Rohinton Emmanuel | Glasgow Caledonian University (original) (raw)

Papers by Rohinton Emmanuel

Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitorin... more Increasingly, sustainability assessment is applied as a valuable tool for assessing and monitoring the performance of construction projects in delivering sustainable buildings. Sustainability assessment has been traditionally regarded as a technical process to determine the performance of projects against environmental, social and economic criteria. Calls are emerging for assessment to evolve as a tool better integrated with the subjectively based decisions taken across the project lifecycle, supporting stakeholder engagement and promoting a culture of learning about sustainability in practice. In order for assessment to fully realise this wider role; it is necessary to recognise the significance played by knowledge and its flow between stakeholders in the promotion of a common understanding of the actions required to deliver a sustainable urban environment. This paper presents the findings of a knowledge mapping exercise focused on understanding the nature of this flow during susta...

This report summarises the findings of a review of the Scottish Government's Energy Assistance Pa... more This report summarises the findings of a review of the Scottish Government's Energy Assistance Package conducted by researchers from the Sustainable Urban Environments Research Group, Glasgow Caledonian University, in September and October 2012. It is based on the results of 18 semi-structured interviews, conducted under conditions of anonymity with 25 participants from 14 key stakeholder organisations, backed by a wider review of publicly available and confidential evidence identified by the researchers or supplied by those involved in managing and delivering EAP. The review had been carried out as the EAP contract was due to expire on 31 August 2013. Options for what would happen after 1 April 2013 were principally constrained by the design of ECO and Green Deal by the UK Government. However, this review considered what might be retained and what might be reformed to ensure the Scottish Government maximises the benefits to customers of any future Scottish schemes. Whilst it was not within our remit to present recommendations on the future of EAP or any other schemes, all participants suggested some improvements where they had encountered issues with EAP. These suggestions are presented either where they are clearly indicative of the views of the majority, or where they offer a particularly specialist insight into a problem. Key Learning Points  EAP is seen as very successful and demonstrates the value of retaining a national fuel poverty scheme that integrates with area-based initiatives and also supports wider social and economic development.  EAP's successes have been hampered by the complexity of the design, management and administration, and a lack of flexibility in delivering measures to customers.  Delivering EAP has been hardest for those working in rural areas and the islands, with the latter needing particular consideration in any future iteration of EAP.  Stage 4 has suffered from some technical problems relating to the appropriateness of SAP and rdSAP, but these could be reduced through allowing greater flexibility in how they are used.  Where customers are referred to delivery partners the outcome needs to be delivered timeously and reported back so that the impact of the service or measures provided can be monitored.  Data management and information sharing in EAP could be improved to simplify information flows, improve effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and enable frontline staff to have more and better access to information on existing and potential customers.  Prioritising the use of locally-based subcontractors has been beneficial to delivering Stages 3 and 4 but more could be done to both increase the volume of work going to these businesses, particularly in rural areas and islands, and to improve the management of complaints relating to subcontracted installations.  Greater sensitivity is needed to address the needs of the most vulnerable as part of both marketing and enabling contractors and other frontline staff better to understand and respond to their needs.  Every opportunity should be taken to improve the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of future fuel poverty schemes by improving access to data and data sharing for the purposes of targeting support to the most vulnerable, including exploring any relevant provision in the Welfare Reform Act.  Most importantly, the trusted status frontline organisations whose staff work face-to-face with the public should not be undervalued as they have clearly been fundamental to EAP's successes. However more could be done to enable them to operate more flexibly, efficiently, and effectively in responding to the needs of the most vulnerable and hard to reach.

Developing holistic frameworks for the next generation of sustainability assessment methods for t... more Developing holistic frameworks for the next generation of sustainability assessment methods for the built environment. In: Egbu, C.

Springer Proceedings in Complexity

Climate

This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, b... more This study analyses the interactions and impacts between multiple factors i.e., urban greening, building layout, and meteorological conditions that characterise the urban microclimate and thermal comfort in the urban environment. The focus was on two neighbourhoods of Lecce city (southern Italy) characterised through field campaigns and modelling simulations on a typical hot summer day. Field campaigns were performed to collect greening, building geometry, and microclimate data, which were employed in numerical simulations of several greening scenarios using the Computational Fluid Dynamics-based and microclimate model ENVI-met. Results show that, on a typical summer day, trees may lead to an average daily decrease of air temperature by up to 1.00 °C and an improvement of thermal comfort in terms of Mean Radiant Temperature (MRT) by up to 5.53 °C and Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) by up to 0.53. This decrease is more evident when the urban greening (in terms of green surfaces and trees) ...

Built-Environment Sri Lanka

Sustainable Cities and Society

Although studies on tropical UHIs remain numerically inferior to temperate UHI studies, there app... more Although studies on tropical UHIs remain numerically inferior to temperate UHI studies, there appears to be a considerably rich and diverse knowledge base built upon in the recent past  While the effect of greenery is important in lowering a tropical UHI, the cooling effect is modulated by wetness.  The lack of standardisation on the characterisation of parameters pose problems in deciphering the overall effect of compactness on tropical UHIs  Relationship between energy and UHI in tropics, especially in the residential sector is not very well captured.  Local Climate Zone' (LCZ) is a promising approach for the classification of measurement locations by their key micro-climate influencing features.

Air, Soil and Water Research

Daytime urban heat island effects can be weak compared to night time and even reversed (as in the... more Daytime urban heat island effects can be weak compared to night time and even reversed (as in the case of cool islands, where urban locations display lower temperatures than at a rural site), mostly due to shading effects from buildings, vegetation, and other possible obstructions. The study of the relationship between the sky-view factor, an indicator of urban geometry in terms of sky openness, and urban heat island intensity generally focus on night time periods; only a few report on the daytime effect of the SVF. Such effect will also vary according to background atmospheric conditions of the period of measurements. This article is a commentary on a recent publication by the authors on a study of diurnal intra-urban temperature differences in a location with Koeppen’s Cfb climate.

Science of The Total Environment

Highlights  Background atmospheric conditions contributes to explain daytime intra-urban tempera... more Highlights  Background atmospheric conditions contributes to explain daytime intra-urban temperature variability  Temperature variations tend to be more accentuated in less stable atmospheric classes  Variability in air temperature is mostly noticed in urban canyons and less so in open-air situations

Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences

The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neu... more The random neural network (RNN) is a probabilitsic queueing theory-based model for artificial neural networks, and it requires the use of optimization algorithms for training. Commonly used gradient descent learning algorithms may reside in local minima, evolutionary algorithms can be also used to avoid local minima. Other techniques such as artificial bee colony (ABC), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and differential evolution algorithms also perform well in finding the global minimum but they converge slowly. The sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimization algorithm can find the optimum neural network weights, but can also get stuck in local minima. We propose to overcome the shortcomings of these various approaches by using hybridized ABC/PSO and SQP. The resulting algorithm is shown to compare favorably with other known techniques for training the RNN. The results show that hybrid ABC learning with SQP outperforms other training algorithms in terms of mean-squared err...

Cities

One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely ... more One of the tenets of urban sustainability is that more compact urban forms that are more densely occupied are more efficient in their overall use of space and of energy. In many designs this has been translates into high-rise buildings with a focus on energy management at their outer envelopes. However, pursuing this building focused approach alone means that buildings are treated as standalone entities with minimal consideration to their impact on the surrounding urban landscape and vice versa. Where urban density is high, individual buildings interact with each other, reducing access to sunshine and daylight, obstructing airflow and raising outdoor air temperature. If/when each building pursues its own sustainability agenda without regard to its urban context, the result will diminish the natural energy resources available to nearby buildings and worsen the outdoor environment generally. This paper examines some of these urban impacts using examples from the City of London where rapid transformation is taking place as very tall buildings with exceptional energy credentials are being inserted into a low-rise city without a plan for the overall impact of urban form. The focus of the paper is on access to sunshine and wind and the wider implications of sustainable strategies that that focuses on individual buildings to the exclusion of the surrounding urban landscape. The work highlights the need for a framework that accounts for the synergistic outcomes that result from the mutual interactions of buildings in urban spaces.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2016

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 2016

"This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: "The durability of building material... more "This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: "The durability of building materials under a changing climate", which has been published in final form at WIREs Clim Change 2016. doi: 10.1002/wcc.398. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving."

Rethinking Planning and Design Opportunities, 2016