The potential of integrating blockchain technology into smart sustainable city development

The rise of global urbanisation has led to massive pressures on resources such as food, water, infrastructure, and energy demand to support growing populations. It brings adverse impacts on the liveable condition and economic growth of a country if this problem remains unsolved. Smart city is a potential solution to address the challenges of urbanisation by leveraging the technological breakthrough such as internet of things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, big data, and cloud computing to facilitate scarce resources planning and management. With numerous connected devices and vast communication networks, it poses a challenges of security threat which cannot be addressed by the conventional cybersecurity solutions. Blockchain offers a solution in securing the huge numbers of connected devices in smart city network. The application of blockchain technology is leading in the banking and financial industry. However, the uses and implementations in smart city have emerged in recent years. The combination of blockchain technology and smart city has offered a great potential for sustainable development. Thus, it is imperative to discuss the potential of these two elements in making the city safer and sustainable. This paper explores how the blockchain technology application can help in managing smart city and achieve sustainability. The findings revealed that there are five key areas of blockchain application in smart city which are smart governance, smart mobility, smart asset, smart utility and smart logistic. A framework for smart sustainable city with blockchain technology is presented as an outcome of this study. It gives a clear overview for the policy makers and regulators of how blockchain supports within smart city framework. It facilitates the transition towards smart and sustainable cities through the use of blockchain

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

An architecture for distributed ledger-based M2M auditing for Electric Autonomous Vehicles

Electric Autonomous Vehicles (EAVs) promise to be an effective way to solve transportation issues such as accidents, emissions and congestion, and aim at establishing the foundation of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) economy. For this to be possible, the market should be able to offer appropriate charging services without involving humans. The state-of-the-art mechanisms of charging and billing do not meet this requirement, and often impose service fees for value transactions that may also endanger users and their location privacy. This paper aims at filling this gap and envisions a new charging architecture and a billing framework for EAV which would enable M2M transactions via the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)