Impact Assessment and Recommendations: Making Sense H2020 CAPS Project

The aim of this report is to address the impact of Making Sense, considering not only citizens and communities involved on the ground level, but also the organizations behind it. We chose to aggregate, summarize and break down our review into five dimensions, adopting a STEEP model and looking into sub-topics inside each of them: Social (Values, representations and practices; Community extension effects; Collective events as awareness raising; Internal communication; Inclusion and fairness; Exchanges and synergies with other organisations), Technoscientific (Open hardware, software and other open tools; Training and education; Materials and tools for local communities; Technical and scientific outputs; Open source platforms), Economic (New entrepreneurial initiatives; Alternative relationships with economic assets; Job creation; Direct exploitation and transfer), Environmental (Igniting environmental changes; Reducing environmental harm; Collective measuring and calibration events; Networking effects; Sustainability plan), Policy (New ways and channels of participation; Communities capacity to impact policy decisions; Organisational influence in political or power dynamics). Through our strategies to measure and assess impact we were able to conclude that Making Sense impact goals were clearly fulfilled, recalling its main intended impacts established at the beginning, first divided in societal objectives: “Make visible and tangible the invisible”, “Understand their environment”, “Turn data and insight into compelling stories & action”, “Using public networks of low cost, open source sensors”, and second into desired results: “Better informed, more engaged citizens”, “Impactful dialogues between citizens and governments”, “More data, more insight, better policies”, “More enjoyable, social, inclusive, healthy & livable cities”.JRC.I.2-Foresight, Behavioural Insights and Design for Polic

Discussion Document Digitalization processes in agriculture and the rural environment

12 páginasLa digitalización involucra a todos los actores de las cadenas agroalimentarias; proveedores de insumos, agricultores, procesadores de alimentos, proveedores de software, operadores logísticos, cadenas de distribución, minoristas y consumidores, administraciones públicas, etc. Se presentan una reflexión de la importancia al valor que pueden agregar las nuevas tecnologías, mediante la integración y el tratamiento de datos procedentes de diversas fuentes.Digitization involves all the actors in the agri-food chains; input suppliers, farmers, food processors, software providers, logistics operators, distribution chains, retailers and consumers, public administrations, etc. They present a reflection of the importance to the value that new technologies can add, through the integration and treatment of data from various sources

IoTMapper: a metrics aggregation system architecture in support of smart city solutions

Smart cities are, nowadays, an unavoidable and growing reality, supported on software platforms that support city management, through the processing and presentation of a large number of data, obtained from sensors used throughout the cities. Low-power wide area networks (LPWAN) leverage the sensorization process; however, urban landscape, in turn, induces a high probability of change in the propagation conditions of the LPWAN network, thus requiring active monitoring solutions for assessing the city LPWAN network condition. Currently existing solutions usually consider the existence of only one type of LPWAN network to be monitored. In this paper, an architecture for aggregation of metrics from heterogeneous LPWAN networks is presented. The architecture, named IoTMapper, combines purpose build components with existing components from the FIWARE and Apache Kafka ecosystems. Implementation details for the LPWAN networks are abstracted by adapters so that new networks may be easily added. The validation was carried out using real data collected for long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) in Lisbon, and a simulated data set extrapolated from the collected data. The results indicate that the presented architecture is a viable solution for metrics aggregation that may be expanded to support multiple networks. However, some of the considered FIWARE components present performance bottlenecks that may hinder the scaling of the architecture while processing new message arrivals.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Smart contract and web dapp for tracing sustainability indicators in the textile and clothing value chain

Mestrado em Engenharia Informática na Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Viana do CasteloNa sociedade atual, o têxtil e vestuário é um dos maiores setores de mercado do mundo. O rápido crescimento desta indústria está a ter impactos sem precedentes na sustentabilidade do planeta, respondendo por consequências negativas ambientais, sociais e de saúde. As tendências da fast-fashion, juntamente com a falta de transparência na cadeia de valor têxtil global, somam-se a cenários desfavoráveis para o mundo, à medida que os níveis crescentes de poluição e consumo de recursos dentro da cadeia de valor atingem máximos históricos a cada ano que passa. O ciclo de vida de uma peça de roupa precisa de se adaptar a um modelo económico regenerativo em vez de linear, que acaba no equivalente a um caminhão de lixo de produtos têxteis sendo descartado num aterro sanitário a cada segundo [1]. Não só as indústrias precisam de reformular os seus processos para circularizar as suas cadeias de valor e promover ações sustentáveis, mas também os consumidores precisam de participar do processo de manter os produtos no círculo da cadeia de valor, pois cabe a eles decidir o destino final de um produto vestuário aquando o seu fim da vida útil. Com estas questões em mente, esta dissertação visa desenvolver duas soluções que possam mitigar os problemas a cima mencionados e promover ações sustentáveis rumo a uma economia circular na cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário. Uma solução business-to-business baseada em smart contracts do Hyperledger Fabric para gerir a cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário com funcionalidade de rastreabilidade foi desenvolvida como prova de conceito para apoiar as reivindicações de sustentabilidade dos participantes na cadeia de valor, da fibra à peça final de vestuário. A actual funcionabilidade de rastreabilidade desenvolvida no smart contract fornece aos operadores da cadeia de valor a capacidade de rastrear um lote até à sua origem, contudo, também limita a escalabilidade devido ao aumento exponencial do tamanho do bloco, especialmente se considerarmos uma cadeia de valor circular. Para os consumidores, foi proposta uma aplicação descentralizada business-to-consumer-to-consumer com elementos de eco-gamificação para promover o envolvimento e motivação do utilizador para a realização de tarefas que contribuam para a adoção de uma economia circular na cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário. Após testar a usabilidade da aplicação com o questionário AttrakDiff, concluiu-se que o sistema precisa de focar a sua usabilidade em prol de um produto orientado à tarefa em vez da orientação pessoal atual da aplicação a fim de promover ações que contribuam para a economia circular da cadeia de valor do têxtil e vestuário.In today’s society, Textile and Clothing (T&C) is one of the biggest market sectors world wide.The sheer size and fast growth of this industry is having unprecedented impacts on sustainability, accounting for negative environmental, social and health consequences. The fast-fashion trends along side the lack of transparency in the global T&C value chain add up to unfavorable scenarios for the world as the increas- ing levels of pollution and resource consumption within the value chain reach historic highs with every year that passes. The lifecycle of a clothing item needs to adapt to a regenerative economic model instead of a linear one that ends up in the equivalent of a garbage truck full of textiles being disposed into a landfill every second [1]. Not only do the industries need to revamp their processes to circularize their value chains and promote sustainable actions, but the consumers also need to partake in the process of keeping the products in the value chain loop as it is up to them to make the final decision upon the end-of-life of an item of clothing. With these issues in mind,this dissertation aims to develop two solutions that can mitigate the aforementioned problems and promote sustainable actions towards a circular economy in the T&C value chain. A Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Business-to-Business (B2B) T&C value chainmanagement smart contract solution builton Hyperledger Fabric with traceability features was developed to support the sustainability claims of participants in the value chain, from fiber to garment. The current traceability feature developed into the smart contract provides value chain operators the capabilities to trace a batch back to its origin, however, it also constraints scalability due to the exponential in crease in block size specially if considering a circular value chain. For the consumers, a Business-to-Consumer-to-Consumer (B2C2C) Decentralized Application (DApp) was proposed with eco-gamification elements fo rpromoting the user’s engagement and motivation to complete tasks that contribute for the adoption of a circular economy in the T&C value chain. After testing the consumer DApp’s usability with the AttrakDiff survey, it was concluded that the system needs to focus it susability towards a task-oriented product instead of the current self-oriented results in order to promote actions that contribute to the circular economy of the T&C value chain

Proceedings of the Conference on Production Systems and Logistics: CPSL 2022

[no abstract available

Smart Monitoring and Controlling of Appliances using LoRa Based IoT System

In the era of Industry 4.0, remote monitoring and controlling appliance/equipment at home, institute, or industry from a long distance with low power consumption remains challenging. At present, some smart phones are being actively used to control appliances at home or institute using Internet of Things (IoT ) systems. This paper presents a novel smart automa-tion system using long range (LoRa) technology. The proposed LoRa based system consists of wireless communication system and different types of sensors, operated by a smart phone ap-plication and powered by a low-power battery, with an operating range of 3–12 km distance. The system established a connection between an android phone and a microprocessor (ESP32) through Wi-Fi at the sender end. The ESP32 module was connected to a LoRa module. At the re-ceiver end, an ESP32 module and LoRa module without Wi-Fi was employed. Wide Area Net-work (WAN ) communication protocol was used on the LoRa module to provide switching functionality of the targeted area. The performance of the system was evaluated by three real-life case studies through measuring environmental temperature and humidity, detecting fire, and controlling the switching functionality of appliances. Obtaining correct environmental data, fire detection with 90% accuracy, and switching functionality with 92.33% accuracy at a distance up to 12 km demonstrated the high performance of the system. The proposed smart system with modular design proved to be highly effective in controlling and monitoring home appliances from a longer distance with relatively lower power consumption

A Systematic Review of Blockchain Applications

For this study, the researchers conducted a systematic literature review to answer complex questions about the field of blockchain technology. We used an unbiased systematic review process to find works on blockchain-based applications and developed a Python code that searched various online databases. This paper provides an overview of the characteristics, mode of operation, and applications of blockchains in various domains such as transportation, commerce and industry, privacy and security, the financial sector, government, education, healthcare, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The aim was to identify the key research themes addressed in existing articles within each application domain and suggest future research directions for these domains. We analyzed a set of 750 articles published between 2015 and 2021 that dealt with blockchain applications. We found that financial management and security issues have been the main research focus since 2015. However, the use of blockchain in education has become a central research theme in 2021. Healthcare, IoT, and government applications have also grown in popularity. We furthermore analyzed some of the implementations of privacy mechanisms, as well as the challenges and future directions that need to be addressed for effective blockchain deployment. This study contributes to existing research by providing a comprehensive overview of blockchain application themes and their emerging areas for stakeholders in diverse sectors.V rámci této studie provedli výzkumníci systematický přehled literatury, aby zodpověděli komplexní otázky týkající se technologie blockchain. K vyhledání prací o aplikacích založených na blockchainu jsme použili nezaujatý proces systematického přehledu a vyvinuli jsme kód v jazyce Python, který prohledával různé online databáze. Tento článek poskytuje přehled charakteristik, způsobu fungování a aplikací blockchainů v různých oblastech, jako je doprava, obchod a průmysl, ochrana soukromí a bezpečnost, finanční sektor, státní správa, vzdělávání, zdravotnictví a internet věcí (IoT). Cílem bylo identifikovat klíčová témata výzkumu, kterými se zabývají existující články v rámci jednotlivých aplikačních domén, a navrhnout budoucí směry výzkumu pro tyto domény. Analyzovali jsme soubor 750 článků publikovaných v letech 2015 až 2021, které se zabývaly aplikacemi blockchainu. Zjistili jsme, že od roku 2015 se výzkum zaměřuje především na otázky finanční správy a bezpečnosti. V roce 2021 se však ústředním tématem výzkumu stalo využití blockchainu ve vzdělávání. Rostla také popularita aplikací ve zdravotnictví, internetu věcí a státní správě. Dále jsme analyzovali některé z implementací mechanismů ochrany soukromí a také výzvy a budoucí směry, které je třeba řešit pro efektivní nasazení blockchainu. Tato studie přispívá ke stávajícímu výzkumu tím, že poskytuje ucelený přehled témat aplikací blockchainu a jejich nově vznikajících oblastí pro zúčastněné strany v různých odvětvích

Enabling Circular Economy with Digital Solutions: Multiple-case study in Finland

Circular economy and the benefits of digital solutions are constantly gaining interest among researchers, companies and organizations. The two trends have separately received much attention during the recent years, but the cooperative opportunities of digital solutions in the area of circular economy are still to be further researched. While circular economy is introducing a new approach to consumption by keeping materials in a continuous cycle, digital solutions are generating new opportunities and innovations. The correlation between the two trends has been recognised but the empirical research results on the subject have been missing. The conducted research focused on gaining insight into benefits, requirements and challenges related to the use of digital solutions in circular economy operations. Four organizations that operate with different circular economy solutions in Finland were interviewed based on current understanding on the subjects gained from scientific literature and expert interviews. As the interviewed companies focused on different areas of circular economy, the research provided results on all three value drivers of circular economy listed as resource efficiency, ex-tending product lifetime and closing material loops. The different digital technologies used in the context of circular economy were identified and sorted under the categories of data collection, data integration and data analysis technologies. The different categories also resemble the development and implementation status of digital solutions as the earlier technologies are required to achieve development in the next category. Despite large attention on data analysis technologies and the opportunities of Big Data, the development status of most organizations still focuses on data collection solutions revolving around Internet of Things and its applications. Clear benefits can be seen to be achieved with data analysis solutions, but implementations on that level remain to be identified especially on a large scale. Even though the focus is still on data collection technologies, several benefits and effects to promote circular economy through digitalization were identified. This indicates that digital solutions have an important part in circular economy development as large potential is still to be researched with the benefits of data integration and data analysis technologies. The results on interviews indicated that the requirements on implementing digitalized circular economy match the literature-based results, adding also new findings to the discussion. Customer interaction and consumer decision weighted heavily in the development of circular and digital solutions as the users need to agree on the development decisions for the solution to succeed. Additionally, the challenges found differed largely from the earlier research as the literature-based challenges focused on physical limitation and terminology discussion, where the interviewed organizations pinpointed the importance of finding top experts and solving data ownership issues. At the end, future development areas and directions of digitalized circular economy was discussed where four repeating key areas were identified. The upcoming key areas to follow and develop are the implementation of data analysis technologies, accessibility of customer information, solutions to promote preventive maintenance and effective use of cross-organizational unified systems.Kiertotalous ja digitaaliset teknologiat keräävät jatkuvasti lisää huomiota tutkijoiden, yritysten ja organisaatioiden keskuudessa. Näitä kahta trendiä on tutkittu viime vuosina huomattavan paljon erillisinä kokonaisuuksina, mutta niiden yhdistelmästä ilmenevät mahdollisuudet ovat vasta äskettäin nousseet tutkimuksen keskiöön. Ilmiönä kiertotalous haastaa perinteisen kulutusmallin, jossa raaka-aineet päätyvät valmistuksen ja käytön jälkeen kaatopaikalle, pitämällä tuotteet mukana materiaalikierrossa. Samaan aikaan digitalisaatio mahdollistaa uusia toimintamalleja ja innovaatioita, joilla materiaaliratkaisujen toteuttamista voidaan tukea entistä tehokkaammin. Näiden kahden trendin välillä voidaan havaita selkeä korrelaatio, mutta sen hyödyntämistä ei vielä ole empiirisesti tutkittu. Toteutettu tutkimus keskittyy perehtymään digitaalisten ratkaisujen hyötyihin, vaatimuksiin sekä haasteisiin kiertotalouden prosesseissa. Tutkimuksessa haastateltiin neljää suomalaista yritystä, jotka toimivat kiertotalouden parissa ja hyödyntävät ratkaisuissaan digitalisaatiota. Haastattelut perustuivat kirjallisuuteen ja alan ammattilaisilta hankittuun ajankohtaiseen tietoon aiheesta. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan kiertotaloutta kolmen kiertotalouden ajurin avulla, joita ovat resurssitehokkuus, tuotteiden elinkaaren pidentäminen sekä materiaalivirtojen sulkeminen. Valittujen yritysten ratkaisut rakentuvat eri ajurien ympärille, joten tutkimuksessa digitalisaation hyötyjä on tarkasteltu laajasti eri lähtökohdista. Tutkimuksessa tunnistettiin eri digitaaliset teknologiat, joita hyödynnetään kiertotalouden yhteydessä. Teknologiat jaettiin dataa kerääviin, dataa integroiviin ja dataa analysoiviin teknologioihin, joiden tunnistettiin vastaavan myös teknologisen kehityksen tasoja. Seuraavan tason teknologiat vaativat edeltävän tason teknologioiden hyödyntämistä, jolloin dataa analysoivien teknologioiden käyttöönotto vaatii ensin suuria investointeja dataa integroivien ja keräävien teknologioiden implementointiin. Dataa analysoivien teknologioiden suuresta suosiosta huolimatta, niiden hyödyntäminen on vasta vähäisellä tasolla sillä suurin osa yrityksistä kehittää vielä ratkaisuja dataa keräävien teknologioiden ympärillä. Analysoivilla ratkaisuilla koetaan olevan paljon potentiaalia, mutta etenkin suuren mittakaavan ratkaisuja ei kukaan vielä ole toteuttanut. Vaikka digitaalinen kehitys kiertotalouden alueella on vielä alkuvaiheessa, tutkimuksissa tunnis-tettiin useita hyötyjä, joilla etenkin esineiden internetin avulla kiertotalouden toteutusta voidaan tehostaa. Tutkimuksen tulokset osoittavat, että yritysten haastattelutuloksista sekä alan kirjallisuudesta voidaan havaita yhtenevät vaatimukset digitaalisen kiertotalouden implementoinnille. Vaatimuksissa korostuu asiakasyhteistyö sekä kuluttajiin vaikuttaminen, joilla on suuri merkitys kiertotalouden uusien ratkaisujen kehitykselle. Jotta uusia menetelmiä voidaan onnistuneesti ottaa käyttöön, tulee kuluttajien hyväksyä ja omaksua muutokset omiin käytäntöihinsä. Toisin kuin vaati-mukset, listatut implementoinnin haasteet eroavat merkittävästi kirjallisuuden ja haastattelutulosten välillä. Kirjallisuudessa haasteet perustuvat luonnollisiin rajoituksiin sekä jätteen määrittelyyn, jotka asettavat haasteita toiminnalle, kun haastattelutuloksissa haasteet keskittyvät alan osaajien löytämiseen sekä datan omistajuuskysymysten ratkaisuun. Haastattelujen lopuksi yritysten kanssa keskusteltiin digitaalisen kiertotalouden kehityssuunnista ja tärkeimmistä kohteista, jotka tulevat muuttamaan alaa. Tärkeimmiksi kehityskohteiksi tunnistettiin, analysointi tekno-logioiden implementointi, asiakastietojen hyödyntäminen, ennakoivat huoltamismenetelmät sekä yritysten välisten järjestelmien rakentaminen

Insights Into Global Engineering Education After the Birth of Industry 5.0

Insights Into Global Engineering Education After the Birth of Industry 5.0 presents a comprehensive overview of recent developments in the fields of engineering and technology. The book comprises single chapters authored by various researchers and edited by an expert active in the engineering education research area. It provides a thorough overview of the latest research efforts by international authors on engineering education and opens potential new research paths for further novel developments