The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Modeling IoT-aware Business Processes - A State of the Art Report

This research report presents an analysis of the state of the art of modeling Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes. IOT links the physical world to the digital world. Traditionally, we would find information about events and processes in the physical world in the digital world entered by humans and humans using this information to control the physical world. In the IoT paradigm, the physical world is equipped with sensors and actuators to create a direct link with the digital world. Business processes are used to coordinate a complex environment including multiple actors for a common goal, typically in the context of administrative work. In the past few years, we have seen research efforts on the possibilities to model IoT- aware business processes, extending process coordination to real world entities directly. This set of research efforts is relatively small when compared to the overall research effort into the IoT and much of the work is still in the early research stage. To create a basis for a bridge between IoT and BPM, the goal of this report is to collect and analyze the state of the art of existing frameworks for modeling IoT-aware business processes.Comment: 42 page

The digitalization of supply chain: A review

The emergence of new digital technologies as part of Industry 4.0 has enabled the supply chain to be managed more efficiently. We talk about digitalization of the supply chain and this trend refers to the evolution towards a smarter model that involves digital technologies such as Blockchain, IoT, Machine Learning, etc. These technologies actually increase and enhance the ability to optimize planning, sourcing and procurement strategies. Since this topic is of relevant interest for the scientific community, this paper aims to investigate the main discussion themes related to supply chain digitalization using a keyword-based organizing framework to identify, classify and investigate relevant intellectual contributions in this field. Results showed which are the main issues regarding supply chain digitalization as well as promising future research avenues

Paths to Innovation in Supply Chains: The Landscape of Future Research

This chapter presents a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda for supply chain and it is the result of an intensive work jointly performed involving a wide network of stakeholders from discrete manufacturing, process industry and logistics sector to put forward a vision to strengthen European Supply Chains for the next decade. The work is based on matching visions from literature and from experts with several iterations between desk research and workshops, focus groups and interviews. The result is a detailed analysis of the supply chain strategies identified as most relevant for the next years and definition of the related research and innovation topics as future developments and steps for the full implementation of the strategies, thus proposing innovative and cutting-edge actions to be implemented based on technological development and organisational change

The role of blockchain technology in the transition toward the circular economy: Findings from a systematic literature review

The circular economy (CE) has emerged as a paradigm to protect the environment and the well-being of future generations. In parallel, Blockchain technology (BC) has emerged as a critical enabler for accelerating the transition toward a CE. In order to understand and summarize prior research on the role of BC in the CE, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of 70 seminal articles published before July 2022. Six main themes emerged: a) CE approaches and practices, b) BC and the integration of the Internet of Things (IoT), c) sustainable supply chain management, d) BC and the CE in the COVID-19 era, e) sector-specific BC applications, and f) barriers to BC adoption in the CE. Furthermore, we develop a comprehensive framework that integrates stakeholders, strategies and practices, industrial sectors and a BC-enabled CE

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

An Environmental-Based Perspective Framework: Integrating IoT Technology into a Sustainable Automotive Supply Chain

Purpose - Over the next decade, humanity is going to face big environmental problems, and considering these serious issues, businesses are adopting environmentally responsible practices. To put forward specific measures to achieve a more prosperous environmental future, this study aims to develop an environment-based perspective framework by integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) technology into a sustainable automotive supply chain (SASC). Design/methodology/approach - The study presents a conceptual environmental framework - based on 29 factors constituting four stakeholders’ rectifications - that holistically assess the SASC operations as part of the ReSOLVE model utilizing IoT. Then, experts from the SASC, IoT, and sustainability areas participated in two rigorous rounds of a Delphi study to validate the framework. Findings – The results indicate that the conceptual environmental framework proposed would help companies enhance the connectivity between major IoT tools in SASC, which would help develop congruent strategies for inducing sustainable growth. Originality/value - This study adds value to existing knowledge on SASC sustainability and digitalization in the context where the SASC is under enormous pressure, competitiveness, and increased variability

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc