Industry throughout the world is faced with a common problem that of the disposal of waste materials from manufacturing processes. In the case of the dairy industry, one such 'waste' which is produced in enormous quantities is the whey resulting from cheese and casein manufacture. In the 1996/97 season alone it is estimated that around five billion litres of whey were produced in New Zealand. I...

Iron occurs mainly as oxide ores, though it is also found in smaller quantities as its sulfide and carbonate. These other ores are usually first roasted to convert them into the oxide. On a world scale the most important ore is haematite (Fe2O3), but in New Zealand the starting materials are magnetite (Fe3O4) and titanomagnetite (Fe2TiO4). The oxides are reduced with carbon from coal, through t...

Crop straw gasification technologies are the most promising biomass gasification technologies and have great potential to be further developed in China. However, the commercialization development of gasification technology in China is slow. In this paper, the technical reliability and practicability of crop straw gasification technologies, the economic feasibility of gas supply stations, the ec...

8 AI MAGAZINE One of the central challenges in computational sustainability is how to allocate resources in order to optimize long-term objectives. An archetypal application is conservation planning: managers recommend patches of land in order to achieve long-term conservation of biodiversity. In this and similar applications, we typically have to make decisions over time: financial resources (...

In this paper we introduce a class of Markov decision processes that arise as a natural model for many renewable resource allocation problems. Upon extending results from the inventory control literature, we prove that they admit a closed form solution and we show how to exploit this structure to speed up its computation. We consider the application of the proposed framework to several problems...

— Road traffic is a problem which is increasing in cities with large population. Unrelated to this fact the number of portable and wearable devices has also been increasing throughout the population of most countries. With this advent, the capacity to monitor and register data about people habits and locations as well as more complex data such as intensity and strength of movements has created ...

Sustainability is a wide concept that contains other concepts such as social responsibility and has been investigated with concepts such as competition sustainability, reporting sustainability, and social sustainability. The present study aims to investigate the role of social interest rate risk management (SIRRM) in the relationship between sustainability performance and investment ef...

Companies today face the challenge of adopting proper supply chain sustainability (SCS) strategies and practices to respond effectively to emerging global sustainability initiatives. Business sustainability has become a strategic imperative, with a focus on both financial and non-financial sustainability performance, which creates shared value for all stakeholders. This paper examines the integ...