The user-value of rural electrification: An analysis and adoption of existing models and theories

User-value is a determining factor for product acceptance in product design. Research on rural electrification to date, however, does not draw sufficient attention to the importance of user-value with regard to the overall success of a project. This is evident from the analysis of project reports and applicable indicators from agencies active in the sector. Learning from the design, psychology and sociology literatures, it is important that rural electrification projects incorporate the value perception of the end-user and extend their success beyond the commonly used criteria of financial value, the appropriateness of the technology, capacity building and technology uptake. Creating value for the end-user is particularly important for project acceptance and the sustainability of a scheme once it has been handed over to the local community. In this research paper, existing theories and models of value-theory are transposed and applied to community operated rural electrification schemes and a user-value framework is developed. Furthermore, the importance of value to the end-user is clarified. Current literature on product design reveals that user-value has different properties, many of which are applicable to rural electrification. Five value pillars and their sub-categories important for the users of rural electrification projects are identified, namely: functional; social significance; epistemic; emotional; and cultural values. These pillars provide the main structure for the conceptual framework developed in this research paper. It is proposed that by targeting the values of the end-user, the key factors of user-value applicable to rural electrification projects will be identified and the sustainability of the project will be better ensured. © 2014 The Authors.

Comparing the sustainability of an innovative dry sanitation (Ecosan) system in China to a conventional waterborne sanitation system

The use of sustainability indicators for evaluating sanitation systems is applied to the Erdos Eco- Town Project (EETP) in China for illustration. The EETP is the largest urban settlement in the world employing ecological sanitation, which incorporates separation of waste streams, dry toilets, and resource recovery. The EETP’s dry sanitation system is compared against the Dongsheng District’s conventional sewer and centralised STP. The two systems are compared based on technological, environmental, economic, and societal indicators. Overall, the two systems perform reasonably well from a technological perspective. The conventional system performs significantly better than the dry system with regards to land and energy requirements, and global warming potential; it also performs better based on freshwater aquatic and terrestrial ecotoxicity potentials, but by a smaller margin. The dry system has superior environmental performance based on water consumption, eutrophication potential, and nutrient and organic matter recovery. The dry system is a more costly system as it requires greater infrastructure and higher operational costs, and does not benefit from economies of scale. The waterborne system performs better based on the societal indicators largely because it is a well-established system.

Testing of the multi-objective alliance algorithm on benchmark functions

A new version of the Multi-objective Alliance Algorithm (MOAA) is described. The MOAA's performance is compared with that of NSGA-II using the epsilon and hypervolume indicators to evaluate the results. The benchmark functions chosen for the comparison are from the ZDT and DTLZ families and the main classical multi-objective (MO) problems. The results show that the new MOAA version is able to outperform NSGA-II on almost all the problems.