This open access book addresses several questions regarding the implementation of human and organisational factors (HOF) so that recent improvements in industrial safety can be built upon. It addresses sources of frustration in senior management with high expectations of operational recommendations and disquiet on the part of HOF specialists struggling to have an impact on high-level decision making. The brief explores these issues with an emphasis on examples and lessons learned based on the experience of its authors, who come from different academic disciplines and various industrial sectors such as oil and gas, energy and transportation. It then offers some ways...

Blind and Low-vision (BLV) people face challenges in their daily lives, especially regarding independent navigation in unfamiliar settings. Assistive robots have recently emerged as assistive tools for people with special needs. Drones, in particular, have unique advantages over ground robots. Our work aims at designing a drone assistant in addition to primary mobility aids (i.e., white cane) to improve spatial awareness and navigation in unfamiliar settings. Using a Research-through-Design method with 21 BLV users, we identified challenging scenarios and the need for two distinct operating modes (Explorer and Team). We then deployed a low-fidelity prototype in a Wizard...

<div><p>In manufacturing context a free-form surface is a surface that is neither prismatic nor of revolution. End-milling of free-form surfaces on multi-axis CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machines is a complex and expensive operation involved in the production of many high-value-added parts, such as molds and stamping dies. For such operations, the toolpath planning process is important because it has a very high impact on operation duration and, thus, on the cost of the part. The objective of this process is to minimize the machining time while ensuring the surface quality. Roughly speaking, it aims to make a good part as quickly as possible.</p><p>This article...

Path planning for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles is a difficult task, and even more for a fleet of fixed-wing aircraft. One specific case is the transition to, or between, formation flight patterns, which requires synchronous arrivals while ensuring minimal separation, and ideally maintaining cruise speed. We resent a centralized method to solve this problem based on enumerating different Dubins paths. Given a travel time for the fleet, it builds a set of possible paths for each aircraft. Then, it checks in parallel separation between each path pair. This yields coefficients for an Integer Linear Programming problem determining if a fleet-wide conflict-free solution...

We study environmental policy in imperfectly competitive markets where firms differ in their objectives. Alongside standard profit-maximizing firms, we consider welfareoriented firms that partially or fully internalize environmental externalities but are subject to financial viability constraints. Wedevelop a Cournot model in which production generates emissions and firms may differ in the extent to which they account for environmental damages. We characterize market equilibria and examine the effects of environmental taxes and output subsidies on emissions, output, profits, and welfare. Our analysis shows that standard Pigouvian prescriptions are modified by the presence...

We propose a new statistical estimation framework for a large family of global sensitivity analysis indices. Our approach is based on rank statistics and uses an empirical correlation coefficient recently introduced by Chatterjee [9]. We show how to apply this approach to compute not only the Cramér-von-Mises indices, which are directly related to Chatterjee’s notion of correlation, but also first-order Sobol indices, general metric space indices and higher-order moment indices. We establish consistency of the resulting estimators and demonstrate their numerical efficiency, especially for small sample sizes. In addition, we prove a central limit theorem for the estimators...