Carbon-Footprint Policy Of The Top Ten Global Retailers: Contribution To Sustainable Development

The goal of the article is to study the policy of the most prominent ten global retailers relative to the reduction in their carbon footprint. This policy is an integral part of the environmental component of the organizational policy for sustainable development. The research has an exploratory character and is based on the analysis of public information available on the Internet about the objectives, strategies and achievements of the top ten global retailers in the field of carbon-footprint. According to the research objectives, the main results of the study reveal: the organizations that have sustainable development objectives and policies as well as carbon-footprint objectives and policies; the strategies applied for the reduction in their carbon footprint and the results obtained. Are the top ten global retailers a benchmark as regards the carbon-footprint policies? Do they represent a model which has to be followed by other retailers? Several answers may be found in the present article.sustainable development, environmental assessment, ecological footprint, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emissions, global retailers

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