Management and engineering of process aware information systems : introduction to the special issue

In this editorial letter, we provide the readers of Information Systems with a birds-eye introduction to Process-aware Information Systems (PAIS) – a sub-field of Information Systems that has drawn growing attention in the past two decades, both as an engineering and as a management discipline. Against this backdrop, we briefly discuss how the papers included in this special issue contribute to extending the body of knowledge in this field.

The influence of conformity and group identity on drink walking intentions : comparing intentions to drink walk across risky pedestrian crossing scenarios

Despite the dangers associated with drink walking, limited research is currently available regarding the factors which influence individuals to engage in this risky behaviour. This study examined the influence of psychosocial factors upon individuals’ intentions to drink walk across four experimental scenarios (and a control condition). Specifically, a 2 × 2 repeated measures design was utilised in which all of the scenarios incorporated a risky pedestrian crossing situation (i.e., a pedestrian crossing against a red man signal) but differed according to the level of group identity (i.e., low/strangers and high/friends) and conformity (low and high). Individuals were assessed for their intentions to drink walk within each of these different scenarios. Undergraduate students (N = 151), aged 17–30 years, completed a questionnaire. Overall, most of the study's hypotheses were supported with individuals reporting the highest intentions to drink walk when in the presence of friends (i.e., high group identity) and their friends were said to be also crossing against the red man signal (i.e., high conformity). The findings may have significant implications for the design of countermeasures to reduce drink walking. For instance, the current findings would suggest that potentially effective strategies may be to promote resilience to peer influence as well as highlight the negative consequences associated with following the behaviour of other intoxicated pedestrians who are crossing against a red signal.

Defences in medical negligence : to what extent has tort law reform in Australia limited the liability of health professionals?

Tort law reform has resulted in legislation being passed by all Australian jurisdictions in the past decade implementing the recommendations contained in the Ipp Report. The report was in response to a perceived crisis in medical indemnity insurance. The objective was to restrict and limit liability in negligence actions. This paper will consider to what extent the reforms have impacted on the liability of health professionals in medical negligence actions. The reversal of the onus of proof through the obvious risk sections has attempted to extend the scope of the defence of voluntary assumption of risk. There is no liability for the materialisation of an inherent risk. Presumptions and mandatory reductions for contributory negligence have attempted to reduce the liability of defendants. It is now possible for reductions of 100% for contributory negligence. Apologies can be made with no admission of legal liability to encourage them being made and thereby reduce the number of actions being commenced. The peer acceptance defence has been introduced and enacted by legislation. There is protection for good samaritans even though the Ipp Report recommended against such protection. Limitation periods have been amended. Provisions relating to mental harm have been introduced re-instating the requirement of normal fortitude and direct perception. After an analysis of the legislation, it will be argued in this paper that while there has been some limitation and restriction, courts have generally interpreted the civil liability reforms in compliance with the common law. It has been the impact of statutory limits on the assessment of damages which has limited the liability of health professionals in medical negligence actions.

Sociopathic attitudes to road safety

Injuries and deaths due to unsafe driving practices are a substantial health and socioeconomic burden to the community. Young socially disadvantaged males who are involved in a lifestyle of risky behaviour, crime and motor vehicle accidents seem unaffected by educational campaigns to improve safer driving. The aim is to develop a driving and social behavioural profile that may explain the lack of effectiveness of road safety advertising and suggest ways to refine educational strategies to reduce the risky lifestyle and associated harms among those most vulnerable, the 15-25 year olds. The procedure involved a quantitative and qualitative analysis through questionnaires, surveys and focus groups involving a comparison of populations (n = 668) by age, gender and socioeconomic status in three discrete Australian sites. Information gathered included issues related to road safety awareness, knowledge of advertising, personal and peer group attitudes as well as driving and life style history. The results indicate that within the community a highly visible profile of strong anti-social road safety activities by an educationally and economically disadvantaged sub-culture exists and this group seem impervious to road safety advertising and education initiatives. As the overall unsafe driving and risky antisocial behaviour is significant among 15-25 year olds within the community the solution is seen to be community based. A long-term (five to ten year) program has been posited; promoting community partnerships through consultative and local action committees at all levels creating locally designed formal and informal educational and mutual support programs.

Using reflective clothing to enhance the conspicuity of bicyclists at night

Bicycling at night is more dangerous than in the daytime and poor conspicuity is likely to be a contributing factor. The use of reflective markings on a pedestrian’s major joints to facilitate the perception of biological motion has been shown to greatly enhance pedestrian conspicuity at night, but few corresponding data exist for bicyclists. Twelve younger and twelve older participants drove around a closed-road circuit at night and indicated when they first saw a bicyclist who wore black clothing either alone, or together with a reflective bicycling vest, or a vest plus ankle and knee reflectors. The bicyclist pedaled in place on a bicycle that had either a static or flashing light, or no light on the handlebars. Bicyclist clothing significantly affected conspicuity; drivers responded to bicyclists wearing the vest plus ankle and knee reflectors at significantly longer distances than when the bicyclist wore the vest alone or black clothing without a vest. Older drivers responded to bicyclists less often and at shorter distances than younger drivers. The presence of a bicycle light, whether static or flashing, did not enhance the conspicuity of the bicyclist; this may result in bicyclists who use a bicycle light being overconfident of their own conspicuity at night. The implications of our findings are that ankle and knee markings are a simple and very effective approach for enhancing bicyclist conspicuity at night.

Occupational driver safety : conceptualising a leadership-based intervention to improve safe driving performance

Occupational driving crashes are the most common cause of death and injury in the workplace. The physical and psychological outcomes following injury are also very costly to organizations. Thus, safe driving poses a managerial challenge. Some research has attempted to address this issue through modifying discrete and often simple target behaviors (e.g., driver training programs). However, current intervention approaches in the occupational driving field generally do not consider the role of organizational factors in workplace safety. This study adopts the A-B-C framework to identify the contingencies associated with an effective exchange of safety information within the occupational driving context. Utilizing a sample of occupational drivers and their supervisors, this multi-level study examines the contingencies associated with the exchange of safety information within the supervisor-driver relationship. Safety values are identified as an antecedent of the safety information exchange, and the quality of the leader-member exchange relationship and safe driving performance is identified as the behavioral consequences. We also examine the function of role overload as a factor influencing the relationship between safety values and the safety information exchange. Hierarchical Linear Modelling found that role overload moderated the relationship between supervisors’ perceptions of the value given to safety and the safety information exchange. A significant relationship was also found between the safety information exchange and the subsequent quality of the leader-member exchange relationship. Finally, the quality of the leader-member exchange relationship was found to be significantly associated with safe driving performance. Theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed.

Train control to reduce delays upon service disturbances at railway junctions

Train delay is one of the most important indexes to evaluate the service quality of the railway. Because of the interactions of movement among trains, a delayed train may conflict with trains scheduled on other lines at junction area. Train that loses conflict may be forced to stop or slow down because of restrictive signals, which consequently leads to the loss of run-time and probably enlarges more delays. This paper proposes a time-saving train control method to recover delays as soon as possible. In the proposed method, golden section search is adopted to identify the optimal train speed at the expected time of restrictive signal aspect upgrades, which enables the train to depart from the conflicting area as soon as possible. A heuristic method is then developed to attain the advisory train speed profile assisting drivers in train control. Simulation study indicates that the proposed method enables the train to recover delays as soon as possible in case of disturbances at railway junctions, in comparison with the traditional maximum traction strategy and the green wave strategy.

Positive emotional responses to hybridised writing about a socio-scientific issue

In order to understand better the role of affect in learning about socio-scientificissues (SSI), this study investigated Year 12 students’ emotional arousal as they participated in an online writing-to-learn science project about the socio-scientific issue of biosecurity. Students wrote a series of hybridised scientific narratives, or BioStories, that integrate scientific information about biosecurity with narrative storylines, and uploaded these to a dedicated website. Throughout their participation in the project, students recorded their emotional responses to the various activities (N=50). Four case students were also video recorded during selected science lessons as they researched, composed and uploaded their BioStories for peer review. Analysis of these data, as well as interview data obtained from the case students, revealed that pride, strength, determination, interest and alertness were among the positive emotions most strongly elicited by the project. These emotions reflected students’ interest in learning about a new socio-scientific issue, and their enhanced feelings of self-efficacy in successfully writing hybridised scientific narratives in science. The results of this study suggest that the elicitation of positive emotional responses as students engage in hybridised writing about SSI with strong links to environmental education, such as biosecurity, can be valuable in engaging students in education for sustainability.

A review of commuter exposure to ultrafine particles and its health effects

Ultrafine particles (UFPs, <100 nm) are produced in large quantities by vehicular combustion and are implicated in causing several adverse human health effects. Recent work has suggested that a large proportion of daily UFP exposure may occur during commuting. However, the determinants, variability and transport mode-dependence of such exposure are not well-understood. The aim of this review was to address these knowledge gaps by distilling the results of ‘in-transit’ UFP exposure studies performed to-date, including studies of health effects. We identified 47 exposure studies performed across 6 transport modes: automobile, bicycle, bus, ferry, rail and walking. These encompassed approximately 3000 individual trips where UFP concentrations were measured. After weighting mean UFP concentrations by the number of trips in which they were collected, we found overall mean UFP concentrations of 3.4, 4.2, 4.5, 4.7, 4.9 and 5.7 × 10^4 particles cm^-3 for the bicycle, bus, automobile, rail, walking and ferry modes, respectively. The mean concentration inside automobiles travelling through tunnels was 3.0 × 10^5 particles cm^-3. While the mean concentrations were indicative of general trends, we found that the determinants of exposure (meteorology, traffic parameters, route, fuel type, exhaust treatment technologies, cabin ventilation, filtration, deposition, UFP penetration) exhibited marked variability and mode-dependence, such that it is not necessarily appropriate to rank modes in order of exposure without detailed consideration of these factors. Ten in-transit health effects studies have been conducted and their results indicate that UFP exposure during commuting can elicit acute effects in both healthy and health-compromised individuals. We suggest that future work should focus on further defining the contribution of in-transit UFP exposure to total UFP exposure, exploring its specific health effects and investigating exposures in the developing world. Keywords: air pollution; transport modes; acute health effects; travel; public transport

From barrier elimination to barrier negotiation : a qualitative study of parents' attitudes about active travel for elementary school trips

This paper examines parents' responses to key factors associated with mode choices for school trips. The research was conducted with parents of elementary school students in Denver Colorado as part of a larger investigation of school travel. School-based active travel programs aim to encourage students to walk or bike to school more frequently. To that end, planning research has identified an array of factors associated with parents' decisions to drive children to school. Many findings are interpreted as ‘barriers’ to active travel, implying that parents have similar objectives with respect to travel mode choices and that parents respond similarly and consistently to external conditions. While the conclusions are appropriate in forecasting demand and mode share with large populations, they are generally too coarse for programs that aim to influence travel behavior with individuals and small groups. This research uses content analysis of interview transcripts to examine the contexts of factors associated with parents' mode choices for trips to and from elementary school. Short, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 65 parents from 12 Denver Public Elementary Schools that had been selected to receive 2007–08 Safe Routes to School non-infrastructure grants. Transcripts were analyzed using Nvivo 8.0 to find out how parents respond to selected factors that are often described in planning literature as ‘barriers’ to active travel. Two contrasting themes emerged from the analysis: barrier elimination and barrier negotiation. Regular active travel appears to diminish parents' perceptions of barriers so that negotiation becomes second nature. Findings from this study suggest that intervention should build capacity and inclination in order to increase rates of active travel.

Cultural challenges to secondary prevention: Implications for Saudi women

Like other highly developed countries, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) are major health problems in Saudi Arabia. The aetiology of cardiovascular disease (CVD) burden within the Saudi population is similar to Western countries with atherosclerosis, hypertension, ischemic heart disease and diabetes highly prevalent with the main risk factors being smoking, obesity and inactivity. There are differences between Saudi men and women in epidemiology, risk factors and health service provision for CHD. These sex and gender based factors are important in considering the health and well-being of Saudi women. Currently, there is limited focus on the cardiovascular health of Saudi women. The aim of this paper is to examine culturally specific issues for Saudi women and the implications for secondary prevention.

Speeding by young novice drivers : what can personal characteristics and psychosocial theory add to our understanding?

Purpose: Young novice drivers continue to be overrepresented in fatalities and injuries arising from crashes even with the introduction of countermeasures such as graduated driver licensing (GDL). Enhancing countermeasures requires a better understanding of the variables influencing risky driving. One of the most common risky behaviours performed by drivers of all ages is speeding, which is particularly risky for young novice drivers who, due to their driving inexperience, have difficulty in identifying and responding appropriately to road hazards. Psychosocial theory can improve our understanding of contributors to speeding, thereby informing countermeasure development and evaluation. This paper reports an application of Akers’ social learning theory (SLT), augmented by Gerrard and Gibbons’ prototype/willingness model (PWM), in addition to personal characteristics of age, gender, car ownership, and psychological traits/states of anxiety, depression, sensation seeking propensity and reward sensitivity, to examine the influences on self-reported speeding of young novice drivers with a Provisional (intermediate) licence in Queensland, Australia. Method: Young drivers (n = 378) recruited in 2010 for longitudinal research completed two surveys containing the Behaviour of Young Novice Drivers Scale, and reported their attitudes and behaviours as pre-Licence/Learner (Survey 1) and Provisional (Survey 2) drivers and their sociodemographic characteristics. Results: An Akers’ measurement model was created. Hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that (1) personal characteristics (PC) explained 20.3%; (2) the combination of PC and SLT explained 41.1%; and (3) the combination of PC, SLT and PWM explained 53.7% of variance in self-reported speeding. Whilst there appeared to be considerable shared variance, the significant predictors in the final model included gender, car ownership, reward sensitivity, depression, personal attitudes, and Learner speeding. Conclusions: These results highlight the capacity for psychosocial theory to improve our understanding of speeding by young novice drivers, revealing relationships between previous behaviour, attitudes, psychosocial characteristics and speeding. The findings suggest multi-faceted countermeasures should target the risky behaviour of Learners, and Learner supervisors should be encouraged to monitor their Learners’ driving speed. Novice drivers should be discouraged from developing risky attitudes towards speeding.

Improved design rules for hollow flange sections subject to lateral distortional buckling

The LiteSteel Beam (LSB) is a new hollow flange section with a unique geometry consisting of torsionally rigid rectangular hollow flanges and a relatively slender web. It is subjected to lateral distortional buckling when used as flexural members, which reduces its member moment capacity. An investigation into the flexural behaviour of LSBs using experiments and numerical analyses led to the development of new design rules for LSBs subject to lateral distortional buckling. However, the comparison of moment capacity results with the new design rules showed that they were conservative for some LSB sections while slightly unconservative for others due to the effects of section geometry. It is also unknown whether these design rules are applicable to other hollow flange sections such as hollow flange beams (HFB). This paper presents the details of a study into the lateral distortional buckling behaviour of hollow flange sections such as LSBs, HFBs and their variations. A geometrical parameter defined as the ratio of flange torsional rigidity to the major axis flexural rigidity of the web (GJf/EIxweb) was found to be a critical parameter in evaluating the lateral distortional buckling behaviour and moment capacities of hollow flange sections. New design rules were therefore developed by using a member slenderness parameter modified by K, where K is a function of GJf/EIxweb. The new design rules based on the modified slenderness parameter were found to be accurate in calculating the moment capacities of not only LSBs and HFBs, but also other types of hollow flange sections.

Numerical modelling and design of LiteSteel Beams subject to lateral buckling

The LiteSteel Beam (LSB) is a new hollow flange channel section developed using a patented dual electric resistance welding and cold-forming process. It has a unique geometry consisting of torsionally rigid rectangular hollow flanges and a slender web, and is commonly used as flexural members. However, the LSB flexural members are subjected to a relatively new lateral distortional buckling mode, which reduces their moment capacities. Unlike lateral torsional buckling, the lateral distortional buckling of LSBs is characterised by simultaneous lateral deflection, twist and cross sectional change due to web distortion. Therefore a detailed investigation into the lateral buckling behaviour of LSB flexural members was undertaken using experiments and finite element analyses. This paper presents the details of suitable finite element models developed to simulate the behaviour and capacity of LSB flexural members subject to lateral buckling. The models included all significant effects that influence the ultimate moment capacities of such members, including material inelasticity, lateral distortional buckling deformations, web distortion, residual stresses, and geometric imperfections. Comparison of elastic buckling and ultimate moment capacity results with predictions from other numerical analyses and available buckling moment equations, and experimental results showed that the developed finite element models accurately predict the behaviour and moment capacities of LSBs. The validated model was then used in a detailed parametric study that produced accurate moment capacity data for all the LSB sections and improved design rules for LSB flexural members subject to lateral distortional buckling.

Behaviour and design of cold-formed steel beams subject to lateral-torsional buckling

Cold-formed steel beams are increasingly used as floor joists and bearers in buildings. Their behaviour and moment capacities are influenced by lateral-torsional buckling when they are not laterally restrained adequately. Past research on lateral-torsional buckling has concentrated on hot-rolled steel beams. Hence a numerical study was undertaken to investigate the lateral-torsional buckling behaviour of simply supported cold-formed steel lipped channel beams subjected to uniform bending. For this purpose a finite element model was developed using ABAQUS and its accuracy was verified using available numerical and experimental results. It was then used in a detailed parametric study to simulate the lateral-torsional buckling behaviour and capacity of cold-formed steel beams under varying conditions. The moment capacity results were compared with the predictions from the current design rules in many cold-formed steel codes and suitable recommendations were made. European design rules were found to be conservative while Australian/New Zealand and North American design rules were unconservative. Hence the moment capacity design equations in these codes were modified in this paper based on the available finite element analysis results. This paper presents the details of the parametric study, recommendations to current design rules and the new design rules proposed in this research for lateral-torsional buckling of cold-formed steel lipped channel beams.