0000000000083351
AUTHOR
Edvins Karnitis
Strategic planning and management of national development processes in Latvia
Thanks to achieved productive collaboration of the highest level government institutions with the academic community experts, a national strategic planning system is shaping that is very significant for further development of Latvia. General principles of the system have been approved by the Law on Development Planning System. The conceptual document A Growth Model for Latvia: People First defines a knowledge‐based human‐centred development scenario. The National Development Plan has been approved as a mid‐term programme for implementation of the Model. To monitor progress towards the goal an integrated quantified quality of life index was developed; the index includes priorities essential …
Toward solutions for energy efficiency
Abstract The tariff setting for district heating (DH) services is a hard regulatory procedure. This chapter is devoted to development of the simple but sufficiently accurate methodology for fast and objective evaluation of the actual costs of DH to optimize the regulatory process and to set adequate tariffs on heat production and transmission. The developed methodology is based on the data sets of Latvian DH providers, but the methodological principles are applicable in another area too. Investigation of heat production drivers and following simulation revealed the key performance indicators (KPIs): fuel type and price. By usage of intelligent benchmarking data mining methods and mathematic…
Sustainable growth of EU economies and Baltic context: Characteristics and modelling
The united general growth strategy for all EU Member States, a common economic and political vision as well as location in the same geographic region provides a necessary basis for the benchmarking modelling of economies. The main objective of this study is determination of the functional regularities and drivers of the growth of EU economies and the context of the Baltic States in line with the general trend of the EU, as well as development of the growth model, which can be used for sustainable planning and prediction. Analysis of several regularly published analytical indexes suggests a thesis on innovation as the real basic driving force for EU economies and outlines Innovation Performa…
Modelling of Adequate Costs of Utilities Services
The paper propose methodology for benchmark modelling of adequate costs of utilities services, which is based on the data analysis of the factual cases (key performance indicators of utilities as the predictors). The proposed methodology was tested by modelling of Latvian water utilities with three tools: (1) a classical version of the multi-layer perceptron with error back-propagation training algorithm was sharpened up with task-specific monotony tests, (2) the fitting of the generalized additive model using the programming language R ensured the opportunity to evaluate the statistical significance and confidence bands of predictors, (3) the sequential iterative nonlinear regression proce…
Sustainable Development Model of EU Cities Compliant with UN Settings
Nowadays, the globally accepted UN concept of sustainable development (SD) is gradu®ally transferred to the city level, including small and medium-sized cities. The implementation of SD settings requires regular measurement of developmental progress to monitor the level achieved in statics and dynamics, and to make strategic decisions for the next period. The existing urban SD indicator systems and indices are not well-suited for the monitoring of specific cities. Benchmarking algorithms and mathematical modelling procedures were applied to create a methodology and mathematical model for measuring the achieved urban SD level and to ensure the most objective selection and proportions of key …
Transparent Model for State Management
To ensure optimum governance of the state (regions, sectors, specific activities) all management system units (tasks, functions and services, normative environment, institutional framework, budget funding) have to operate in strong cooperation and consistency, which should be defined by corresponding documents. Unfortunately this logical relevance does not always exist. Documents and information are weakly connected, because of the huge complexity of units that objectively hinders implementation of the strong linkage and seriously weakens management quality. The situation can be radically improved by usage of ontological methodology for development of the back-office of the management syste…
District heating networks: enhancement of the efficiency
International audience; During the decades the district heating's (DH) advantages (more cost-efficient heat generation and reduced air pollution) overcompensated the additional costs of transmission and distribution of the centrally produced thermal energy to consumers. Rapid increase in the efficiency of low-power heaters, development of separated low heat density areas in cities reduce the competitiveness of the large centralized DH systems in comparison with the distributed cluster-size networks and even local heating. Reduction of transmission costs, enhancement of the network efficiency by optimization of the design of the DH networks become a critical issue. The methodology for determ…
Modelling of Water Supply Costs
Water supply tariffs setting is a labour intensive regulatory procedure; currently number of informative and procedural shortages and problems exist. The aim of the current research is improvement of methodology for determination of the substantiated costs for provision of water services. A working hypothesis was advanced to modernize the methodology: the specific costs (/m3) required for the provision of water services in a specific region is a variable multi-parameter function of key performance indicators. There is preferred a benchmark modelling procedure, which is based on the factual cases (declared indicators of water utilities) and synthesis of the general regularity. The model is d…
Informative model for national development management
Strategic planning experience shows the major problem of the national planning system - plan- ning documents are faintly intercorrelative (including aspects "from long-term to short-term" and "from general to concrete"), as well non-linked with managing and implementing institutions (public sector func- tions and services) and budgetary appropriation. It creates huge barriers to carry out plans. Structurization of all system's objects in logical units and determination of strict interrelations between them is the pro- posed solution of the problem. Informative model of planning system have to be developed as depository of logical units and their interlinkage. It becomes possible to manage i…