Ghanima Al-Sharrah

Ranking business incubation: mathematical techniques

Incubators are globally renowned as a premier 21st century location for technology and technology-based economic development. This paper is new and unique perspective into the identification and ranking of business incubators worldwide in relation to economic development using mathematical techniques. Much research has been done on the quantitative and qualitative outcomes of incubators regarding their contribution to economic development; however, until now, none has been done from a mathematical point of view. This paper attempts to rank business incubators according to four indicators namely: mission, financial status, size and obstacles. The study applies survey and mathematical techniques to 43 selected industry incubators worldwide. The countries were chosen based on their known international success outcomes and membership in the National Business Incubation Association (NBIA). Findings based on critical financial indicators indicate that mathematical techniques could be utilised in the future to rank incubators worldwide to enhance the development of business practices within incubators.

Ranking Hazardous Chemicals with a Heuristic Approach to Reduce Isolated Objects in Hasse Diagrams

This work identifies hazardous chemicals that cause chemical accidents in plants using simple and available properties. Particular attention is given to reactive chemicals and the relation between corrosion and accidents frequencies. The identification of hazardous chemicals is done by categorized ranking using the Hasse diagram technique. Hasse diagrams are the most promising method due to simplicity, wide use, and nonparametric advantage. To achieve our goal, the large number of isolated objects in Hasse diagrams was reduced/eliminated using a heuristic approach that presents strategies to speed up the ranking task. The basis is to collect suitable indicators and to define the suitable ranking objective. The ranking is presented using a case study of 22 chemicals with 8 simple hazardous indicators. Results show that the reduction of isolated objects is essential before evaluating the hazardous results. Also, simple and readily available data were used successfully as indicators for identifying chemicals causing accidents.

Ranking Chemicals with Respect to Accidents Frequency

The chemical industry is one of the most well-known high-risk areas in modern society. Chemical accidents can have a great and lasting impact on the public’s perception of a chemical facility’s risk. The number of reported accidents constitutes a natural direct source of information on accidents risk. Reports provide a better understanding of two risk criteria, frequency and consequence, and help to identify hazardous chemicals, which can thereafter prevent accidents. Many published risk and accident data reports give information on the number of accidents or the numerator of the frequency calculation. However, they appear blind to information on exposure, such as the scale of the facility operation (the frequency denominator). This study will present how neglecting the denominator in frequency calculation gives misleading risk alerts. The research also proposes suitable denominators and a method to combine different frequency data based on partial order. Higher data size is also a good confidence indicator in frequency estimation. Results show that normalization with a suitable denominator is important, and the task is possible with the availability of many accident databases. Furthermore, partial order ranking using the Hasse diagram gives an overall hazard view of chemicals; it was able to estimate the percentage of chemicals performing above acceptable risk using only a small sample size.

Environmental ranking of desalination plants: the case of the Arabian Gulf

ABSTRACT Performance indicators and ranking methods are effective tools for assessing the environmental impact of emerging technologies and comparing the operational efficiencies of different processes. Desalination of seawater, which is vital for solving the water shortage in the Arabian Gulf region, should be assessed due to its adverse environmental impacts on the shallow and closed Gulf basin. The main objective of the current work is to develop and implement an environmental assessment methodology capable of ranking alternative desalination processes and technologies based on their environmental performance. The proposed methodology starts with identification of relevant indicators and uses the relative ranking of desalination plants together with an aggregated environmental index. The assessment approach was tested on selected desalination plants in the Arabian Gulf region. The results showed that the ranking methods are effective in aggregating the influence of individual indicators to produce a numerical value that indicates the rank of studied desalination plants with respect to their environmental impact.