-objective optimization model (FGMOM), is illustrated to discuss suitability and significances in the problems of sustainable watershed management. FGMOM is developed based on the combination of fuzzy set theory, game theory and traditional multi-objective programming. The model is implemented to support decision m...

Design and operation of chemical plants involves a combination of synthesis, analysis and evaluation of alternatives. Suchactivitieshave traditionallybeendrivenbyeconomic factorsfirst, followedbyengineering, safety and environmental considerations. Recently, chemical companies have embraced the concept of sustainable development, entailing renewable feedmaterials and energy, non-toxic and biode...

Process planning is an activity for designers to evaluate manufacturability and manufacturing cost in the early design stage of mechanical parts production where important parameters that affect the machining process should be analyzed in detail. This paper deals with the systematic determination of the detailed methods involved in the manufacturing of parts from raw materials to a finished pro...

Increasing environmental concerns together with legislations are forcing industries to take a fresh look at the impact of their supply chain operations on the environment. This paper introduces a mixed-integer linear programming based framework for sustainable supply chain design that considers life cycle assessment (LCA) principles in addition to the traditional material balance constraints at...

In this work, we present a hybrid infrastructure, named NECADA, which supports the execution of a detailed simulation model representing all building processes on a supercomputer, cloud, cluster of computers or desktop environments. The aim of this infrastructure is to find optimal values for various building parameters and the associated impacts to reduce the energy demand or consumption of th...

Due to the complex and changing global trade environment intensification of economic conflicts, enterprises have become more cautious about development [...]