Faculty of Technology, University of Tuzla, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Department of Chemical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, United States, Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland, Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory—SPIL, NETME Centre, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology—VUT BRNO, Brno, Czechia, CanmetENERGY, Natural Resources Canada, Varennes, QC, Canada, School of Chemical Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

Increasing demands for logistics services cause several challenges related to total costs and meeting global environmental requirements. Logistic operators make efforts to improve all logistic processes and the distribution chain system by optimizing distribution networks and transport routes. Also, using clean or renewable energy help to meet the above-mentioned requirements by using environmentally friendly means of transportation such as electric and hybrid vehicles. The replacement of conventional with electric vehicles provides numerous benefits for improving the efficiency of the distribution chain system. This process is part of the concept known as Green Logistics, which strives to minimize the environmental impact of the logistics network and delivery. This paper focuses on identification of indicators for evaluating the acceptability of replacing conventional vehicles with electric vehicles in the fleet of logistics operators. We propose an evaluation matrix based on key indicators such as total costs, eco score fleet rating, and range and energy supply of vehicles. We use these indicators to determine the advantages, challenges, and possibilities of introducing electric vehicles in the logistics operator’s fleet. Also, we conducted a multi-criteria analysis of replacing conventional with electric vehicles in the fleet of one logistics operator.

At the beginning of the 20th century, more than a thousand mosques originating from the Ottoman period (1463-1878) were recorded in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some estimates point that the number currently is much smaller. The goal of this study is to establish a typological classification of historical forms that were developed in more than four centuries. The diversity of patterns comes from the mixed influences ranging from the developed Ottoman style to the local material conditions and regional building traditions. This study used a qualitative evaluation of many characteristic examples to identify prevalent features that point to different types and subtypes of mosques. The evaluation of various examples used both firsthand observation and the written sources that are readily available. Thirty-six historical domed mosques were founded in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and their architecture is essentially a reflection of the architectural pattern predominantly from the 16th-century classical repertoire. However, a significantly higher proportion of mosques have sloping roofs where they strongly suggest domestic influences. The paper defines distinctive roofed mosque types where common characteristics predominate. Certain variations from the standard show a clear need for flexibility, adaptability, or improvisation. The study shows that the fundamental concept of the Turkish single-unit mosque, which was developed in Anatolia beginning in the 12th century, underwent a broad interpretation in Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the Ottoman period, as evidenced by a variety of distinct types of roofed mosques.

Background The 2015 Lancet Commission on global surgery identified surgery and anaesthesia as indispensable parts of holistic health-care systems. However, COVID-19 exposed the fragility of planned surgical services around the world, which have also been neglected in pandemic recovery planning. This study aimed to develop and validate a novel index to support local elective surgical system strengthening and address growing backlogs. Methods First, we performed an international consultation through a four-stage consensus process to develop a multidomain index for hospital-level assessment (surgical preparedness index; SPI). Second, we measured surgical preparedness across a global network of hospitals in high-income countries (HICs), middle-income countries (MICs), and low-income countries (LICs) to explore the distribution of the SPI at national, subnational, and hospital levels. Finally, using COVID-19 as an example of an external system shock, we compared hospitals' SPI to their planned surgical volume ratio (SVR; ie, operations for which the decision for surgery was made before hospital admission), calculated as the ratio of the observed surgical volume over a 1-month assessment period between June 6 and Aug 5, 2021, against the expected surgical volume based on hospital administrative data from the same period in 2019 (ie, a pre-pandemic baseline). A linear mixed-effects regression model was used to determine the effect of increasing SPI score. Findings In the first phase, from a longlist of 103 candidate indicators, 23 were prioritised as core indicators of elective surgical system preparedness by 69 clinicians (23 [33%] women; 46 [67%] men; 41 from HICs, 22 from MICs, and six from LICs) from 32 countries. The multidomain SPI included 11 indicators on facilities and consumables, two on staffing, two on prioritisation, and eight on systems. Hospitals were scored from 23 (least prepared) to 115 points (most prepared). In the second phase, surgical preparedness was measured in 1632 hospitals by 4714 clinicians from 119 countries. 745 (45·6%) of 1632 hospitals were in MICs or LICs. The mean SPI score was 84·5 (95% CI 84·1–84·9), which varied between HIC (88·5 [89·0–88·0]), MIC (81·8 [82·5–81·1]), and LIC (66·8 [64·9–68·7]) settings. In the third phase, 1217 (74·6%) hospitals did not maintain their expected SVR during the COVID-19 pandemic, of which 625 (51·4%) were from HIC, 538 (44·2%) from MIC, and 54 (4·4%) from LIC settings. In the mixed-effects model, a 10-point increase in SPI corresponded to a 3·6% (95% CI 3·0–4·1; p<0·0001) increase in SVR. This was consistent in HIC (4·8% [4·1–5·5]; p<0·0001), MIC (2·8 [2·0–3·7]; p<0·0001), and LIC (3·8 [1·3–6·7%]; p<0·0001) settings. Interpretation The SPI contains 23 indicators that are globally applicable, relevant across different system stressors, vary at a subnational level, and are collectable by front-line teams. In the case study of COVID-19, a higher SPI was associated with an increased planned surgical volume ratio independent of country income status, COVID-19 burden, and hospital type. Hospitals should perform annual self-assessment of their surgical preparedness to identify areas that can be improved, create resilience in local surgical systems, and upscale capacity to address elective surgery backlogs. Funding National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery, NIHR Academy, Association of Coloproctology of Great Britain and Ireland, Bowel Research UK, British Association of Surgical Oncology, British Gynaecological Cancer Society, and Medtronic.

Interactive Imitation Learning (IIL) is a branch of Imitation Learning (IL) where human feedback is provided intermittently during robot execution allowing an online improvement of the robot's behavior. In recent years, IIL has increasingly started to carve out its own space as a promising data-driven alternative for solving complex robotic tasks. The advantages of IIL are its data-efficient, as the human feedback guides the robot directly towards an improved behavior, and its robustness, as the distribution mismatch between the teacher and learner trajectories is minimized by providing feedback directly over the learner's trajectories. Nevertheless, despite the opportunities that IIL presents, its terminology, structure, and applicability are not clear nor unified in the literature, slowing down its development and, therefore, the research of innovative formulations and discoveries. In this article, we attempt to facilitate research in IIL and lower entry barriers for new practitioners by providing a survey of the field that unifies and structures it. In addition, we aim to raise awareness of its potential, what has been accomplished and what are still open research questions. We organize the most relevant works in IIL in terms of human-robot interaction (i.e., types of feedback), interfaces (i.e., means of providing feedback), learning (i.e., models learned from feedback and function approximators), user experience (i.e., human perception about the learning process), applications, and benchmarks. Furthermore, we analyze similarities and differences between IIL and RL, providing a discussion on how the concepts offline, online, off-policy and on-policy learning should be transferred to IIL from the RL literature. We particularly focus on robotic applications in the real world and discuss their implications, limitations, and promising future areas of research.

Growing intelligent transportation systems demand a vehicular communication technology that can satisfy high requirements in terms of data rates, latency, reliability and number of connected devices. To evaluate the performance of such communication technology, real-world measurements are required for various channel conditions. Since vehicular measurement campaigns are expensive and time-consuming, a high-mobility environment poses enormous challenges for performance measurements. Using the existing technique of time-stretching the transmit signals, such experiments can be emulated through measurements at a single lower velocity by inducing effects caused by higher velocities. The existing time-stretching technique poses the problem of different channel estimation quality between the time-stretched and the original system. To ensure that the technique gives accurate results in practical systems, we adapt the pilot-based channel estimation scheme within the existing time-stretching technique. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed channel estimation scheme through simulations and a high-speed vehicular channel measurement campaign at the center frequency of 2.55 GHz.

This article evaluates the role that the economic conditionality of the European Union (EU) toward the six Western Balkan countries may play in the transformation of these countries as a part of their EU accession process. The article is a case study of a temporary policy shift that occurred in 2014 in relation to conditions that Bosnia and Herzegovina must fulfill to qualify for opening negotiations on EU membership. It also aims to address what this shift has achieved for the Europeanization of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its progress towards EU accession. The shift, implemented via an economic plan called the Reform Agenda, was an attempt at Europeanization of the country’s economic policies that temporarily put aside the constitutional reform demands that had previously dominated the Europeanization discourse. After the first five years of the Reform Agenda, moderate gains primarily in the domain of economic development and fiscal stability were made; however, political fragmentation and nationalistic and secessionist ideas have prevented the reforms from making a stronger impact. Additionally, the lack of a defined desired outcome in terms of measurable economic reforms and the inadequate planning by the EU were not conducive to a more transformative impact.

This paper uses a mutual-information maximization paradigm to optimize the voltage levels written to cells in a Flash memory. To enable low-latency, each page of Flash memory stores only one coded bit in each Flash memory cell. For example, three-level cell (TL) Flash has three bit channels, one for each of three pages, that together determine which of eight voltage levels are written to each cell. Each Flash page is required to store the same number of data bits, but the various bits stored in the cell typically do not have to provide the same mutual information. A modified version of dynamic-assignment Blahut-Arimoto (DAB) moves the constellation points and adjusts the probability mass function for each bit channel to increase the mutual information of a worst bit channel with the goal of each bit channel providing the same mutual information. The resulting constellation provides essentially the same mutual information to each page while negligibly reducing the mutual information of the overall constellation. The optimized constellations feature points that are neither equally spaced nor equally likely. However, modern shaping techniques such as probabilistic amplitude shaping can provide coded modulations that support such constellations.

The Covid-19 pandemic has a direct impact on the social, economic, political, and other segments of society through a large number of lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. The largest postal and logistics companies as an integral part of the supply chain have been directly affected by the Covid 19 pandemic. Disruption in the supply chain significantly affects the movement of goods and the economic development of countries. This paper investigates the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the logistics sector, with special emphasis on public postal operators (PPO) in some countries of the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia). The paper analyzes the movement of express shipments in domestic transport, as well as imports and exports for 2020. There is almost no research on the implications of the covid-19 pandemic on the postal and logistics sectors of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. The aim of this research is to understand the impact of the pandemic on this sector.

The study problematizes the sociological/political/psychological/genetic aspects of neo-racism and nationalism and their conflict consequences. It aims to unlock points within peace philosophy and enlightenment. The paper argues that contemporary sociopolitics, as an expression of neoliberalism, globalization, radical nationalism, and supremacy, maintain archaic conflicting ideological, racial antagonistic, and national entity relations, particularly in post-socialist and post-conflict ethnoreligiously controlled societies-Balkans. Racism is a moral and sociopolitical subject significantly related to peace and conflict philosophy normative. Although a liberal conscience can be reassured by the fact that genetics has not found much difference among the peoples of the world, it is irrelevant to the problem of racism. In the sphere of flexibility, it established an association with nationalism. Nationalism initiates and homogenizes the national masses with narratives regarding the threat to national domains or injustices. Neo-racism and nationalism ignore insights into group differentiation; race genetics narratives were scientifically disguised prejudice. Racism can be enforced in regions with zero racial diversity. The significant causes lie within structural mechanisms of conflict, overwhelmed by the ethnonational/ethnoreligious culture of antagonism and fear. Balkan sports racism is correlated with ethnoreligious nationalism. It is deeply rooted in the culture and creation of ethnoreligious homogenous territories and ethnonational radicalism/far-right patterns. The racist and nationalist antagonistic mind can be liberated through enlightenment; one must notice how the national/ethnic/religious mind functions. The peace philosophy seeks to advance human society marked by processes and relations, cooperation, tolerances, mutual arrangements, and parity to resolve violent, non-violent, or ideological conflicts within the liberty of manifestation of individuals and societies. Thus, general civilizational progress.

The philosophy of Gustav Radbruch made an immeasurable contribution to the development of the concept of the rule of law. The part of Radbruch’s philosophy that still has a great influence on thought about the relationship between justice and mere legality is certainly his Formula, which can be reduced to the venerable stance of lex injusta non est lex.[1] Simply put, according to Radbruch’s Formula, any law that is ‘unjust to an intolerable degree is not legally valid and should not be applied by courts. In this text, the author finds a similarity between Radbruch’s Formula and provision VI/3(c) of the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) and analyzes the content of the aforementioned provision, which regulates the possibility of initiating a concrete review of the constitutionality of laws by ordinary courts. The text analyzes what the aforementioned provision of the B&H Constitution stipulates and what opportunities it offers to ordinary courts when applying the law. It also analyzes the extent to which the potential of the B&H Constitution has been used by ordinary courts in the legal system of B&H.

Approximately sixty lyrical songs were inscribed into the Folklore Archive of the National Museum during the field research in Brcko conducted by Bosnian writer and folklorist Alija Nametak as an employee of the Institute for Folklore Research in 1956, including a ballad about a mother who sacrificed her son to save her brother's life. This moving ballad has been inscribed at least twice more in Bosnia's north, and two variants of this song were recorded in Derventa - they are included in a large collection made by Smajl Bradaric and kept in the National Museum of BiH's Folklore Archive. The National Museum and the BiH Slavic Committee collaborated to publish this collection (Bradari 2018). The mentioned ballad was also discussed in Munib Maglajlic's 1985 study "Muslim Oral Ballads," in the section entitled Conflict in the Family, indicating its importance, but also a solid number of variants throughout Bosnia (Maglajlić 2018). The variants presented here, however, were not the subjects of Maglajlić's analyses, even though he found as many as nine versions of this ballad from various sources for his study. This paper will use the method of three-variant ballad promotion to see the oral poet from Bosnia's north in action. It will try to show and highlight the poetic achievements of the "northern" variants. The poetic shaping of key motifs will be considered in each recorded variant, and the difference between them will be established. Methods of interpretation and analysis will be used.

Research aimed at the etiology of creativity suggests that its development is contributed by both individual and contextual factors. In analyzing contextual factors, more attention is paid to the institutional environment concerning the family. Starting from the above, the goal of this work is to explicate the development of creativity by taking parenting and the early family environment as a conceptual framework. Operationalizing family context through two dimensions – structural (socioeconomic status, family size, birth order) and process (integration, parenting style, parenting dimensions), sought to explore their connection to the development of creativity in early childhood. A special focus was on the process dimension, through the relationship between parenting – as what parents do along with children and creative development in early childhood. In doing so, etiological factors are taken into account that enables and/or inhibit the development of creative potential.

This paper presents the model for the identification of reference points on the lifetime curve of engineering systems. This curve commonly represents the increase and decline of failure in relation to time. A direct correlation between failure rate and costs is assumed in this paper, therefore, statistical and empirical analysis of costs provided reference points. This approach is used for positioning stages of the engineering system’s lifetime with a minimal number of failures and costs, regardless of whether these are acceptable or not. The following three stages are usually identified: the beginning, the stationary part and the end of life. The boundaries between them are recognized on the basis of minimum total lifetime costs and on economic lifetime costs. Model is tested on the dozers, machines frequently used in the mining industry for the earthmoving operations, and which are characterized by high operating and maintenance costs.

Concerning the media’s properties, there is always a possibility of changing groundwater flow conditions surrounding hydroelectric power plants. Causes for such events could be natural or anthropogenic, which is, in many cases, not so obvious to determine. In addition, determining a period when changes in the groundwater flow occur is a complex task. All of the above mentioned are of crucial importance due to the operational work of hydropower plants, i.e., the optimization of the inflow and outflow of the water in the turbine, regardless of the hydropower plant type. All types listed require a particular approach for solving such issues. Rescaled Adjusted Partial Sums (RAPS) is an appropriate time-series analysis method. In this specific case, observed fluctuations in the time series of the groundwater levels could lead to conclusions about possible irregularities in the shallow as well as the deep zones of the underground water. The concept was shown in this paper in the example of the hydroelectric power plant Mostar dam in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It should be noted that the defined methodology was a novel procedure for analyzing and determining the pathways of the flow of groundwater in the surrounding hydropower plant dams. In other words, such analysis could be conducted without the need for complex and expensive drilling and geophysical surveys, tracing, and all other methods.