FlexiChain 2.0: NodeChain Assisting Integrated Decentralized Vault for Effective Data Authentication and Device Integrity in Complex Cyber-Physical Systems

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has been introduced using the most common consensus algorithm either for an electronic cash system or a decentralized programmable assets platform which provides general services. Most established reliable networks are unsuitable for all applications such as smart cities applications, and, in particular, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) applications. The purpose of this paper is to provide a suitable DLT for IoT and CPS that could satisfy their requirements. The proposed work has been designed based on the requirements of Cyber Physical Systems. FlexiChain is proposed as a layer zero network that could be formed from independent blockchains. Also, NodeChain has been introduced to be a distributed (Unique ID) UID aggregation vault to secure all nodes' UIDs. Moreover, NodeChain is proposed to serve mainly FlexiChain for all node security requirements. NodeChain targets the security and integrity of each node. Also, the linked UIDs create a chain of narration that keeps track not merely for assets but also for who authenticated the assets. The security results present a higher resistance against four types of attacks. Furthermore, the strength of the network is presented from the early stages compared to blockchain and central authority. FlexiChain technology has been introduced to be a layer zero network for all CPS decentralized applications taking into accounts their requirements. FlexiChain relies on lightweight processing mechanisms and creates other methods to increase security

A Federated learning model for Electric Energy management using Blockchain Technology

Energy shortfall and electricity load shedding are the main problems for developing countries. The main causes are lack of management in the energy sector and the use of non-renewable energy sources. The improved energy management and use of renewable sources can be significant to resolve energy crisis. It is necessary to increase the use of renewable energy sources (RESs) to meet the increasing energy demand due to high prices of fossil-fuel based energy. Federated learning (FL) is the most emerging technique in the field of artificial intelligence. Federated learning helps to generate global model at server side by ensemble locally trained models at remote edges sites while preserving data privacy. The global model used to predict energy demand to satisfy the needs of consumers. In this article, we have proposed Blockchain based safe distributed ledger technology for transaction of data between prosumer and consumer to ensure their transparency, traceability and security. Furthermore, we have also proposed a Federated learning model to forecast the energy requirements of consumer and prosumer. Moreover, Blockchain has been used to store excess energy data from prosumer for better management of energy between prosumer and grid. Lastly, the experiment results revealed that renewable energy sources have produced better and comparable results to other non-renewable energy resources.Comment: 14 figures, 7 tables, 15 page

Future of the Artificial Intelligence: Object of Law or Legal Personality?

Objective: to reveal the problems associated with legal regulation of public relations, in which artificial intelligence systems are used, and to rationally comprehend the possibility of endowing such systems with a legal subject status, which is being discussed by legal scientists.Methods: the methodological basis of the research are the general scientific methods of analysis and synthesis, analogy, abstraction and classification. Among the legal methods primarily applied in the work are formal-legal, comparative-legal and systemic-structural methods, as well as the methods of law interpretation and legal modeling.Results: the authors present a review of the state of artificial intelligence development and its introduction into practice by the time of the research. Legal framework in this sphere is considered; the key current concepts of endowing artificial intelligence with a legal personality (individual, collective and gradient legal personality of artificial intelligence) are reviewed. Each approach is assessed; conclusions are made as to the most preferable amendments in the current legislation, which ceases to correspond to the reality. The growing inconsistency is due to the accelerated development of artificial intelligence and its spreading in various sectors of economy, social sphere, and in the nearest future – in public management. All this testifies to the increased risk of a break between legal matter and the changing social reality.Scientific novelty: scientific approaches are classified which endow artificial intelligence with a legal personality. Within each approach, the key moments are identified, the use of which will allow in the future creating legal constructs based on combinations, avoiding extremes and observing the balance between the interests of all parties. The optimal variant to define the legal status of artificial intelligence might be to include intellectual systems into a list of civil rights objects, but differentiating the legal regulation of artificial intelligence as an object of law and an “electronic agent” as a quasi subject of law. The demarcation line should be drawn depending on the functional differences between intellectual systems, while not only a robot but also a virtual intellectual system can be considered an “electronic agent”.Practical significance: the research materials can be used when preparing proposals for making amendments and additions to the current legislation, as well as when elaborating academic course and writing tutorials on the topics related to regulation of using artificial intelligence

A Design Concept for a Tourism Recommender System for Regional Development

Despite of tourism infrastructure and software, the development of tourism is hampered due to the lack of information support, which encapsulates various aspects of travel implementation. This paper highlights a demand for integrating various approaches and methods to develop a universal tourism information recommender system when building individual tourist routes. The study objective is proposing a concept of a universal information recommender system for building a personalized tourist route. The developed design concept for such a system involves a procedure for data collection and preparation for tourism product synthesis; a methodology for tourism product formation according to user preferences; the main stages of this methodology implementation. To collect and store information from real travelers, this paper proposes to use elements of blockchain technology in order to ensure information security. A model that specifies the key elements of a tourist route planning process is presented. This article can serve as a reference and knowledge base for digital business system analysts, system designers, and digital tourism business implementers for better digital business system design and implementation in the tourism sector

Innopolis University - From Zero to Hero

This open access book describes the development of Innopolis, a young Russian university established in 2012 to focus on teaching excellence in computer science, engineering, and robotics. It reports on the problems that were faced in the first decade of its development, and the adopted solutions. It shows how the key aspects for the development of the faculty, the curricula, the university structure, and the challenge of internationalization have been successfully addressed by the university management and professors, and how the solutions are scalable for other newly founded research organizations. The book is divided in five parts: “The Beginning” describes the very early days in general, from the foundation and start-up of the university with the related processes. “The People” reports on the initial hiring of the faculty members, the selection of students, and the curriculum development. “The Activities” provide information about the creation of the single research institutions and labs, and their relation to industry. “The Future” gives an outlook on the planned internationalization and faculty strategy. Eventually, “A Visual Journey” shows a selection of photographs illustrating highlights of the whole process and the current achievements. The processes and the components described built the basis for the development of Innopolis, and many of them still have a big impact on its present and its future. The fewer mistakes are made at the beginning, the higher the probability to fully achieve the initial goals

User consent modeling for ensuring transparency and compliance in smart cities

Smart city infrastructures such as transportation and energy networks are evolving into so-called cyber physical social systems (CPSSs), which collect and leverage citizens’ data in order to adapt services to citizens’ needs. The privacy implications of such systems are, however, significant and need to be addressed. Current systems either try to escape the privacy challenge via anonymization or use very rigid, hard-coded workflows that have been agreed with a data protection authority. In the case of the latter, there is a severe impact on data quality and richness, whereas in the former, only these hard-coded flows are permitted resulting in diminished functionality and potential. We address these limitations via user modeling in terms of investigating how to model and semantically represent user consent, preferences, and data usage policies that will guide the processing of said data in the data lake. Data protection is a horizontal field and consequently very wide. Therefore, we focus on a concrete setting where we extend the domain-agnostic SPECIAL policy language for a smart mobility use case supplied by Vienna’s largest utility provider. To that end, (1) we create an extension of SPECIAL in terms of a core CPSS vocabulary that lowers the semantic gap between the domain agnostic terms of SPECIAL and the vocabulary of the use case; (2) we propose a workflow that supports defining domain-specific vocabularies for complex CPSSs; and (3) show that these two contributions allow successfully achieving the goals of our setting

Transformation of law in the context of digitalization: defining the correct priorities

The subject under analysis is the peculiarities around the legal regulation of digital technologies and products arising from digital technologies. The choice of this topic was predetermined by the active development of digital services and digital financial assets, and the necessity to adapt modern legislation to the needs of the digital economy. Despite the fact that several strategies for the development of digital law are being worked out at the level of international organizations, neither in theory nor in practice is there a single understanding of the legal nature of digital technologies and the foundations of their legal regulation.From this perspective, the purpose of this article is to understand the system and the main categories of the digital economy through the prism of fundamental legal institutions, based both on the traditional principles of scientific analysis and on the results steaming from applied data processing methods.Using methods of theoretical modeling, idealization, and theoretical experiments, the authors consider the categories of legal personality, security, and tort of digital technologies and products, compare them with similar legal institutions, and determine possible options for integrating new legal categories into traditional rule of law on contracts, liability, and the protection of intellectual rights.As a result of the study, the authors have assembled their vision of those benchmarks, on which international strategies for regulating the digital economy should be built. The authors proceed from the fact that the adaptive capabilities of traditional law are very limited in relation to digital technologies; furthermore, in relation to many of them, qualitatively new legal models should be developed. The article presents the results of a review of the main legal parameters of digital technologies. Formulations of legal personality and protection are proposed, definitions of digital technology products in civil and copyright law are formulated.The conclusion reached concerns the inconsistency of approaches to assessing the legal nature of digital objects, and the insufficient consideration of the technical aspects of digital technologies, as well as the need to develop — at the international level — a unified legal strategy for civil and intellectual law regarding digital technologies. This study underlines, among the priority tasks and directions, the issues of legal personality of digital technologies, and the essential mechanisms for the protection of products using digital technologies. The conclusions formulated in the article have important practical and methodological significance, and can be taken into account when reforming the current legislation

Joint optimisation of drone routing and battery wear for sustainable supply chain development: a mixed-integer programming model based on blockchain-enabled fleet sharing

Alongside the rise of ‘last-mile’ delivery in contemporary urban logistics, drones have demonstrate commercial potential, given their outstanding triple-bottom-line performance. However, as a lithium-ion battery-powered device, drones’ social and environmental merits can be overturned by battery recycling and disposal. To maintain economic performance, yet minimise environmental negatives, fleet sharing is widely applied in the transportation field, with the aim of creating synergies within industry and increasing overall fleet use. However, if a sharing platform’s transparency is doubted, the sharing ability of the platform will be discounted. Known for its transparent and secure merits, blockchain technology provides new opportunities to improve existing sharing solutions. In particular, the decentralised structure and data encryption algorithm offered by blockchain allow every participant equal access to shared resources without undermining security issues. Therefore, this study explores the implementation of a blockchain-enabled fleet sharing solution to optimise drone operations, with consideration of battery wear and disposal effects. Unlike classical vehicle routing with fleet sharing problems, this research is more challenging, with multiple objectives (i.e., shortest path and fewest charging times), and considers different levels of sharing abilities. In this study, we propose a mixed-integer programming model to formulate the intended problem and solve the problem with a tailored branch-and-price algorithm. Through extensive experiments, the computational performance of our proposed solution is first articulated, and then the effectiveness of using blockchain to improve overall optimisation is reflected, and a series of critical influential factors with managerial significance are demonstrated

Six-Gear Roadmap Towards the Smart Factory

The fourth industrial revolution is the transformation of industrial manufacturing into smart manufacturing. The advancement of digital technologies that make the trend Industry 4.0 are considered as the transforming force that will enable this transformation. However, Industry 4.0 digital technologies need to be connected, integrated and used effectively to create value and to provide insightful information for data driven manufacturing. Smart manufacturing is a journey and requires a roadmap to guide manufacturing organizations for its adoption. The objective of this paper is to review different methodologies and strategies for smart manufacturing implementation to propose a simple and a holistic roadmap that will support the transition into smart factories and achieve resilience, flexibility and sustainability. A comprehensive review of academic and industrial literature was preformed based on multiple stage approach and chosen criteria to establish existing knowledge in the field and to evaluate latest trends and ideas of Industry 4.0 and smart manufacturing technologies, techniques and applications in the manufacturing industry. These criteria are sub-grouped to fit within various stages of the proposed roadmap and attempts to bridge the gap between academia and industry and contributes to a new knowledge in the literature. This paper presents a conceptual approach based on six stages. In each stage, key enabling technologies and strategies are introduced, the common challenges, implementation tips and case studies of industrial applications are discussed to potentially assist in a successful adoption. The significance of the proposed roadmap serve as a strategic practical tool for rapid adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies for smart manufacturing and to bridge the gap between the advanced technologies and their application in manufacturing industry, especially for SMEs