Abderahman Rejeb, John G. Keogh, Horst Treiblmaier
Modern supply chains have evolved into highly complex value networks and turned into a vital source of competitive advantage. However, it has become increasingly challenging to verify the source of raw materials and maintain visibility of products and merchandise while they are moving through the value chain network. The application of the Internet of Things (IoT) can help companies to observe, track, and monitor products, activities, and processes within their respective value chain networks. Other applications of IoT include product monitoring to optimize operations in warehousing‚ manufacturing, and transportation. In combination with IoT, Blockchain technology can enable a broad range of different application scenarios to enhance value chain transparency and to increase B2B trust. When combined, IoT and Blockchain technology have the potential to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of modern supply chains. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we illustrate how the deployment of Blockchain technology in combination with IoT infrastructure can streamline and benefit modern supply chains and enhance value chain networks. Second, we derive six research propositions outlining how Blockchain technology can impact key features of the IoT (i.e., scalability, security, immutability and auditing, information flows, traceability and interoperability, quality) and thus lay the foundation for future research projects.
Blockchain is a technology making the shared registry concept from distributed systems a reality for a number of application domains, from the cryptocurrency one to potentially any industrial system requiring decentralized, robust, trusted, and automated decision making in a multi-stakeholder situation. Nevertheless, the actual advantages in using blockchain instead of any other traditional solution (such as centralized databases) are not completely understood to date, or at least there is a strong need for a vademecum guiding designers toward the right decision about when to adopt blockchain or not, which kind of blockchain better meets use-case requirements, and how to use it. In this paper, we aim at providing the community with such a vademecum, while giving a general presentation of blockchain that goes beyond its usage in Bitcoin and surveying a selection of the vast literature that emerged in the last few years. We draw the key requirements and their evolution when passing from permissionless to permissioned blockchains, presenting the differences between proposed and experimented consensus mechanisms, and describing existing blockchain platforms.
Modern smart homes are being equipped with certain renewable energy resources that can produce their own electric energy. From time to time, these smart homes or microgrids are also capable of supplying energy to other houses, buildings, or energy grid in the time of available self-produced renewable energy. Therefore, researches have been carried out to develop optimal trading strategies, and many recent technologies are also being used in combination with microgrids. One such technology is blockchain, which works over decentralized distributed ledger. In this paper, we develop a blockchain based approach for microgrid energy auction. To make this auction more secure and private, we use differential privacy technique, which ensures that no adversary will be able to infer private information of any participant with confidence. Furthermore, to reduce computational complexity at every trading node, we use consortium blockchain, in which selected nodes are given authority to add a new block in the blockchain. Finally, we develop differentially private Energy Auction for bLockchain-based microgrid systems (DEAL). We compare DEAL with Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) auction scenario and experimental results demonstrates that DEAL outperforms VCG mechanism by maximizing sellers’ revenue along with maintaining overall network benefit and social welfare.
Data is nowadays an invaluable resource; indeed, it guides all business decisions in most of the computer-aided human activities. Threats to data integrity are thus of paramount relevance, as tampering with data may maliciously affect crucial business decisions. This issue is especially true in cloud computing environments, where data owners cannot control fundamental data aspects, like the physical storage of data and the control of its accesses. Blockchain has recently emerged as a fascinating technology which, among others, provides compelling properties about data integrity. Using the Blockchain to face data integrity threats seems to be a natural choice, but its current limitations of low throughput, high latency, and weak stability hinder the practical feasibility of any Blockchain-based solutions. In this paper, by focusing on a case study from the European SUNFISH project, which concerns the design of a secure by-design cloud federation platform for the public sector, we precisely delineate the actual data integrity needs of cloud computing environments and the research questions to be tackled to adopt Blockchain-based databases. First, we detail the open research questions and the difficulties inherent in addressing them. Then, we outline a preliminary design of an effective Blockchain-based database for cloud computing environments.
Priti Tagde, Sandeep Tagde, Tanima Bhattacharya
et al.
Blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies are novel innovations in healthcare sector. Data on healthcare indices are collected from data published on Web of Sciences and other Google survey from various governing bodies. In this review, we focused on various aspects of blockchain and artificial intelligence and also discussed about integrating both technologies for making a significant difference in healthcare by promoting the implementation of a generalizable analytical technology that can be integrated into a more comprehensive risk management approach. This article has shown the various possibilities of creating reliable artificial intelligence models in e-Health using blockchain, which is an open network for the sharing and authorization of information. Healthcare professionals will have access to the blockchain to display the medical records of the patient, and AI uses a variety of proposed algorithms and decision-making capability, as well as large quantities of data. Thus, by integrating the latest advances of these technologies, the medical system will have improved service efficiency, reduced costs, and democratized healthcare. Blockchain enables the storage of cryptographic records, which AI needs.
Abstract The arising awareness of drug safety has brought tremendous demands on improving traceability and transparency in the supply chain. Conventionally, centralized/distributed database-based traceability platforms are adopted by many drug companies to control drug quality and improve transparency levels. However, it is still challenging to link drug stakeholders into an information-sharing chain due to the potential data manipulations and interest conflicts. In this context, this paper proposes a unified five-layer Blockchain and Internet of Things-based smart tracking and tracing (BIoT3, in short) platform to provide a decentralized traceability solution in the drug supply chain. Following the five-layer blockchain platform architecture, a practical roadmap is provided for the drug industry to achieve blockchain design, development, application, and evaluation. Moreover, three core enabling components are presented: IoT-based drug identity management, on-chain & off-chain mechanism, smart contract-enabled drug services. According to the real data from collaborating companies, the feasibility and efficiency of the BIoT3 platform have been verified using Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. The case study demonstrates that it not only gains useful insights into transaction sizes configuration for optimal blockchain performance, but also provides a feasible blockchain-based solution for drug traceability and visibility.
Federated learning (FL) is a promising decentralized deep learning technology, which allows users to update models cooperatively without sharing their data. FL is reshaping existing industry paradigms for mathematical modeling and analysis, enabling an increasing number of industries to build privacy-preserving, secure distributed machine learning models. However, the inherent characteristics of FL have led to problems such as privacy protection, communication cost, systems heterogeneity, and unreliability model upload in actual operation. Interestingly, the integration with Blockchain technology provides an opportunity to further improve the FL security and performance, besides increasing its scope of applications. Therefore, we denote this integration of Blockchain and FL as the Blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) framework. This paper introduces an in-depth survey of BCFL and discusses the insights of such a new paradigm. In particular, we first briefly introduce the FL technology and discuss the challenges faced by such technology. Then, we summarize the Blockchain ecosystem. Next, we highlight the structural design and platform of BCFL. Furthermore, we present the attempts ins improving FL performance with Blockchain and several combined applications of incentive mechanisms in FL. Finally, we summarize the industrial application scenarios of BCFL.
Blockchain technology enables users to verify, preserve, and synchronize the contents of a data sheet (a transaction ledger) replicated by multiple users. Blockchain technology has provided considerable advantages and incentives to industries in terms of enabling better services. This review aims to explore the benefits, challenges and functionalities that affect blockchain applications in different sectors. This article is constructed as a systematic literature review study. From 1976 articles, 168 final articles were selected and classified into three main dimensions, that is, benefits, challenges, and functionalities, in four different sectors: government, financial, manufacturing, and healthcare. The results were extracted and compared based on factors in three dimensions, which were categorized as benefits (informational, technological, economic, organizational, and strategic), challenges (technological, organizational, adoption, operational, and environmental and sustainability), and functionalities (point-to-point transmission, data ownership, data protection, and transaction processing). The results of this review study aim to support professionals, practitioners, and stakeholders who wish to implement and manage transformation projects related to blockchain in their sectors. Moreover, helping these possible blockchain users to understand the implied factors associated with blockchain would be beneficial for the decision-making processes of their organizations.
Blockchain is an immutable type of distributed ledger that is capable of storing data without relying on a third party. Blockchain technology has attracted significant interest in research areas, including its application in the smart grid for cybersecurity. Although significant efforts have been devoted to utilizing blockchain in the smart grid for cybersecurity, there is a lack of comprehensive survey on blockchain in the smart grid for cybersecurity in both application and technological perspectives. To fill this gap, we conducted a comprehensive survey on blockchain for smart gird cybersecurity. This conducted survey presents the latest insights of ideas, architectures, and techniques of implementation that are relevant to blockchain's application in the smart grid for cybersecurity. This article aims at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts specific to blockchain for cybersecurity in the smart grid.
Abstract In recent years, blockchain technology has been increasingly adopted in OTC medicine supply chains, enabling customers to track the entire process from raw material purchasing to finished medicine distribution. This improves the brand image and hence expands the market. With the use of blockchain, information transparency can be achieved because data are stored immutably and safely in a distributed database that is accessible by all supply chain members. However, will the incentives for supply chain members to participate in blockchain for larger-scale demand come at the cost of information disclosure? In this paper, to investigate the supply chain members’ incentive alignment opportunities towards the adoption of blockchain technology, we consider a two-stage supply chain comprising two medicine manufacturers and a common retailer that has more accurate demand information than the manufacturers have. We find that, interestingly, the retailer has incentives to participate in blockchain when the manufacturers’ competition is mild and the demand variance is low. We further investigate the impact of blockchain on total surplus and customer surplus and find that the adoption of blockchain always benefits customers and society; therefore, blockchain can be particularly useful for social goods such as OTC medicine.
This article presents research challenges and a tutorial on performance evaluation of blockchain-based security and privacy systems for the Internet of Things (IoT). We start by summarizing the existing surveys that deal with blockchain security for IoT networks. Then, we review the blockchain-based security and privacy systems for seventeen types of IoT applications, e.g., Industry 4.0, software-defined networking, edge computing, Internet of Drones, Internet of Cloud, Internet of Energy, Internet of Vehicles, etc. We also review various consensus algorithms and provide a comparison with respect to the nine properties, such as latency, throughput, computation, storage, and communication costs, scalability, attack model, advantage, disadvantage, etc. Moreover, we present the security analysis techniques and provide a classification into four categories, including Burrows, Abadi, and Needham (BAN) logic, game theory, theory analysis, and AVISPA tool. In addition, we analyze the performance metrics, blockchain testbeds, and cryptography libraries used in the performance evaluation of blockchain-based security and privacy systems for the IoT networks. Based on the current survey, we discuss the major steps to follow for building and evaluating blockchain-based security and privacy systems. Finally, we discuss and highlight open challenges and future research opportunities.
Abstract Blockchain-based technologies are predicted as major disruptors for numerous business applications and processes, which bears huge implications for e-commerce. Given the ability of blockchain and related technologies to create so-called “trustless systems” with idiosyncratic properties, various business models and established processes that have emerged over the years to ensure trust, reliability and enforceability in business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) relations need to be questioned and potentially adjusted. Blockchain has the potential to shake the foundation of e-commerce by enabling exchange relations that are trustless and operate without dedicated intermediaries or even central authorities in the case of permissionless blockchains. Furthermore, the exchange of information and value between companies and consumers might change considerably by enabling unified access to immutable data along the entire supply chain. In this paper, a framework and 19 high-level research questions are developed to inspire researchers to closely investigate the potential impact of blockchain on e-commerce. The main categories include (a) technological, (b) legal and (c) organizational and quality issues as well as (d) consumer issues. This paper illustrates how blockchain potentially impacts different elements of e-commerce in these respective areas.
Ting-Peng Liang, R. Kohli, Hang-Chang Huang
et al.
ABSTRACT Blockchain technology has the promise of transforming security and trust in digital transactions. However, concerns about technical complexity and the benefits of deployment have blunted its adoption. We examine factors that influence managerial intention to adopt blockchain technology. We extend the fit-viability model (FVM) and develop a value-based technology adoption model through an empirical study of 242 managers mostly in medical and financial industries. Managers in such organizations are likely to consider fit and viability in adopting blockchain technology to store and protect data. Drawing upon Fit-Viability and Task-Technology Fit models, and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), we test a model with Partial Least Squares (PLS) to assess managers’ intention to adopt blockchain technology. Our findings indicate that functional and symbolic benefits have positive impact on managers’ assessment of task-technology fit. Furthermore, viability is an important criterion in adopting blockchain technology.