No abstract

With the massive economic development and vast environmental degradation over the last decade, "sustainability" and "sustainable development" have become primary concepts in governments" agenda. Sustainability has three pillars, namely environmental, economic and social, the latter gaining attention relatively later than the others. Some organizations evaluate the world countries for social sustainability using indices such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Better Life Index, Human Development Index and Social Society Index (SSI). SSI is used to rank world countries and evaluate their level of sustainability. SSI is a scoring system developed by Social Society Foundation to measure human wellbeing, environmental wellbeing and economic wellbeing every 2 years. In the evaluation process, SSI calculates scores using 21 indicators and publishes the actual situation on sustainability, progress over time and differences in development per region and per income class. In this paper, human wellbeing indicators of SSI are used to cluster world countries with k-means algorithm to assess social sustainability. Human wellbeing indicators are grouped into basic needs, personal development and health, and well-balanced society, all of which are measured with 3 indicators. The clusters obtained are compared with SSI rankings and the results are elaborated.

The utilization of renewable energy sources (RES) has become inevitable, not only due to the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, but also to sustain life on Earth. Consequently, countries have started developing renewable energy policies individually and as part of global organizations and networks, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the European Union (EU) and the International Energy Agency (IEA). Turkey is a developing OECD member country and in the accession process to the EU. Thus, the renewable energy policies should be aligned with those of the EU. Moreover, despite the substantial amount and wide range of RES, it is still in a position to import more than half of its energy demand. In the light of these facts, this study aims to analyze and compare the renewable energy policies in Turkey with those adopted worldwide to lay out possible solutions regarding its energy problems.

Sustainability concerns resulting from the consumption of natural resources, life-threatening levels of pollution, global warming, climate change and the ever-increasing worldwide energy use have brought renewable energy sources to forefront. Given the possibility of depletion of fossil fuels in the near future, the utilization of clean and renewable energy sources have become inevitable. Consequently, governments and global organizations adopted respective regulations to ensure the production and use of renewable energy and promote the respective new investments. In the light of these developments, the aim of this study is to conduct a detailed review and evaluation on the current literature and global energy statistics. The respective projects, binding regulations, incentives, and pricing mechanisms have also been studied to analyze and compare the renewable energy policies adopted worldwide. Ultimately, the goal is to make certain suggestions and lay out possible solutions regarding global energy problems.

Scheduling is a vital element of manufacturing processes and requires optimal solutions under undetermined conditions. Highly dynamic and, complex scheduling problems can be classified as np-hard problems. Finding the optimal solution for multi-variable scheduling problems with polynomial computation times is extremely hard. Scheduling problems of this nature can be solved up to some degree using traditional methodologies. However, intelligent optimization tools, like BBAs, are inspired by the food foraging behavior of honey bees and capable of locating good solutions efficiently. The experiments on some benchmark problems show that BBA outperforms other methods which are used to solve scheduling problems in terms of the speed of optimization and accuracy of the results. This chapter first highlights the use of BBA and its variants for scheduling and provides a classification of scheduling problems with BBA applications. Following this, a step by step example is provided for multi-mode project scheduling problem in order to show how a BBA algorithm can be implemented.