Mass Customization: A Supply Chain Approach is a text on the emerging topic of mass customization in manufacturing. The contributed chapters in this book provide a unified treatment to the topic by offering coverage in four main categories - concepts and current state of research; problem solving frameworks, models, and methodologies; supportive techniques and technologies for enabling mass customization; and future research agenda. The book blends theory and practice and includes prototypical applications to illustrate this complex, yet emerging field of inquiry.

In the last half of the twentieth century industry encountered a revolutionary change brought about by the harnessed power of seemingly ever-increasing capacity, speed and functionality of computers and microprocessors. This strength provided management and workers within industries with new capabilities for management, planning and control, design, quality assurance and customer support. Organized information flow became the mainstay of industrial companies. New tools and information technology systems emerged and evolved to enable companies to integrate the various departments (Design, Procurement, Manufacturing, Sales and Finance) within companies, particularly the lager ones, including international corporations. This was to give them a chance to meet new demands for product time to market, just in time supply of orders, and customer support. To the smaller company these changes were not so apparent. Neither the tools nor systems nor indeed their economic value seemed appropriate to them except for special cases. While all this was happening the structure of the larger companies began to disintegrate. Strong competitive pressures and globalization of the market place brought this about. Shedding unwanted competence and subcontracting it to others became common practice. Regional market pressures triggered companies to reorganize to create, produce, and distribute goods and services. Greater dependency on chains of supply from external companies became the norm. Medium and smaller sized companies began to gain some advantage and at the same time some were sucked into management and control systems governed by the larger companies.

The 1997 Kyoto Conference defined CO2 emISSIOn targets for the developed regions of the world. The EU target of decreasing the emissions 8% below the 1990 level, by 2010, will require a very substantial effort covering basically all activities if such a target is to be reached. Energy-efficient motor systems can provide one of the most important opportunities to achieve electricity savings in a cost effective way, avoiding at the same time the emission of tens of millions of tons of carbon. The reduction of energy consumption through improvements in energy efficiency is one of the major instruments for developed and developing countries to meet the Kyoto commitments. Energy efficiency is also a key element of the European Union (EU) energy policy, since it improves the efficiency of the economy, increases energy supply security, and decreases harmful emissions due to electricity generation.

Although most universities could be considered bureaucrat organizations, the accumulated knowledge reveals that universities try to adapt their core activities and technological innovation processes to face the current socio-economic challenges. This book explores the ways in which universities have re-built multiple capabilities to support the development of applied innovation and manage new technologies. Concretely, this book (1) theoretically addresses the university managers’ view for re-building university capabilities due to the public policy agendas demands; and (2) empirically addresses the documentation of experiences and strategies adopted by universities in different contexts to achieve public policy agendas. These universities strategies include re-build entrepreneurial, innovative, digital, and sustainable capabilities. This book encourages researchers, scholars, academics, students and policy makers to re-think how universities are expanding equal opportunities related to high-quality higher education, innovative/entrepreneurial graduate options, and contributing to sustainable societal advance and well-being through research and community engagement.

This book, bringing together selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Entrepreneurship, Business and Technology (InCEBT) on the overarching theme of ‘Industry Forward and Technology Transformation in Business and Entrepreneurship’, provides the audience some preliminary understanding of the current and emerging trends in entrepreneurship and business activities. This includes the usage of information and digital technology in business, competition in a digital economy, its challenges and opportunities, and transformation of business and entrepreneurship for the forward industry.

This book, bringing together selected papers from the 10th International Conference on Entrepreneurship, Business and Technology (InCEBT) on the overarching theme of ‘Industry Forward and Technology Transformation in Business and Entrepreneurship’, provides the audience some preliminary understanding of the current and emerging trends in entrepreneurship and business activities. This includes the usage of information and digital technology in business, competition in a digital economy, its challenges and opportunities, and transformation of business and entrepreneurship for the forward industry.

Although most universities could be considered bureaucrat organizations, the accumulated knowledge reveals that universities try to adapt their core activities and technological innovation processes to face the current socio-economic challenges. This book explores the ways in which universities have re-built multiple capabilities to support the development of applied innovation and manage new technologies. Concretely, this book (1) theoretically addresses the university managers’ view for re-building university capabilities due to the public policy agendas demands; and (2) empirically addresses the documentation of experiences and strategies adopted by universities in different contexts to achieve public policy agendas.

The purpose of this edited collection is to discuss the role and importance of stakeholder engagement in a sustainable circular economy from multiple theoretical and practical perspectives. Developing and maintaining a circular economy is an essential step to a more environmentally friendly and socially inclusive society. In addition to redesigning products and business models to minimise waste and increase the reuse of materials, a transition towards a sustainable circular economy requires collaboration and co-operation between various stakeholders from all parts of society. An international team of contributors explore how stakeholder engagement can foster and support sustainable change, assessing current literature and laying out guidance for future study. The collection is of interest to academics and students of sustainability management and sustainable business models, stakeholder theory and practice, and the circular economy.

This book combines two main topics applied to cities and societies: innovation and sustainability. The book begins by showing a brief overview of the book's main topics; then, the book addresses four main areas which allow our communities to be more attractive, engaging and fun; analytical, descriptive and predictive; healthy, secure and sustainable; and innovative, connected and monitored. This book represents a union of inputs from researchers and practitioners where each chapter has distinct, valuable and practical contributions that turn it unique. The content ranges from theoretical, like studies or analyses to practical, like industrial solutions or engaging systems. Both branches focus on turning our society more attractive, intelligent, inclusive, sustainable, and ready for the future.

This book discusses Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and their ability to predict outcomes using deep and shallow learning principles. The author first describes ANN implementation, consisting of at least three layers that must be established together with cells, one of which is input, the other is output, and the third is a hidden (intermediate) layer. For this, the author states, it is necessary to develop an architecture that will not model mathematical rules but only the action and response variables that control the event and the reactions that may occur within it. The book explains the reasons and necessity of each ANN model, considering the similarity to the previous methods and the philosophical - logical rules.

Over the past decade, Artificial Intelligence has proved invaluable in a range of industry verticals such as automotive and assembly, life sciences, retail, oil and gas, and travel. The leading sectors adopting AI rapidly are Financial Services, Automotive and Assembly, High Tech and Telecommunications. Travel has been slow in adoption, but the opportunity for generating incremental value by leveraging AI to augment traditional analytics driven solutions is extremely high.

This book provides a holistic overview of the major advances that have been made in the context of Service Science with a focus on IT-enabled services. To address challenges in collaborative, social-centric, ad-hoc, dynamic and open environments, the book studies IT-enabled service systems from two distinct but complementary research perspectives: service engineering and service computing. From a service engineering view, the book shows how to apply a systemic approach to tackle social problems from holistic and multi-disciplinary perspectives by focusing on service systems and developing a service design framework, including socio-technical aspects, the service reference model, data-driven collaboration processes, the incremental design method, requirement propagation, and system adaptability with feedback loops. From a service computing view, the book introduces a service-oriented aided infrastructure to support IT-enabled service systems in ICT-facilitated environments and provide access to tangible and intangible resources in a trustworthy environment.