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The Integrated Supply Chain at Xerox Ltd is a large complex organisation which has many potential impacts on the environment. In order to better understand and reduce those impacts, an environmental bias has been introduced into the decision making process which allows more environmentally conscious decisions to be made. This paper details how the environmental bias was developed and how it can be used to provide both a measure of environmental performance for the whole supply chain, each functional element within the chain and for different product delivery scenarios. The environmental decision making tool construction is discussed and preliminary results show that it is the working life of a typical product which causes the biggest environmental impact.

Describes research into the use of external sensors for robot systems to allow them to react intelligently to unforeseen events in the production process and irregularities in products. Examines the use of active vision systems with robot controllers and the integration of the two systems. Concludes that this enhances the ability of an industrial robot system to cope with variations and unforeseen circumstances in the workcell or the workpiece.

This paper describes the Active Telepresence System and the development of an augmented reality (AR) interface to enhance the operator’s sense of presence in hazardous environments. The initial enhancements to the user interface are a virtual instrument panel to aid navigation in a variety of viewing conditions and a virtual cursor that provides a means for the operator to interact with the remote environment. The results of preliminary experiments using the initial enhancements are discussed.

Although there has been considerable effort placed on measuring supply chains in order to assess their performance, these techniques have been found to be time and cost focused, aimed at coping with rapid change. This approach tends to have a short‐term outlook. Work on greening supply chains is much longer‐term in outlook. Is information intensive and biased towards the supply side? These two mindsets appear to be diverging, developing in conflicting directions. This is an alarming prospect for the environment, which has no place in future supply chain performance measurements, thus running the risk of being increasingly side‐lined; and for performance measurements, which is unconcerned with longer‐term sustainability in terms of the environment. The case is made to amalgamate the advantages of both schools of thought to allow long‐term views to be represented by short‐term performance measurement.

A symposium on this subject was held at the New Connaught Rooms in London on 21 October 1992. Twelve papers were presented and about 30 delegates attended. All but one of the papers came from a university: Brunei, East London, Ghent in Belgium, Greenwich, Nottingham, Salford, Sheffield and Surrey. The exception was a paper from Advanced Robotics Research Ltd. It was significant, and widely commented on, that the papers were virtually all from academic institutions while the delegates were all from industry. Methods and systems described in the papers were in various stages of development; none was commercially available or in industrial use. In fact, in many cases the objective behind presenting a paper at this symposium was to canvass industrial sponsorship to enable the project to continue or to bring it to market.

High levels of interior water vapour lead to condensation and black mould that in turn represent significant risks to residential properties and their occupants. Beliefs about window opening are good predictors of the degree to which householders will actually open windows to purge their homes of water vapour, including water vapour that they themselves generate. The present study tested if a short information-giving intervention could enhance householders’ beliefs that foster window opening as purge ventilation and, in turn, lead to greater window opening.

Data were collected from 242 UK householders with robust psychometrically sound measures embedded in an online self-report survey that also presented the intervention information.

The intervention led participants, and males in particular, to have significantly greater concerns about condensation and mould and significantly less concerns about heat loss costs arising from opening windows, and these altered beliefs in turn predicted a greater intention to open windows in the future.

By sharing simple information, surveyors and other building professionals can help householders take the simple step of opening their windows and so reduce the threats that condensation and mould present to themselves and their homes.

This is the first study to test (1) a time-based model that predicted the intervention would have a positive effect on specific window opening attitudes and that those new attitudes would in turn affect window opening intentions, and (2) if the intervention had different effects on men and women.

The prevalent practice of construction supply chain (CSC) in developing countries with a focus on Africa was presented in this chapter. Two African countries (South Africa and Ghana) were selected due to the extensive literature on the CSC emanating from the countries. The impediment to the effective management of the CSC in the two African countries was also examined in this chapter. It was discovered that the vital inhibition to the performance of CSC in developing countries is the adoption of culture from developed countries without a proper model for ensuring its implementation in developing countries. Also, no model has incorporated the principles and technologies of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) to manage the CSC. The failure to adopt the 4IR technologies like block chain, big data and the internet of things has prevented the proper application of CSC practices in developing countries. CSC practices like collaboration, integration, lean supply chain, information sharing, financial management and communication are the primary practice in developing countries. Finally, this chapter called for the development of a model for managing the CSC in developing countries in alignment with the principles of the 4IR.

Last December a meeting of the SILVER Robotics Special Interest Group was held at the Land Systems Section of DERA at Chertsey, UK, and addressed the subject of robotics in military and explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) applications. Presentations speculated on the future of intelligent vehicles; battlefield engineering and robotics; the RAVEN explosive ordnance disposal system; stereo vision and virtual reality for robotics; and three papers on explosive ordnance disposal. During the lunch break there was a demonstration of some of the systems reviewed at the meeting.