The history of human civilization and the way it has flourished is mostly a testimony to the fact that simple solutions are the strongest and the most effective.
Inventions like a matchbox to light a fire or a safety pin to keep things from falling apart could not have been simpler. But these products have stood the test of time and served their purposes in the most cost-effective way possible.
Today, we probe further into this phenomenon that makes us believe that the simplest approach is usually the best. In the coming segments, we will look into three ideas that validate this claim.
Just-in-Time Port Call
A port call is a process that might sound simple to a layman as it is only an indication of a ship stopping intermittently at a port for a short time in its journey of visiting several places/ports. But, the complexity arises from the fact that ports are not meant to receive one single ship at a time.
Throughout the day, many ships of various sizes arrive at a port, each with its logistical challenges and itineraries to adhere to. This complexity often causes container vessels to wait extended periods for their port time, significantly increasing global emissions. An optimized port call workflow could help reduce these emissions by coordinating arrival times, ensuring that ships neither race to the port nor wait too long.
One study reveals that a port call can involve up to 27 stakeholders, presenting multiple bottlenecks that need resolution. Effective and efficient planning requires these stakeholders to align their operational strategies. Without clear timing for arrivals, port stays, and departures, planning cannot be optimized.
DCSA, Digital Container Shipping Association, a non-profit organization driving standardization and digital innovation in the container shipping sector, realized this problem: There is no single source of “truth” for port call events, and stakeholders need to expend resources manually collecting accurate information on port call events.
Since there is no global standard and available stakeholder APIs are all in different languages and speak different dialects, there is a pressing need for interoperability, without which digitalization and maintenance processes become expensive, unscalable, and unsustainable. To solve this problem, the DCSA introduced a simple solution: the DCSA Just-in-Time implementation framework.
How do the DCSA Just-In-Time Implementation Framework, API, and Message Format Help?
The system provides instant and accurate information, delivering usable data that ensures port calls are unambiguous, fast, safe, transparent, reliable, and sustainable. By standardizing procedures, the system optimizes port call events, interconnects port call operations, and improves the efficiency of each supply chain node involved in the process.
In the long run, standardized procedures also make it possible to benchmark performances and make effective arrangements for predictive analysis and preemptive planning rather than planning ad hoc and abruptly!
The system’s components include open-source API definitions, an interface standard, a message format, and a business process. Because the system is ideally compartmentalized into standardized fragments, it is highly interoperable and scalable.
The system deals with 22 data attributes, and users are free to choose from 112 event timestamp messages to exchange with their port call partners.
The Many Advantages of DCSA’s Just-in-Time Implementation Framework
One of the major problems of not having the right and optimized port call framework in place was the fear of global emissions rising. Data suggested that the application of JIT practices as little as 24 hours before a port call could save nearly 6% fuel usage or 8.08 M ton of emission.
The process calls for data-driven optimization, which increases operational transparency and enhances reliability. Most of all, implementing the framework makes the entire process safe by facilitating the exchange of accurate information about arrival, departure, and vessel dimensions.
One could see that a complex logistical challenge could be solved by essentially making things standardized and streamlined. Often, such simple approaches evade our drive to invest in new solutions. We fail to see things that are in front of our eyes and can be highly effective.
City Centres Heating: A Simple Solution for Easy and Efficient Relief
Rising temperatures in cities and their main centers are a concern that will negatively affect our globalized world.
According to reports published by the European Commission, surface temperatures in cities are sometimes up to 10-15°C higher than in their rural surroundings.
The report also estimated that the temperature in extreme heat islands in cities around the world has risen on average by 1°C since 2003. Heat islands refer to the phenomenon of temperatures being higher within cities than in neighboring rural zones, amplifying the effect of heat waves in cities and increasing the risk to human health.
One solution that the scientific and technological community has proposed recently to tackle this challenge is adaptive roof tiles.
What are Adaptive Roof Tiles?
As the name suggests, these are tiles that can adapt themselves to the outside temperature, making optimal thermoregulation possible. A team of UC Santa Barbara researchers, comprising Charlie Xiao, Elliot Hawkes, and Bolin Liao, for instance, presented an adaptive tile idea. When deployed in arrays on roofs, these tiles could lower heating bills in winter and cooling bills in summer without the need for electronics.
While explaining the core mechanism of the tiles, which is also how most of these adaptive roof tiles work, Charlie Xiao, the lead author of the study, had the following to say:
“It switches between a heating state and a cooling state, depending on the temperature of the tile. The target temperature is about 65° F—about 18° C.”
While adaptive roof tiles could be a workable solution, they would also have to be affordable, cost-effective, and implementation-friendly. While considering all these aspects, another idea that often evades us is the much simpler idea of painting your roofs white.
Painting Building Roofs White
Five years back, much before the present adaptive roof tile solution came to the fore, in 2019, no less than the former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had suggested that painting the roof of a building white reflected sunlight and reduced its temperature and this reduction could be as much as 30C, with the internal temperature of the building falling by as much as seven degrees.
Specifically, the UN Secretary-General was referring to a pilot project in Ahmedabad City in western India, where summer temperatures could reach as high as 50C. The pilot project inspired over 3,000 city rooftops to be painted using both white lime and a special reflective coating.
Anjali Jaiswal of the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council, which oversaw the Ahmedabad project, provided a more specific assessment of the impact of the white roofing project, stating the following:
“Depending on the setting, cool roofs can help keep indoor temperatures lower by 2C to 5C as compared to traditional roofs.”
Another similar study carried out by the California-based Berkeley Lab found that a clean white roof that reflected 80% of sunlight would stay about 31C cooler on a summer afternoon.
This simple idea, which might get lost in the buzz around adaptive roof tiles, has been a tried and tested solution for quite some time now. Reports suggest that white roofs and walls have been a part of traditional architecture for centuries across countries in the southern European and North African regions. In 2019, the city of New York witnessed as much as 10 million sq ft of its rooftops painted white.
The solution was simple. Yet, it proved efficient and cost-effective. After all, it could save air-conditioning costs by as much as 40%.
A similar experiment, conducted in the Central Indian city of Bhopal, showed that solar reflective paint on low-rise buildings could save energy load by 303 kWh in peak summer hours. If we look at the cumulative effect such reflective painting on rooftops generated, it could produce a global cooling effect equivalent to offsetting 24 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide—the equivalent of taking 300 million cars off the road for 20 years. The estimation came from the University of California Berkeley Lab.
Most of all, it was a cost-effective option that most of the low-income, poor countries could seamlessly adopt. More specifically, according to calculations endorsed by Anjali Jaiswal, a lime-wash coating could cost as “little as 1.5 rupees (£0.017; $0.02) per sq ft to more expensive reflective coatings or membranes.”
Switching from adaptive tiles to white-painted roofs might seem like a step back from technology. However, simplicity doesn’t mean abandoning modern technology. For example, in healthcare, telemedicine has shown that simple solutions can still be technologically advanced.
The Benefits of Telemedicine Finally Coming to the Fore
A study led by Michigan State University researchers exhibited a surge in the adoption of telemedicine services. It noted that the percentage of hospitals offering at least one form of telemedicine service increased from 46% in 2017 to 72% in 2021, with a dramatic surge in patient utilization during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The factors driving the surge were simple: telemedicine reduced the need for mundane meetings and patient assessments and allowed practitioners to see more patients per day, making it easier for older fragile patients not to be forced to undertake uncomfortable and unnecessary trips to the healthcare centers.
Therefore, it was no wonder that telemedicine encounters witnessed a 75% increase, growing from approximately 111.4 million in 2020 to nearly 194.4 million in 2021.
However, in this context, we must also remember that the simplicity of a solution does not always guarantee a seamless adoption. Making a solution simple and smooth requires working on the bottlenecks and removing the rough edges. Telemedicine will see increased adoption in the days to come if the adopters work on some basic issues and challenges.
One of such challenges included the area of online data submission. Systems had to be put in place to make such submissions an efficient reality, as over 90% of hospitals allowed patients to view and download medical records online, and only 41% permitted online data submission.
Overcoming this challenge would require onboarding more experts in the domain. The Michigan State University report, for instance, pointed to challenges in exchanging electronic health information, with 85% reporting issues due to interoperability across different vendor platforms. Expert intervention would be required.
At the same time, the challenge called for greater coordination among IT developers and electronic health (EHR) vendors. As per the report, 25% of hospitals identified certified health IT developers, including electronic health record vendors, as frequent sources of information blocking.
According to Joseph Ross, professor at the Yale School of Medicine and co-author of the study:
“The lower rates of telehealth service availability in smaller and for-profit hospitals suggests that efforts are needed to ensure these services are broadly available to patients across all hospitals, enabling patients to obtain the care they need.”
Concluding Thoughts
The road to achieving a simple solution might be complex and resource-intensive. But it is worth the effort. A simple solution is essentially more accessible and affordable. It reduces the barriers to entry and seamlessly grows into something inclusive and democratic.
Because these solutions are cost-effective, users can sustain them in the long term. Their simplicity also eliminates the need for expensive technological intermediaries who would otherwise charge a fortune to implement the solution. Therefore, it is clear that the simplest approaches are usually the best!
Click here to learn how we can cool city centers with basic principles.