Universal health coverage mitigated COVID-19 health-related consequences in Asia Oceania.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a continual challenge since 2020, and it continues to impact people and industries as a disaster caused by a biological hazard. This study examined universal health coverage (UHC) scores in relation to the performance in combating COVID-19 in the Southeast Asian region (SEAR) and the Western Pacific region (WPR), along with the State Party Self-Assessment Annual Reporting (SPAR) index under the international health regulations (IHC). The numbers of infections and deaths per million population from December 2019 to June 2022 were used as primary outcomes to measure countries' performance. Countries with UHC scores of 63 or higher had a significantly lower number of infected patients and deaths. In addition, several inter-capacity correlations within the SPAR capacities, including with C8 (the National Health Emergency Framework), as well as a very strong correlation to C4 (Food Safety), C5 (Laboratory), and C7 (Human Resources). Furthermore, C9 (Health Service Provisions) has a very strong correlation to C1 (Legislation and Financing), C2 (International Health Regulation Coordination and a National IHR Focal Point function), and C4 (Food Safety), suggesting that the capability to manage an emerging infectious disease form blocks of capacities. In conclusion, UHC clearly mitigated the health-related consequences of COVID-19 in South-East Asia Region (SEAR) and Western Pacific Region (WPR). Investigating the correlation between the SPAR capacities and UHC is a promising approach for future research, including the importance of the provision of health services, points of entry, and, most importantly, risk communications as critical factors for managing pandemic. This study constitutes a good opportunity to apply the SPAR index to define which capacities correlate with the outcome of the pandemic in terms of infections and deaths.

An Intent-driven DaaS Management Framework to Enhance User Quality of Experience

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) has become widely used by enterprises. In 2020, the use of DaaS increased dramatically due to the demand to work remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The DaaS market is expected to continue growing rapidly [1]. The quality of experience (QoE) of a DaaS service has been one of the main factors to enhance DaaS user satisfaction. To ensure user QoE, the amount of cloud computation resources for a DaaS service must be appropriately designed. We propose an Intent-driven DaaS Management (IDM) framework to autonomously determine the cloud-resource-amount configurations for a given DaaS QoE requirement. IDM enables autonomous resource design by ing the knowledge about the dependency between DaaS workload, resource configuration, and performance from previous DaaS performance log data. To ensure the IDM framework's applicability to actual DaaS services, we analyzed five main challenges in applying the IDM framework to actual DaaS services: identifying the resource-design objective, quantifying DaaS QoE, addressing low log data availability, designing performance-inference models, and addressing low resource variations in the log data. We addressed these challenges through detailed designing of IDM modules. The effectiveness of the IDM framework was assessed from the aspects of DaaS performance-inference precision, DaaS resource design, and time and human-resource cost reduction. © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.

INTERNATIONAL ASPECTS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT WITHIN ENGINEERING ENDEAVORS AFFECTED BY THE PANDEMIC

We know change is the only constant;new changes are ever emerging given the evolution in situations, types of engineering endeavors, requirements, etc. Thus, change management needs to be evolved. The world has recently faced a pandemic, COVID-19, which has presented projects with new and unique challenges. This has forced engineering managers to manage these changes and subsequently look at improvements to existing change management frameworks. The paper identifies some challenges engineering projects face, and the change management approaches used to overcome these during COVID-19. The paper has analyzed projects in the regions of Asia and Australia to derive an updated change management framework for use in unique situations such as pandemics. This paper presents the findings of a literature review focused on change management in enterprises during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the paper identifies the drivers, contributors, and moderators associated with change response. It introduces a new holistic change framework, which will aid project managers in facilitating its implementation within their projects. Copyright, American Society for Engineering Management, 2022.

Policy Responses of the TNE Institutions in China to COVID-19 Pandemic: A Proposal of a Crisis Management Framework

The COVID-19 pandemic will likely to have long-lasting impacts on higher education (HE) because of the global disruption it continues to cause. Transnational education (TNE) has been particularly vulnerable and been forced to respond to the disaster through new policies and management strategies. Taking pandemic as a case of crisis management, this paper first applies an integrative review method to synthesize the impacts of the pandemic on TNE institutions in China, and then uses the policy analysis method to explore their real-time governance policies from January 2020 to January 2021. A Pandemic Crisis Management Matrix for TNE is developed and used for the analysis of policies for phases before, during, and after the event. The findings suggest that TNE institutions in China took proactive measures to maintain normal operation during and after the crisis, but paid less attention to pandemic preparedness. In addition, some policies were changing according to the evolving epidemiology, whereas the crisis management objective had remained durable. Theoretically, this paper contributes to the crisis management theory in HE and TNE contexts. Practically, constructive recommendations are provided for government agencies, universities, and TNE institutions in terms of building long-term and transformative resilience and preparing for future crises. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Post-pandemic Project Change Management Model: An Adaptable Framework Utilizing Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm and Dynamic Causal Loop Diagram for Construction Innovation

The coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) had a detrimental effect on the majority of sectors, including the construction industry. The industry’s operations, productivity, expenditures, and profit have all been impacted. With the present state of the economy, it’s natural that certain methods and frameworks are no longer as useful, efficient, or effective as they once were. This study examines the various relationships between delays, profit, productivity rate, and project acquisition, as well as their impact on the project-change management practices of companies in the Philippine construction industry, with the goal of developing a new project-change management framework that is flexible and adaptable to future changes. This research employs a variety of statistical techniques to ascertain the significance of each variable and its contribution to project change management. Through the use of artificial neural network modeling and causal loop diagramming, the different connections between the variables were graphically interpreted. The artificial neural network modeling of the variables demonstrated a high degree of accuracy, with a R all value of 0.99492;scatter plots also revealed a high degree of positive correlation. The causal loop diagram illustrates the many connections between the input variables and their contributing components. Together, the models and statistical tests summarize the criteria employed by the researchers to create a project-change management framework that is focused on its capacity to be used for both short- and long-term objectives, is applicable to the new normal, and is adaptable to any future change. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Industry 4.0 for PLM in Pandemics: Towards a Smart Digital Agile PLM

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a business strategy, aiming to streamline the flow of information about products and related processes throughout the whole product Lifecycle such that the right information in the right context at the right time can be made available. Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic meant major improvements to the way service companies operate, changing the schedule and activities of their workers. The introduction of Industry 4.0 also launched emerging technology that could promote certain operations, thus alleviating the consequences of COVID-19. The aim of this research is to, first, investigate how this pandemic has impacted the product lifecycle, and secondly, explore how industry 4.0 technologies can address these challenges by proposing a Digital Smart Agile PLM framework. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

GIS Based emergency management framework for large-scale events: A case study of the torch relay activity

Due to the high popular concentration of large-scale events, once an emergency (like a stampede) occurs, it will often cause severe casualties. Moreover, since the widespread of the COVID-19, the prevention of the novel coronavirus should also be considered during mass gatherings. How to reduce the probability and potential consequence of emergencies is of great significance. This research designs an emergency management framework using ArcGIS-based geographic information technology for large-scale events. To verify the effectiveness of our framework, we take the Winter Olympic torch relay in university as an example. The paper is mainly divided into two parts, emergency resource allocation and the emergency prevention model. The former part focuses on the site selection of emergency sentries and emergency hospitals during the torch relay. In the latter part, an emergency prevention model is designed for two significant emergencies: stampede and epidemic. © 2021 Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM. All rights reserved.