Expanding the Horizons of Manufacturing: Towards Wide Integration, Smart Systems and Tools

This research topic aims at enterprise-wide modeling and optimization (EWMO) through the development and application of integrated modeling, simulation and optimization methodologies, and computer-aided tools for reliable and sustainable improvement opportunities within the entire manufacturing network (raw materials, production plants, distribution, retailers, and customers) and its components. This integrated approach incorporates information from the local primary control and supervisory modules into the scheduling/planning formulation. That makes it possible to dynamically react to incidents that occur in the network components at the appropriate decision-making level, requiring fewer resources, emitting less waste, and allowing for better responsiveness in changing market requirements and operational variations, reducing cost, waste, energy consumption and environmental impact, and increasing the benefits. More recently, the exploitation of new technology integration, such as through semantic models in formal knowledge models, allows for the capture and utilization of domain knowledge, human knowledge, and expert knowledge toward comprehensive intelligent management. Otherwise, the development of advanced technologies and tools, such as cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, the Industrial Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Cloud Computing, Blockchain, etc., have captured the attention of manufacturing enterprises toward intelligent manufacturing systems

Blockchain-Based Digitalization of Logistics Processes—Innovation, Applications, Best Practices

Blockchain technology is becoming one of the most powerful future technologies in supporting logistics processes and applications. It has the potential to destroy and reorganize traditional logistics structures. Both researchers and practitioners all over the world continuously report on novel blockchain-based projects, possibilities, and innovative solutions with better logistic service levels and lower costs. The idea of this Special Issue is to provide an overview of the status quo in research and possibilities to effectively implement blockchain-based solutions in business practice. This Special Issue reprint contained well-prepared research reports regarding recent advances in blockchain technology around logistics processes to provide insights into realized maturity

A Low-Energy Security Solution for IoT-Based Smart Farms

This work proposes a novel configuration of the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS), suitable for low energy Internet of Things (IoT), applications. The motivation behind the redesign of TLS is energy consumption minimisation and sustainable farming, as exemplified by an application domain of aquaponic smart farms. The work therefore considers decentralisation of a formerly centralised security model, with a focus on reducing energy consumption for battery powered devices. The research presents a four-part investigation into the security solution, composed of a risk assessment, energy analysis of authentication and data exchange functions, and finally the design and verification of a novel consensus authorisation mechanism. The first investigation considered traditional risk-driven threat assessment, but to include energy reduction, working towards device longevity within a content-oriented framework. Since the aquaponics environments include limited but specific data exchanges, a content-oriented approach produced valuable insights into security and privacy requirements that would later be tested by implementing a variety of mechanisms available on the ESP32. The second and third investigations featured the energy analysis of authentication and data exchange functions respectively, where the results of the risk assessment were implemented to compare the re-configurations of TLS mechanisms and domain content. Results concluded that selective confidentiality and persistent secure sessions between paired devices enabled considerable improvements for energy consumptions, and were a good reflection of the possibilities suggested by the risk assessment. The fourth and final investigation proposed a granular authorisation design to increase the safety of access control that would otherwise be binary in TLS. The motivation was for damage mitigation from inside attacks or network faults. The approach involved an automated, hierarchy-based, decentralised network topology to reduce data duplication whilst still providing robustness beyond the vulnerability of central governance. Formal verification using model-checking indicated a safe design model, using four automated back-ends. The research concludes that lower energy IoT solutions for the smart farm application domain are possible

Plant Biodiversity and Genetic Resources

The papers included in this Special Issue address a variety of important aspects of plant biodiversity and genetic resources, including definitions, descriptions, and illustrations of different components and their value for food and nutrition security, breeding, and environmental services. Furthermore, comprehensive information is provided regarding conservation approaches and techniques for plant genetic resources, policy aspects, and results of biological, genetic, morphological, economic, social, and breeding-related research activities. The complexity and vulnerability of (plant) biodiversity and its inherent genetic resources, as an integral part of the contextual ecosystem and the human web of life, are clearly demonstrated in this Special Issue, and for several encountered problems and constraints, possible approaches or solutions are presented to overcome these

Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5

This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well

Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad: actas de las VIII Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en ciberseguridad: Vigo, 21 a 23 de junio de 2023

Jornadas Nacionales de Investigación en Ciberseguridad (8ª. 2023. Vigo)atlanTTicAMTEGA: Axencia para a modernización tecnolóxica de GaliciaINCIBE: Instituto Nacional de Cibersegurida