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In the developing field of nano-materials synthesis, copper oxide nanoparticles (NPs) are deemed to be one of the most significant transition metal oxides because of their intriguing characteristics. Its synthesis employing green chemistry principles has become a key source for next-generation antibiotics attributed to its features such as environmental friendliness, ease of use and affordability. Because they are more environmentally benign, plants have been employed to create metallic NPs. These plant extracts serve as capping, stabilising or hydrolytic agents and enable a regulated synthesis as well.

Organic chemical solvents are harmful and entail intense conditions during nanoparticle synthesis. The copper oxide NPs (CuO-NPs) synthesised by employing the green chemistry principle showed potential antitumor properties. Green synthesised CuO-NPs are regarded to be a strong contender for applications in the pharmacological, biomedical and environmental fields.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the anticancer potential of CuO-NPs plant extracts to isolate and characterise the active anticancer principles as well as to yield more effective, affordable, and safer cancer therapies.

This review article highlights the copper oxide nanoparticle's biomedical applications such as anticancer, antimicrobial, dental and drug delivery properties, future research perspectives and direction are also discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how emerging open standards are replacing traditional industrial networks. Current industrial Ethernet networks are not interoperable; thus, limiting the potential capabilities for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). There is no forthcoming new generation fieldbus standard to integrate into the IIoT and Industry 4.0 revolution. The open platform communications unified architecture (OPC UA) time-sensitive networking (TSN) is a potential vendor-independent successor technology for the factory network. The OPC UA is a data exchange standard for industrial communication, and TSN is an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard for Ethernet that supports real-time behaviour. The merging of these open standard solutions can facilitate cross-vendor interoperability for Industry 4.0 and IIoT products.

A brief review of the history of the fieldbus standards is presented, which highlights the shortcomings for current industrial systems in meeting converged traffic solutions. An experimental system for the OPC UA TSN is described to demonstrate an approach to developing a three-layer factory network system with an emphasis on the field layer.

From the multitude of existing industrial network schemes, there is a convergence pathway in solutions based on TSN Ethernet and OPC UA. At the field level, basic timing measurements in this paper show that the OPC UA TSN can meet the basic critical timing requirements for a fieldbus network.

This paper uniquely focuses on the specific fieldbus standards elements of industrial networks evolution and traces the developments from the early history to the current developing integration in IIoT context.

With the progress of new technologies of information and communication, more and more producers of data exist. On the other hand, the web forms a huge support of all these kinds of data. Unfortunately, existing data is not proper due to the existence of the same information in different sources, as well as erroneous and incomplete data. The aim of data integration systems is to offer to a user a unique interface to query a number of sources. A key challenge of such systems is to deal with conflicting information from the same source or from different sources. We present, in this paper, the resolution of conflict at the instance level into two stages: references reconciliation and data fusion. The reference reconciliation methods seek to decide if two data descriptions are references to the same entity in reality. We define the principles of reconciliation method then we distinguish the methods of reference reconciliation, first on how to use the descriptions of references, then the way to acquire knowledge. We finish this section by discussing some current data reconciliation issues that are the subject of current research. Data fusion in turn, has the objective to merge duplicates into a single representation while resolving conflicts between the data. We define first the conflicts classification, the strategies for dealing with conflicts and the implementing conflict management strategies. We present then, the relational operators and data fusion techniques. Likewise, we finish this section by discussing some current data fusion issues that are the subject of current research.

Several online services offer functionalities to access information from “big research graphs” (e.g. Google Scholar, OpenAIRE, Microsoft Academic Graph), which correlate scholarly/scientific communication entities such as publications, authors, datasets, organizations, projects, funders, etc. Depending on the target users, access can vary from search and browse content to the consumption of statistics for monitoring and provision of feedback. Such graphs are populated over time as aggregations of multiple sources and therefore suffer from major entity-duplication problems. Although deduplication of graphs is a known and actual problem, existing solutions are dedicated to specific scenarios, operate on flat collections, local topology-drive challenges and cannot therefore be re-used in other contexts.

This work presents GDup, an integrated, scalable, general-purpose system that can be customized to address deduplication over arbitrary large information graphs. The paper presents its high-level architecture, its implementation as a service used within the OpenAIRE infrastructure system and reports numbers of real-case experiments.

GDup provides the functionalities required to deliver a fully-fledged entity deduplication workflow over a generic input graph. The system offers out-of-the-box Ground Truth management, acquisition of feedback from data curators and algorithms for identifying and merging duplicates, to obtain an output disambiguated graph.

To our knowledge GDup is the only system in the literature that offers an integrated and general-purpose solution for the deduplication graphs, while targeting big data scalability issues. GDup is today one of the key modules of the OpenAIRE infrastructure production system, which monitors Open Science trends on behalf of the European Commission, National funders and institutions.

Output from the Irish Dairy Industry has grown rapidly since the abolition of quotas in 2015, with processors investing heavily in capacity expansion to deal with the extra milk volumes. Further capacity gains may be achieved by extending the processing season into the winter, a key enabler for which being the reduction of duration of the winter maintenance overhaul period. This paper aims to investigate if Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques can be used to enhance operational maintenance performance, thereby releasing additional processing capacity.

Combining the Six-Sigma Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC) methodology and the structured approach of Turnaround Maintenance (TAM) widely used in process industries creates a novel hybrid model that promises substantial improvement in maintenance overhaul execution. This paper presents a case study applying the DMAIC/TAM model to Ireland’s largest dairy processing site to optimise the annual maintenance shutdown. The objective was to deliver a 30% reduction in the duration of the overhaul, enabling an extension of the processing season.

Application of the DMAIC/TAM hybrid resulted in process enhancements, employee engagement and a clear roadmap for the operations team. Project goals were delivered, and original objectives exceeded, resulting in €8.9m additional value to the business and a reduction of 36% in the duration of the overhaul.

The results demonstrate that the model provides a structure that promotes systematic working and a continuous improvement focus that can have substantial benefits for wider industry. Opportunities for further model refinement were identified and will enhance performance in subsequent overhauls.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the structure and tools of DMAIC and TAM have been combined into a hybrid methodology and applied in an Irish industrial setting.

Collaboration in agricultural value chains (AVCs) has the potential to increase smallholders’ participation in international value chains and increase their benefits from participation. This scoping review explores existing collaboration models among stakeholders of AVCs in developing countries, examines enablers and constraints of collaboration and identifies policy gaps.

We systematically searched three databases, CAB Abstracts, Econlit (EBSCO) and Agricola, for studies published between 2005 and 2023 and included 59 relevant studies on AVC collaboration.

The primary motivations for collaboration are to enhance market access and improve product quality. Key outcomes of collaboration include improvements in farmers’ welfare, market participation and increased production; only a few studies consider improved risk management as an important outcome. Robust support from government and non-governmental entities is a primary enabler of collaboration. Conversely, conflicts of interest among stakeholders and resource limitations constrain collaboration possibilities. Collaboration involving high-value crops prioritizes income increases, whereas collaboration involving staple crops focuses on improving household food security.

This study may have publication bias as unsuccessful instances of collaboration are less likely to be published.

This study is unique in highlighting collaboration models’ characteristics and identifying AVC policy and programmatic areas where private firms, farmers’ groups, local governments and donor agencies can contribute.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an early assessment of India’s South-South cooperation for trade and technology (SSTT) with East Africa, focusing on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It aims to analyse the role of SSTT in providing support to targeted sectors.

The paper examines SSTT, focusing on India and East Africa over a specific period (2000–2016) of its emergence, and extends the public sponsorship literature in international business (IB) to better understand the relationship between SSTT and value addition – applying to a particular case study of SSTT interventions in spices.

The paper highlights SSTT as a pathway to support value addition in global value chains (GVCs). Trade between India and East African countries has grown, with three developments over the period of analysis in particular: shifting trade patterns, growing share of intermediate goods trade and differences in GVC insertion. However, East African exports are largely of lower value. Capacity building to support processing capability and thriving markets can encourage greater value addition. Preliminary findings suggest early gains at the margins, as SSTT interventions have been focusing on capacity boosting with buffering and bridging mechanisms for increased volume of trade. Moving up the value chain however requires that specific value-enhancing activities continue to be targeted, building on regional capacities. Our high-level case study for spices suggests that activities are starting to have a positive effect; however, more focus is needed to specifically target value creation before export and in particular higher levels of processing.

While findings are preliminary, policy implications emerge to guide SSTT interventions. There is capacity for building higher value-added supply chains as is evident among East African countries that trade with each other – future SSTT programmes could tap into this and help build capacity in these higher-value value chains. Future SSTT programmes can take a comprehensive approach by aiming at interventions at key points of the value chain, and especially at points that facilitate higher value addition than initial processing. An example is that Ethiopia and Rwanda are likely to benefit from an expanded spice industry, but the next phase should be towards building processing for value-addition components of the value chain, such as through trade policies, incentivising exporters to add value to items before export. From a development perspective, more analysis needs to be done on the value chain itself – for instance, trade facilitation measures to help processers engage in value chains and to access investments for increasing value add activities. (iv), Future research should examine more closely the development impacts of SSTT, namely, the connection between increased trade, local job creation and sustained innovation, as it is these tangible benefits that will help countries in the Global South realise the benefits of increased trade.

The paper underlines how the SSTT approach can contribute to the critical IB and GVCs literature using a theoretical grounded approach from public sponsorship theory, and with a unique lens of development cooperation between countries in the global south and its emerging impact on development outcomes in these countries.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework for handling end of life (henceforth EoL) scenarios of solar photovoltaic (solar PV) panels, which includes different options available to businesses and end-users, as well as promoting the collaboration between government and all relevant stakeholders.

This paper adopts purposeful sampling, secondary data and content analysis to develop an appropriate conceptual framework that helps to create awareness of the appropriate options for dealing with the EoL cases of solar PV panels.

From the data analysis, it is revealed that reuse, repair and recycling of solar PV panels can ensure value creation, public-private partnership and a solution for education in sustainability, and thus, prolonging the useful life cycle of the products.

This paper limits the analysis on developing economies and the use of selected literature based on the recycling of solar PV panels.

This paper is an initial attempt to create an awareness by identifying, analyzing and educating the stakeholders to handle appropriately any EoL scenario of solar PV panels.