Over the last years, sophisticated policy making propositions for sustainable rural and urban development have been recorded. The smart village and smart city concepts promote a human-centric vision for a new era of technology-driven social innovation. This Special Issue offers a useful overview of the most recent developments in the frequently overlapping fields of smart city and smart village research. A variety of topics including well-being, happiness, security, open democracy, open government, smart education, smart innovation, and migration have been addressed in this Special Issue. They define the direction for future research in both domains. The organization of the relevant debate is aligned around three pillars: Section A: Sustainable Smart City and Smart Village Research: Foundations • Clustering Smart City Services: Perceptions, Expectations, and Responses • Smart City Development and Residents’ Well-Being • Analysis of Social Networking Service Data for Smart Urban Planning Section B: Sustainable Smart City and Smart Village Research: Case Studies on Rethinking Security, Safety, Well-being, and Happiness • Exploring a Stakeholder-Based Urban Densification and Greening Agenda for Rotterdam Inner City—Accelerating the Transition to a Liveable Low Carbon City • The Impact of the Comprehensive Rural Village Development Program on Rural Sustainability in Korea • Analyzing the Level of Accessibility of Public Urban Green Spaces to Different Socially Vulnerable Groups of People • Consumers’ Preference and Factors Influencing Offal Consumption in the Amathole District Eastern Cape, South Africa • Sustainable Tourism: A Hidden Theory of the Cinematic Image? A Theoretical and Visual Analysis of the Way of St. James • Future Development of Taiwan’s Smart Cities from an Information Security Perspective • Towards a Smart and Sustainable City with the Involvement of Public Participation—The Case of Wroclaw Section C: Sustainable Smart City and Smart Village Research: Technical Issues • Detection and Localization of Water Leaks in Water Nets Supported by an ICT System with Artificial Intelligence Methods as a Way Forward for Smart Cities • A Study of the Public Landscape Order of Xinye Village • Spatio-Temporal Changes and Dependencies of Land Prices: A Case Study of the City of Olomouc • Geographical Assessment of Low-Carbon Transportation Modes: A Case Study from a Commuter University • Performance Analysis of a Polling-Based Access Control Combined with the Sleeping Schema in V2I VANETs for Smart Cities.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to Industry 4.0 applications, introducing implementation aspects and proposing a conceptual framework with respect to This book provides a comprehensive guide to Industry 4.0 applications, introducing implementation aspects and proposing a conceptual framework with respect to the design principles. In addition, it discusses the effects of Industry 4.0, which are reflected in new business models and workforce transformation. The book then examines the key technological advances that form the pillars of Industry 4.0 and explores their potential technical and economic benefits using examples of real-world applications. The changing dynamics of global production, such as more complex and automated processes, high-level competitiveness and emerging technologies, have paved the way for a new generation of goods, products and services. Moreover, manufacturers increasingly realize the value of the data that their processes and products generate. Such trends are transforming the manufacturing industry to the next generation, namely Industry 4.0, which is based on the integration of information and communication technologies and industrial technology. The book provides a conceptual framework and roadmap for decision-makers for this transformation.

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This book provides a comprehensive exploration into the identification and development of sustainable business models as well as their implementation, management and evaluation. With ever-increasing pressure on organisations to respond to societal change and improve competition through sustainable business model innovation (SBMI), this book aims to contribute to the knowledge of their design and management. The chapters explore the role of partnerships, the Internet of Things and the circular economy, among other factors, in developing SBM and how SBMI is facilitated through ideation and in entrepreneurial settings. Providing new typologies, patterns and a framework to evaluate the level of sustainability of business models, this book critically reviews existing literature on the topic to examine the potential of SBMI in research and in practice. The contributing authors employ a number of case studies and case examples to illustrate the integration of sustainable business models throughout the value chain, and their influence on wider social, environmental and business activities.

Focusing on the broader areas of Industry 4.0 as it applies to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this book offers a smooth adoption of techniques and technologies and presents advances, challenges, and opportunities for implementation. It will also enhance the role of academia by training new engineers on Industry 4.0 and digital transformation. Industry 4.0 in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs): Opportunities, Challenges, and Solutions presents concepts of predictive maintenance, digital factory, digital twin, additive manufacturing, and machining for sustainable development. It discusses the challenges faced by adopting Industry 4.0 including new security and privacy measures in the whole smart manufacturing setup while also explaining the impact of Industry 4.0 on Lean production systems. Implementation recommendations in the form of case studies, research studies, and the role academia can play are also provided. Practitioners, research scholars, academicians, and those studying or working in the Industry 4.0 sector will find this book of interest.

Problems facing manufacturing clusters that intersect information technology, process management, and optimization within the Internet of Things (IoT) are examined in this book. Recent advances in information technology have transformed the use of resources and data exchange, often leading to management and optimization problems attributatble to technology limitations and strong market competition. This book discusses several problems and concepts which makes significant connections in the areas of information sharing, organization management, resource operations, and performance assessment. Geared toward practitioners and researchers, this treatment deepens the understanding between resource collaborative management and advanced information technology. Those in manufacturing will utilize the numerous mathematical models and methods offered to solve practical problems related to cutting stock, supply chain scheduling, and inventory management. Academics and students with a basic knowledge of manufacturing, combinatorics, and linear programming will find that this discussion widens the research area of resource collaborative management and unites the fields of information technology, manufacturing management, and optimization.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.This book presents results relevant in the manufacturing research field, that are mainly aimed at closing the gap between the academic investigation and the industrial application, in collaboration with manufacturing companies. Several hardware and software prototypes represent the key outcome of the scientific contributions that can be grouped into five main areas, representing different perspectives of the factory domain:1) Evolutionary and reconfigurable factories to cope with dynamic production contexts characterized by evolving demand and technologies, products and processes.2) Factories for sustainable production, asking for energy efficiency, low environmental impact products and processes, new de-production logics, sustainable logistics.3) Factories for the People who need new kinds of interactions between production processes, machines, and human beings to offer a more comfortable and stimulating working environment.4) Factories for customized products that will be more and more tailored to the final user’s needs and sold at cost-effective prices.5) High performance factories to yield the due production while minimizing the inefficiencies caused by failures, management problems, maintenance.This books is primarily targeted to academic researchers and industrial practitioners in the manufacturing domain.