Decentralized Decision Making for Limited Resource Allocation Using a Private Blockchain Network in an IoT (Internet of Things) Environment with Conflicting Agents

Blockchains have gotten popular in recent times, owing to the security, anonymity, and lack of any third-party involvement. Blockchains essentially are record keeping tools that record any transactions between involved parties. One of the key aspects of handling and navigating of any autonomous traffic on the streets, is secured and simple means of communication. This thesis explores distribution of minimum resources between multiple autonomous agents, by settling conflicts using events of random nature. The thesis focusses on two specific events, tossing of a coin and the game of rock, paper, and scissors (RPS). An improvement on the traditional game of RPS is further suggested, called rock, paper, scissors, and hammer (RPSH). And then seamless communication interface to enable secure interaction is setup using blockchains with smart contracts. A new method of information exchange called Sealed Envelope Exchange is proposed to eliminate any involvement of third-party agents in the monitoring of conflict resolution. A scenario of assigning the sole remaining parking spot in a filled parking space, between two vehicles is simulated and then the conflict is resolved in a fair manner without involving a third-party agent. This is achieved by playing a fair game of RPSH by using blockchains and simulating cross chain interaction to ensure that any messages and transactions during the game are secured

Liberalization of Digital Twins of IoT-Enabled Home Appliances via Blockchains and Absolute Ownership Rights

IoT-enabled home appliances are still in their infancy, especially from the perspective of customers, which hinders widespread market penetration. To relieve this skeptical attitude of customers toward IoT appliances, it is important to design human-centric business models rather than corporate-centric ones. IoT ecosystems that make use of cognitive outputs from the social network of things can assist in the establishment of such business models. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, we propose a reference model that grants the absolute ownership of the fog-located digital twin (DT) of a home appliance to its owner and promotes human-centric services and applications on this twin by utilizing blockchains (BCs) and BC-enabled clouds. Second, by enabling customers to have absolute ownership rights over the fog-located DTs, the model paves the way for the liberalization of DTs as well as the appliances coupled to them, which is an important step in revealing the true value that underlies human-centricity and things-to-things collaboration

Digital Twin in the IoT context: a survey on technical features, scenarios and architectural models

Digital Twin is an emerging concept that is gaining attention in various industries. It refers to the ability to clone a physical object into a software counterpart. The softwarized object, termed logical object, reflects all the important properties and characteristics of the original object within a specific application context. To fully determine the expected properties of the Digital Twin, this paper surveys the state of the art starting from the original definition within the manufacturing industry. It takes into account related proposals emerging in other fields, namely, Augmented and Virtual Reality (e.g., avatars), Multi-agent systems, and virtualization. This survey thereby allows for the identification of an extensive set of Digital Twin features that point to the “softwarization” of physical objects. To properly consolidate a shared Digital Twin definition, a set of foundational properties is identified and proposed as a common ground outlining the essential characteristics (must-haves) of a Digital Twin. Once the Digital Twin definition has been consolidated, its technical and business value is discussed in terms of applicability and opportunities. Four application scenarios illustrate how the Digital Twin concept can be used and how some industries are applying it. The scenarios also lead to a generic DT architectural Model. This analysis is then complemented by the identification of software architecture models and guidelines in order to present a general functional framework for the Digital Twin. The paper, eventually, analyses a set of possible evolution paths for the Digital Twin considering its possible usage as a major enabler for the softwarization process

Feasibility investigation of crowdsourcing-based product design and development for manufacturing

In the era of Industry 4.0, to help manufacturers make quick response to rapidly changing market and customer needs, this research explores the feasibility of realizing benefits of crowdsourcing in product design and development from a lifecycle point of view through investigations on product design quality control and crowdsourcing technology theories, product design lifecycle information modelling, and simulation platform prototyping. It intends to help manufacturers create a product-service ecosystem to deliver values to all involved stakeholders of a PDD process. This study started with building up the theoretical foundation of product design quality control in crowdsourcing design environment. Then, key crowdsourcing technologies for realizing a lifecycle PDD process on a crowdsourcing platform while enabling the design quality were explored. Thirdly, a multi-layer product design lifecycle information model was developed to accommodate all design related information in a PDD process and the identified information at each design phase and the relationships and interactions among information entities were evaluated by case studies and ORM modelling method, respectively. Finally, two crowdsourcing platform prototypes based on the PDLIM were developed to test their effectiveness in communicating design information among stakeholders and delivering value to them. The proposed research made contributions to knowledge through the following improvements/advancements: (1) understanding of key factors affecting product design quality in crowdsourcing design environments, (2) a technical foundation of crowdsourcing technologies for PDD process, (3) a novel product design lifecycle information model accommodating design information in crowdsourcing environments, and (4) guidelines on developing intermediary and integrated crowdsourcing platforms for PDD

BlockNet : Beyond reliable spatial Digital Twins to Parallel Metaverse

The development of Digital Twins has enabled them to be widely applied to various fields represented by intelligent manufacturing. A Metaverse, which is parallel to the physical world, needs mature and secure Digital Twins technology in addition to Parallel Intelligence to enable it to evolve autonomously. We propose that Blockchain combined with other areas does not simultaneously require all of the basic elements. We extract the immutable characteristics of Blockchain and propose a secure multidimensional data storage solution called BlockNet that can ensure the security of the digital mapping process of the Internet of Things, thereby improving the data reliability of Digital Twins. Additionally, to address some of the challenges faced by multiscale spatial data processing, we propose a nonmutagenic multidimensional Hash Geocoding method, allowing unique indexing of multidimensional information and avoiding information loss due to data dimensionality reduction while improving the efficiency of information retrieval and facilitating the implementation of the Metaverse through spatial Digital Twins based on these two studies. © 2022 The Author(s)Export Date: 31 May 2022; Review; 通讯地址: Lv, Z.; Department of Game Design, Sweden; 电子邮件: [email protected]; 基金资助详情: National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC, 61902203; 基金资助详情: Fundo para o Desenvolvimento das Ciências e da Tecnologia, FDCT, 0050/2020/A1; 基金资助文本 1: This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no. 61902203 and the Science and Technology Development Fund , Macau SAR (file no. 0050/2020/A1 ).; 参考文献: Dionisio, J.D.N., Burns, W.G., III, Gilbert, R., 3d virtual worlds and the metaverse: current status and future possibilities (2013) ACM Comput. 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