A report released on July 30 by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) describes the components of “smart manufacturing” – networked devices, predictive and anticipatory software, culminating in an integrated, cloud-based, open-access smart manufacturing platform which “in a few decades will transform the industrial sector and fundamentally alter the way products are manufactured”.

See The Energy Savings of Smart Manufacturing at: http://aceee.org/research-report/ie1403.

See also the July 4 white paper Smart Freight: Applications of Information and Communications Technologies to Freight System Efficiency, which describes and provides examples of companies using new, more sophisticated information and communications technology (ICT). Although examples are given of new systems of electronic monitoring of truck drivers, the majority of the report describes sophisticated logistics innovations. The report is at: http://aceee.org/files/pdf/white-paper/smart-freight-ict.pdf.