The Chinese position as a global player in international comparison with the WTO members: Efficiency analysis and 4IR

During the last quarter-century, globalisation processes affected changes in the world economy in the form of intensifying competition in the international and internal markets. The result is the creation of a global marketplace that is mostly indifferent to national borders and governmental influences. This development has generated widespread interest in competitiveness. Competitiveness affects international relations, especially nowadays, given the changing position of the global leaders and the growth of new economic powers such as China. China has come a long way and has the opportunity to be a global leader in several required fields that will be the cornerstones of global growth in the next decades. Led by China, emerging economies are increasing their share in the worldwide economy and intensifying competition in nearly all sectors. It creates new threats and challenges for players in the global economy, and growing competitiveness must be efficient. The article evaluates the Chinese competitiveness in comparison with the World Trade Organization members by the Data Envelopment Analysis in the pre-in-post crisis period and considering the Fourth Industrial Revolution shifting humanity into a new phase.Web of Science6148

Public entities driven robotic innovation in urban areas

Cities present new challenges and needs to satisfy and improve lifestyle for their citizens under the concept “Smart City”. In order to achieve this goal in a global manner, new technologies are required as the robotic one. But Public entities unknown the possibilities offered by this technology to get solutions to their needs. In this paper the development of the Innovative Public Procurement instruments is explained, specifically the process PDTI (Public end Users Driven Technological Innovation) as a driving force of robotic research and development and offering a list of robotic urban challenges proposed by European cities that have participated in such a process. In the next phases of the procedure, this fact will provide novel robotic solutions addressed to public demand that are an example to be followed by other Smart Cities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Energy-water-environment nexus underpinning future desalination sustainability

Energy-water-environment nexus is very important to attain COP21 goal, maintaining environment temperature increase below 2 °C, but unfortunately two third share of CO2 emission has already been used and the remaining will be exhausted by 2050. A number of technological developments in power and desalination sectors improved their efficiencies to save energy and carbon emission but still they are operating at 35% and 10% of their thermodynamic limits. Research in desalination processes contributing to fuel World population for their improved living standard and to reduce specific energy consumption and to protect environment. Recently developed highly efficient nature-inspired membranes (aquaporin & graphene) and trend in thermally driven cycle's hybridization could potentially lower then energy requirement for water purification. This paper presents a state of art review on energy, water and environment interconnection and future energy efficient desalination possibilities to save energy and protect environment

Desalination Processes’ Efficiency and Future Roadmap

For future sustainable seawater desalination, the importance of achieving better energy efficiency of the existing 19,500 commercial-scale desalination plants cannot be over emphasized. The major concern of the desalination industry is the inadequate approach to energy efficiency evaluation of diverse seawater desalination processes by omitting the grade of energy supplied. These conventional approaches would suffice if the efficacy comparison were to be conducted for the same energy input processes. The misconception of considering all derived energies as equivalent in the desalination industry has severe economic and environmental consequences. In the realms of the energy and desalination system planners, serious judgmental errors in the process selection of green installations are made unconsciously as the efficacy data are either flawed or inaccurate. Inferior efficacy technologies' implementation decisions were observed in many water-stressed countries that can burden a country's economy immediately with higher unit energy cost as well as cause more undesirable environmental effects on the surroundings. In this article, a standard primary energy-based thermodynamic framework is presented that addresses energy efficacy fairly and accurately. It shows clearly that a thermally driven process consumes 2.5-3% of standard primary energy (SPE) when combined with power plants. A standard universal performance ratio-based evaluation method has been proposed that showed all desalination processes performance varies from 10-14% of the thermodynamic limit. To achieve 2030 sustainability goals, innovative processes are required to meet 25-30% of the thermodynamic limit

Desalination Processes’ Efficiency and Future Roadmap

For future sustainable seawater desalination, the importance of achieving better energy efficiency of the existing 19,500 commercial-scale desalination plants cannot be over emphasized. The major concern of the desalination industry is the inadequate approach to energy efficiency evaluation of diverse seawater desalination processes by omitting the grade of energy supplied. These conventional approaches would suffice if the efficacy comparison were to be conducted for the same energy input processes. The misconception of considering all derived energies as equivalent in the desalination industry has severe economic and environmental consequences. In the realms of the energy and desalination system planners, serious judgmental errors in the process selection of green installations are made unconsciously as the efficacy data are either flawed or inaccurate. Inferior efficacy technologies' implementation decisions were observed in many water-stressed countries that can burden a country's economy immediately with higher unit energy cost as well as cause more undesirable environmental effects on the surroundings. In this article, a standard primary energy-based thermodynamic framework is presented that addresses energy efficacy fairly and accurately. It shows clearly that a thermally driven process consumes 2.5-3% of standard primary energy (SPE) when combined with power plants. A standard universal performance ratio-based evaluation method has been proposed that showed all desalination processes performance varies from 10-14% of the thermodynamic limit. To achieve 2030 sustainability goals, innovative processes are required to meet 25-30% of the thermodynamic limit

InterCloud: Utility-Oriented Federation of Cloud Computing Environments for Scaling of Application Services

Cloud computing providers have setup several data centers at different geographical locations over the Internet in order to optimally serve needs of their customers around the world. However, existing systems do not support mechanisms and policies for dynamically coordinating load distribution among different Cloud-based data centers in order to determine optimal location for hosting application services to achieve reasonable QoS levels. Further, the Cloud computing providers are unable to predict geographic distribution of users consuming their services, hence the load coordination must happen automatically, and distribution of services must change in response to changes in the load. To counter this problem, we advocate creation of federated Cloud computing environment (InterCloud) that facilitates just-in-time, opportunistic, and scalable provisioning of application services, consistently achieving QoS targets under variable workload, resource and network conditions. The overall goal is to create a computing environment that supports dynamic expansion or contraction of capabilities (VMs, services, storage, and database) for handling sudden variations in service demands. This paper presents vision, challenges, and architectural elements of InterCloud for utility-oriented federation of Cloud computing environments. The proposed InterCloud environment supports scaling of applications across multiple vendor clouds. We have validated our approach by conducting a set of rigorous performance evaluation study using the CloudSim toolkit. The results demonstrate that federated Cloud computing model has immense potential as it offers significant performance gains as regards to response time and cost saving under dynamic workload scenarios.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, conference pape