•Carbon mitigation effect of information and communication technology (ICT) investment is assessed.•ICT investment has an ideal decoupling state with carbon intensity in most economies.•Emission ...intensity of ICT investment contributes an increase of carbon emissions.•Efficiency of ICT investment is most significant factor in inhibiting emissions.•ICT industrial structure should be further improved in the post-pandemic era.
Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies are facing a substantial increase in the information and communication technology (ICT) investments in the context of rapid spread of the Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-2019) pandemic and constraints of emissions reduction. However, the mechanism of the impact of ICT investments on carbon dioxide is still unclear. Therefore, by employing the decoupling-factor model and Generalized Divisia Index Method, we explore the decoupling states of ICT investments and emission intensity, and the driving factors of ICT investments’ scale, intensity, structure, and efficiency effects on carbon emissions in 20 OECD economies between 2000 and 2018. The results indicate that the number of economies with an ideal state of strong decoupling rose to nine between 2009 and 2018 compared to no economies between 2000 and 2009. The emission intensity of ICT investments contributes to a significant increase of carbon emissions, and the structure and efficiency of ICT investments always restrain the growth of carbon emissions. Significant emissions changes caused by the driving factors are shown in many economies before and after the crisis, reflecting the differences in the strategic choices of ICT investments and the impact on emissions due to the crisis such as the COVID-2019 pandemic. And policy implications for energy and carbon dioxide mitigation strategies in the post-COVID-2019 era are also provided.
Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) present a promising advanced technology that can enhance people life quality and smartness of cities dramatically and increase overall economic efficiency. ...UAVs have attained a significant interest in supporting many applications such as surveillance, agriculture, communication, transportation, pollution monitoring, disaster management, public safety, healthcare, and environmental preservation. Industry 4.0 applications are conceived of intelligent things that can automatically and collaboratively improve beyond 5G (B5G). Therefore, the Internet of Things (IoT) is required to ensure collaboration between the vast multitude of things efficiently anywhere in real-world applications that are monitored in real-time. However, many IoT devices consume a significant amount of energy when transmitting the collected data from surrounding environments. Due to a drone's capability to fly closer to IoT, UAV technology plays a vital role in greening IoT by transmitting collected data to achieve a sustainable, reliable, eco-friendly Industry 4.0. This survey presents an overview of the techniques and strategies proposed recently to achieve green IoT using UAVs infrastructure for a reliable and sustainable smart world. This survey is different from other attempts in terms of concept, focus, and discussion. Finally, various use cases, challenges, and opportunities regarding green IoT using UAVs are presented.
•We identify and examine the critical barriers to big data analytics.•We apply Delphi-based analytic hierarchy process.•We collect data from five Bangladeshi manufacturing companies.•We perform ...sensitivity analysis to justify the robustness of the barrier rankings.
Recently, big data (BD) has attracted researchers and practitioners due to its potential usefulness in decision-making processes. Big data analytics (BDA) is becoming increasingly popular among manufacturing companies as it helps gain insights and make decisions based on BD. However, there many barriers to the adoption of BDA in manufacturing supply chains. It is therefore necessary for manufacturing companies to identify and examine the nature of each barrier. Previous studies have mostly built conceptual frameworks for BDA in a given situation and have ignored examining the nature of the barriers to BDA. Due to the significance of both BD and BDA, this research aims to identify and examine the critical barriers to the adoption of BDA in manufacturing supply chains in the context of Bangladesh. This research explores the existing body of knowledge by examining these barriers using a Delphi-based analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Data were obtained from five Bangladeshi manufacturing companies. The findings of this research are as follows: (i) data-related barriers are most important, (ii) technology-related barriers are second, and (iii) the five most important components of these barriers are (a) lack of infrastructure, (b) complexity of data integration, (c) data privacy, (d) lack of availability of BDA tools and (e) high cost of investment. The findings can assist industrial managers to understand the actual nature of the barriers and potential benefits of using BDA and to make policy regarding BDA adoption in manufacturing supply chains. A sensitivity analysis was carried out to justify the robustness of the barrier rankings.
Purpose
Smart cities provide fully integrated and networked connectivity between virtual/digital assets and physical building/infrastructure assets to form digital economies. However, industrial ...espionage, cyber-crime and deplorable politically driven cyber-interventions threaten to disrupt and/or physically damage the critical infrastructure that supports national wealth generation and preserves the health, safety and welfare of the populous. The purpose of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of cyber-threats confronting critical infrastructure asset management reliant upon a common data environment to augment building information modelling (BIM) implementation.
Design/methodology/approach
An interpretivist, methodological approach to reviewing pertinent literature (that contained elements of positivism) was adopted. The ensuing mixed methods analysis: reports upon case studies of cyber-physical attacks; reveals distinct categories of hackers; identifies and reports upon the various motivations for the perpetrators/actors; and explains the varied reconnaissance techniques adopted.
Findings
The paper concludes with direction for future research work and a recommendation to utilize innovative block chain technology as a potential risk mitigation measure for digital built environment vulnerabilities.
Originality/value
While cyber security and digitization of the built environment have been widely covered within the extant literature in isolation, scant research has hitherto conducted an holistic review of the perceived threats, deterrence applications and future developments in a digitized Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) sector. This review presents concise and lucid reference guidance that will intellectually challenge, and better inform, both practitioners and researchers in the AECO field of enquiry.
Nontechnical losses, particularly due to electrical theft, have been a major concern in power system industries for a long time. Large-scale consumption of electricity in a fraudulent manner may ...imbalance the demand-supply gap to a great extent. Thus, there arises the need to develop a scheme that can detect these thefts precisely in the complex power networks. So, keeping focus on these points, this paper proposes a comprehensive top-down scheme based on decision tree (DT) and support vector machine (SVM). Unlike existing schemes, the proposed scheme is capable enough to precisely detect and locate real-time electricity theft at every level in power transmission and distribution (T&D). The proposed scheme is based on the combination of DT and SVM classifiers for rigorous analysis of gathered electricity consumption data. In other words, the proposed scheme can be viewed as a two-level data processing and analysis approach, since the data processed by DT are fed as an input to the SVM classifier. Furthermore, the obtained results indicate that the proposed scheme reduces false positives to a great extent and is practical enough to be implemented in real-time scenarios.
In recent years, smart city (SC) has attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry due to a mix of urbanization, informatization, and globalization. Although several literature ...reviews of SC research have been conducted, there still appears to be a lack of systematic quantitative and visual investigation and multidisciplinary scrutiny of the structure and evolution of this field. This paper conducts a scientometric review of the progressively synthesized network derived from 7840 bibliographic records from a topic search on SC in the period 1990–2019. Using CiteSpace, co-occurrence analysis of categories is conducted to explore the evolution of the disciplines engaged in SC research; co-word analysis of the keywords and document co-citation analysis associated with cluster analysis are further performed to reveal the development paths and research topics in terms of burst terms, text and citation-based clusters, citation structure, and pivotal points in the field. These scientometric techniques are combined to: (1) reveal the intellectual division of this developing field using a visual and comprehensive approach, (2) identify in chronological order the 10 core research sub-topics in this area with burst references and terms, (3) identify Internet of Things, big data, and fog computing as the most promising technologies for SC planning and development, and (4) conclude that smart sustainable cities and sustainable smart cities are the two emerging trends in the domain. Overall, this paper provides a visual, quantitative, and longitudinal large-scale review of the most recent literature on SC research, providing a broad overview and system thinking for researchers and practitioners with respect to SC.
•A comprehensive analysis and interactive visualization of 7840 citation data have been performed this scientometric review.•10 research topics have been explored from text and citation-based clusters in this progressively developed domain.•ICT-related field and urban planning field are detected as the two pivotal axes in promoting SC planning and development.•Smart sustainable cities and sustainable smart cities are the two promising directions for future SCs.
Despite evidence of an upward trend in the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs), current media discourse suggests that older adults (those 60-plus) lag behind in terms of ...engagement with digital technology. Through a survey and interviews with older adults, we investigate how this population views its own digital skills, barriers to digital literacy, and the social and institutional support system it draws on for help with technology. A lack of skills and limited social and institutional systems make it difficult for older adults to gain experience and comfort with technology. However, support systems, such as family and peers, can help mediate older adults’ reluctance with technology. We propose a model with the aim of understanding the needs of older adults in gaining greater digital literacy.
During recent years, one of the most familiar names scaling new heights and creating a benchmark in the world is the Internet of Things (IoT). It is indeed the future of communication that has ...transformed things (objects) of the real-world into smart objects. The functional aspect of IoT is to unite every object of the world under one common infrastructure; in such a manner that humans not only have the ability to control those objects; but to provide regular and timely updates on the current status. IoT concepts were proposed a couple of years ago and it may not be incorrect to quote that this term has become a benchmark for establishing communication among objects. In context to the present standings of IoT, a comprehensive review of literature has been undertaken on various aspects of IoT, i.e., technologies, applications, challenges, etc. This paper evaluates various contributions of researchers in different areas of applications. These papers were investigated on various parameters identified in each application domain. Furthermore, existing challenges in these areas are highlighted. Future research directions in the field of IoT have also been highlighted in the study to equip novel researchers in this area to assess the current standings of IoT and to improve upon them with innovative ideas.
The globalization revolution has led to many countries considering advancing technology, which has led to electronic finance becoming an important aspect in all economic and financial sectors. This ...study aims to investigate the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on the financial development index of six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries from the period 2000 to 2016. The results are reported in terms of two main ICT variables: fixed broadband and Internet users as a proxy of ICT and domestic credit to private sector as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) and broad money supply/GDP as two proxies of the financial development index. This methodology used fixed effects (FEs) estimations, and the results show that an increase in fixed broadband has a statistically significant and positive effect on both proxies of financial development. In terms of domestic credit as a percentage of the GDP proxy, the positive effects of ICT (broadband) are greater than the one from Internet users. A 1% increase in fixed broadband leads to approximately 2% increase in financial development, but the Internet user variable resulted in about a 0.09% increase. The other money supply proxy increased by 0.40% when ICT increased by 1%. Additionally, money supply increased by 0.11% when the Internet user ratio increased by 1% .To control for the endogeneity problem, the study used a generalized method of moments estimator, and the results confirm the previous results of the FE. Moreover, the negative impact of economic growth and natural resources was found to be valid and significant, while urbanization and trade openness were found to significantly and positively affect both financial development proxies. The main conclusion of the study is that GCC countries should take action in building an effective joint information system to help construct efficient economic sectors.
Using the panel data of 66 countries for the period 1996–2019, the current research explores the influences of information and communication technology (ICT) on energy security. We consider the role ...of financial development, human capital and technological development to explore the channels through which ICT influences energy security. Our empirical results reveal the adverse impact of ICT on energy demand and energy security. In addition, ICT mainly affects energy security through financial development and technological progress. Although human capital can significantly affect energy security, ICT cannot affect energy security through human capital channels. Furthermore, using economic risk as the threshold variable to study the link between ICT and energy security, we note that the impact of ICT on energy security is inverted U-shape with an improvement of economic risk. Specifically, ICT tends to increase the energy security in the lower stages of economic risk, while it weakens energy security reaching a certain level of said risk. In a similar vein, if financial risk is considered as the threshold variable, which is same as economic risk. Finally, the impact of ICT on energy security shows an upward trend in fluctuation with the passage of time. Our results provide policy implications to governments and future researchers.
•Shed new light on the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and energy security.•Confirm ICT has a significant negative impact on energy security.•ICT can affect energy security through financial development and technological progress.•Verify the impact of ICT on energy security is inverted U-shape using economic risk as the threshold variable.•The impact of ICT on energy security shows an upward trend in fluctuation with the passage of time.