This paper describes the origins of environmental, social and governance (ESG) in compliance and brand building, and its evolution into a topic of significant strategic importance to airports owing to the stakeholders driving it forward: finance, government, employees and the airport organisational ecosystem. The paper describes factors acting to resist the growth of the ESG trend, while underscoring the importance of ESG as a risk management tool and a way to maintain the airport’s social licence to operate. It describes the approach that Vantage Group has employed to address ESG at its airports, including establishing an indicator framework drawing on widely accepted standards, gathering data to establish a baseline for those indicators, setting goals and embarking on a journey of continuous improvement to enhance ESG performance.
Uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) are gaining traction in precision-agriculture missions, yet systematic tools for planning their flights remain sparse. Crop spraying illustrates the gap: an optimal mission must minimize flight distance and guarantee that every plant receives an adequate dose. We frame this dual goal as a coverage vehicle-routing problem (CoVRP) and solve it with a tiered decomposition that selects balanced launch sites, orders a compact set of routing centroids, and then joins independent coverage sub-tours into a single route. On two representative fields, a 3.25 meter active-node spacing-paired with a 3 meter spray radius and 4 to 5 high-level nodes-yields near-perfect coverage while keeping solve times below 1 minute on a desktop CPU; a wind-aware extension that replaces circular footprints with ellipses preserves this speed and trims in-field coverage by only 5%. A second application, field surveying, shows how a similar optimization engine can respect dynamic no-fly windows: wind forecasts are converted into a time-indexed availability matrix that activates or deactivates launch facilities as conditions change. In a prototype test case, the planner automatically routes around weather-induced closures and still produces a feasible survey schedule. These results mark a step toward end-to-end, real-time mission planning for weather-resilient precision agriculture.
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We analyze pricing patterns and price level effects of algorithms in the market segments for OTC-antiallergics and -painkillers in Germany. Based on a novel hourly dataset which spans over four months and contains over 10 million single observations, we produce the following results. First, price levels are substantially higher for antiallergics compared to the segment of painkillers, which seems to be reflective of a lower price elasticity for antiallergics. Second, we find evidence that this exploitation of demand characteristics is heterogeneous with respect to the pricing technology. Retailers with a more advanced pricing technology establish even higher price premiums for antiallergics than retailers with a less advanced technology. Third, retailers with more advanced pricing technology post lower prices which contradicts previous findings from simulations but are in line with empirical findings if many firms compete in a market. Lastly, our data suggests that pricing algorithms take web-traffic of retailers’ online-shops as demand side feedback into account when choosing prices. Our results stress the importance of a careful policy approach towards pricing algorithms and highlights new areas of risks when multiple players employ the same pricing technology.
