Saada Said Al Zakwani, Shanza Neda Hussain, Aritra Ghosh
Floating photovoltaic (FPV)-powered PEM electrolysis can be a promising solution for green hydrogen production, as it eliminates land use concerns typically associated with PV installations. Electrolysis produces hydrogen and oxygen as by-products without emitting harmful gases. However, the process requires a substantial amount of clean water, which can be sourced from seawater using desalination techniques. This study demonstrates the viability of an off-grid green hydrogen production system powered by FPV technology and seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO), designed to support green mobility in Duqm, Oman. A 20 MWp FPV system was installed on the Arabian Sea, approximately 600 km south of Muscat. The integrated system efficiently combines renewable energy, desalination, and electrolysis to produce 1755 kg of hydrogen per day using local solar energy and seawater resources.The system achieved zero operational CO₂ emissions, contributing to the decarbonisation of the transportation sector through the use of hydrogen-powered vehicles. The Levelised Cost of Hydrogen (LCOH) was calculated at $9.50/kg, the Levelised Cost of Water (LCW) at $1.80/m³, and the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE) at a competitive $0.05/kWh. Hydrogen-powered sedans and high-capacity fuel cell buses were successfully operated using the produced hydrogen, demonstrating the potential for widespread refuelling of a significant number of vehicles.
The rapid growth of mobile financial services provides significant opportunities for enhancing digital financial inclusion among older adults. However, elderly consumers often lag in adoption and sustained usage due to psychological barriers (e.g., technology anxiety) and factors related to prior experience and comfort with technology (e.g., technology familiarity). This study investigates how technology anxiety and technology familiarity influence elderly consumers’ continuance intention toward mobile banking, while examining age as a moderator by comparing younger older adults (aged 60–69) and older adults (aged 70+). Using data from an online survey of 488 elderly mobile banking users in South Korea, we conducted hierarchical regression analyses. The results show that technology anxiety negatively affects continuance intention, whereas technology familiarity positively enhances sustained usage. Moreover, age significantly moderated these relationships: adults aged 70+ were notably more sensitive to both technology anxiety and familiarity, highlighting distinct age-related psychological differences. These findings underscore the importance of targeted digital literacy initiatives, age-friendly fintech interfaces, and personalized support strategies. This study contributes to the fintech literature by integrating psychological dimensions into traditional technology adoption frameworks and emphasizing age-specific differences. Practically, fintech providers and policymakers should adopt tailored strategies to effectively address elderly consumers’ unique psychological needs, promoting sustained adoption and narrowing the digital divide in financial technology engagement.
Ana Catarina Almeida, Diana Pacheco, Artur Mateus
et al.
Aging, diseases, or immunodeficiency’s can significantly impair the physiological regenerative process and the endogenous regenerative potential of bone tissue. Intensive research focuses on developing scaffolds that fill bone gaps while promoting cellular interaction and guiding tissue regeneration. Biomimicry is today widely acknowledged as a leading concept to develop novel approaches based on biomimetic materials to fabricate smart devices with advanced performance and multiple bio-functionalities. In the pursuit of designing smart devices for more efficient and personalized therapies, magnetic materials are eliciting growing interest due to the possibility of direct cell stimulation by magnetic fields or even for developing novel tools for the on-demand activation of implanted magnetic devices. There is a growing focus on understanding the impact of immune responses and the role of immunomodulators in the healing and regeneration of bone tissue.The relevance of biomimicry, immune and tissue responses to magnetic scaffolds and stimulation, alongside an examination of the limitations of existing bone substitutes in the market is highlighted. Biomimetic and magnetically activated scaffolds hold promise as innovative tools in addressing bone tissue diseases and promoting regeneration by effectively engaging in cellular and immunological responses.
Materials of engineering and construction. Mechanics of materials
This paper investigates a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based quadratic programming (QP) method for the safety-critical trajectory tracking control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The proposed approach addresses the substantial challenge posed by model uncertainty, which may hinder the safety and performance of AUVs operating in complex underwater environments. The RL framework can learn the inherent model uncertainties that affect the constraints in Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs). These learned uncertainties are subsequently integrated for formulating a novel RL-CBF-CLF Quadratic Programming (RL-CBF-CLF-QP) controller. Corresponding simulations are demonstrated under diverse trajectory tracking scenarios with high levels of model uncertainties. The simulation results show that the proposed RL-CBF-CLF-QP controller can significantly improve the safety and accuracy of the AUV’s tracking performance.
The metallurgical industry is a significant contributor to CO<sub>2</sub> emissions. One approach to mitigating these emissions is the implementation of carbon capture, storage, and utilisation (CCSU) technology. In this paper, we present a literature review on the mineral sequestration of CO<sub>2</sub> using metallurgical slags within the CCSU framework. Both direct and indirect carbonation processes are examined, with a focus on key process parameters. Additionally, the utilisation of by-products of the process, a crucial aspect of CCSU technology, is also discussed.
We study an overlapping generations (OLG) exchange economy with an asset that yields dividends. First, we derive general conditions, based on exogenous parameters, that give rise to three distinct scenarios: (1) only bubbleless equilibria exist, (2) a bubbleless equilibrium coexists with a continuum of bubbly equilibria, and (3) all equilibria are bubbly. Under stationary endowments and standard assumptions, we provide a complete characterization of the equilibrium set and the associated asset price dynamics. In this setting, a bubbly equilibrium exists if and only if the interest rate in the economy without the asset is strictly lower than the population growth rate and the sum of per capita dividends is finite. Second, we establish necessary and sufficient conditions for Pareto optimality. Finally, we investigate the relationship between asset price behaviors and the optimality of equilibria.
Although it has been more than four decades that the first components-based software development (CBSD) studies were conducted, there is still no standard method or tool for component selection which is widely accepted by the industry. The gulf between industry and academia contributes to the lack of an accepted tool. We conducted a mixed methods survey of nearly 100 people engaged in component-based software engineering practice or research to better understand the problems facing industry, how these needs could be addressed, and current best practices employed in component selection. We also sought to identify and prioritize quality criteria for component selection from an industry perspective. In response to the call for CBSD component selection tools to incorporate recent technical advances, we also explored the perceptions of professionals about AI-driven tools, present and envisioned.
Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a surge of prompt engineering (PE) techniques that can enhance various requirements engineering (RE) tasks. However, current LLMs are often characterized by significant uncertainty and a lack of controllability. This absence of clear guidance on how to effectively prompt LLMs acts as a barrier to their trustworthy implementation in the RE field. We present the first roadmap-oriented systematic literature review of Prompt Engineering for RE (PE4RE). Following Kitchenham's and Petersen's secondary-study protocol, we searched six digital libraries, screened 867 records, and analyzed 35 primary studies. To bring order to a fragmented landscape, we propose a hybrid taxonomy that links technique-oriented patterns (e.g., few-shot, Chain-of-Thought) to task-oriented RE roles (elicitation, validation, traceability). Two research questions, with five sub-questions, map the tasks addressed, LLM families used, and prompt types adopted, and expose current limitations and research gaps. Finally, we outline a step-by-step roadmap showing how today's ad-hoc PE prototypes can evolve into reproducible, practitioner-friendly workflows.
The digital economy runs on Open Source Software (OSS), with an estimated 90\% of modern applications containing open-source components. While this widespread adoption has revolutionized software development, it has also created critical security vulnerabilities, particularly in essential but under-resourced projects. This paper examines a sophisticated attack on the XZ Utils project (CVE-2024-3094), where attackers exploited not just code, but the entire open-source development process to inject a backdoor into a fundamental Linux compression library. Our analysis reveals a new breed of supply chain attack that manipulates software engineering practices themselves -- from community management to CI/CD configurations -- to establish legitimacy and maintain long-term control. Through a comprehensive examination of GitHub events and development artifacts, we reconstruct the attack timeline, analyze the evolution of attacker tactics. Our findings demonstrate how attackers leveraged seemingly beneficial contributions to project infrastructure and maintenance to bypass traditional security measures. This work extends beyond traditional security analysis by examining how software engineering practices themselves can be weaponized, offering insights for protecting the open-source ecosystem.
Climate science is the multidisciplinary field that studies the Earth's climate and its evolution. At the very core of climate science are indispensable climate models that predict future climate scenarios, inform policy decisions, and dictate how a country's economy should change in light of the changing climate. Climate models capture a wide range of interacting dynamic processes via extremely complex ordinary and partial differential equations. To model these large-scale complex processes, climate science leverages supercomputers, advanced simulations, and statistical methods to predict future climate. An area of engineering that is rarely studied in climate science is control engineering. Given that climate systems are inherently dynamic, it is intuitive to analyze them within the framework of dynamic system science. This perspective has been underexplored in the literature. In this manuscript, we provide a tutorial that: (i) introduces the control engineering community to climate dynamics and modeling, including spatiotemporal scales and challenges in climate modeling; (ii) offers a fresh perspective on climate models from a control systems viewpoint; and (iii) explores the relevance and applicability of various advanced graph and network control-based approaches in building a physics-informed framework for learning, control and estimation in climate systems. We also present simple and then more complex climate models, depicting fundamental ideas and processes that are instrumental in building climate change projections. This tutorial also builds parallels and observes connections between various contemporary problems at the forefront of climate science and their control theoretic counterparts. We specifically observe that an abundance of climate science problems can be linguistically reworded and mathematically framed as control theoretic ones.
Fernando Castillo, Oscar Castillo, Eduardo Brito
et al.
Decentralized Autonomous Machines (DAMs) represent a transformative paradigm in automation economy, integrating artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain technology, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to create self-governing economic agents participating in Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN). Capable of managing both digital and physical assets and unlike traditional Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), DAMs extend autonomy into the physical world, enabling trustless systems for Real and Digital World Assets (RDWAs). In this paper, we explore the technological foundations, and challenges of DAMs and argue that DAMs are pivotal in transitioning from trust-based to trustless economic models, offering scalable, transparent, and equitable solutions for asset management. The integration of AI-driven decision-making, IoT-enabled operational autonomy, and blockchain-based governance allows DAMs to decentralize ownership, optimize resource allocation, and democratize access to economic opportunities. Therefore, in this research, we highlight the potential of DAMs to address inefficiencies in centralized systems, reduce wealth disparities, and foster a post-labor economy.
The relevance of the article lies in the need to increase the level of global competitiveness of Russian regions. Russia is facing the challenge of advanced development in order to move from import substitution to the expansion of non-resource non-energy exports. This means that it is necessary to move away from understanding competitiveness as a competition between regions. In modern conditions, the competitive economy of the region means the ability to provide domestic and foreign markets with products from manufacturing industries. This aspect requires a revision of the usual methods of assessing the competitiveness of the regional economy towards shifting the focus to understanding changes in the localization of manufacturing industries and the export specialization of the region. The objective of the study is to develop a methodological approach to assessing the competitiveness of manufacturing sector from the perspective of regional trade opportunities in global markets. The main hypothesis of the study is the assumption that the level of competitiveness and the use of competitive advantages of the region is characterized by the degree of localization, comparative advantages and export specialization. To achieve the objective of the study, the paper presents a methodological approach that includes three stages: an assessment of the localization index by types of economic activity in the manufacturing industry, an assessment of the comparative advantages and export specialization of the region for certain types of products, and the development of a typology based on changes in localization and export of products. The peculiarity and novelty of the proposed methodological approach is to take into account not only changes in the localization of industry, but also the export of certain types of products manufactured by enterprises localized in the region. This approach can be extended to other types of economic activity. In addition, the degree of detail can be increased according to the commodity nomenclature of foreign economic activity. The results of the study made it possible to confirm the decrease in the level of technological dependence in the regions, since, compared to others, the geography of specializations in the production of electronic equipment and mechanical engineering is expanding at the fastest pace. The pattern is confirmed that regions with a higher level of specialization are more successful in exports than the national average. It has been revealed that regions with relatively small production and export scales can still be more competitive in foreign markets and less dependent on imports than regions with large production facilities, since they use the existing industrial potential more fully and effectively. The proposed methodological approach allowed us to offer recommendations on strengthening competitiveness for each of the four types of regions. The advantages and novelty of the proposed methodological approach lie in the most complete assessment of the region's use of competitive advantages in the global market. The theoretical value lies in identifying the actualization of the methodological apparatus for assessing regional competitiveness. The practical value lies in the possibility of using the results obtained for management decisions on the development of specialization in the regions and the development of support measures to ensure technological sovereignty. The directions of further research are related to detailing the product groups in which regions can increase the level of competitiveness and to expanding the geography of exports.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26565/2074-8922-2024-83-12
Purpose. The purpose of the article is to identify the leading factors of professional development of vocational education teachers in the context of the information and educational environment.
Methods. To achieve this goal, a set of general scientific (analysis, synthesis, analogy, comparison, collation, generalization, classification, systematization), empirical (analysis of philosophical, psychological, pedagogical, methodological literature, regulatory and normative documentation) and universal (modeling) methods have been used.
Results. The specifics of professional activity in vocational educational institutions include: teachers' lack of special pedagogical education; belonging of the educational institution to a certain sector of the national economy for which specialists are being trained; inclusion of non-teaching specialists in the teaching staff. The concept of “educational environment” includes both various information resources (information technology, reference and information, information and technical, information and software, information and educational, etc.) and a set of social and communicative interconnections (networking communities, thematic platforms, websites, blogging sites, etc.). The information and educational environment created for the professional development of vocational education teachers is characterized by certain features: intensity; openness and accessibility; dynamism; absence of geographical and political boundaries; active interaction; interactivity; opportunities to use elements of non-formal and informal education for self-education and professional development based on using Internet resources. The general understanding the information and educational environment of a vocational education institution, which would be an effective factor in promoting the competence of a vocational education teacher, allowed us to develop an appropriate model.
Conclusions. The set of specific factors for vocational teacher development includes: motivational factor, content factor, procedural and technological factor. These factors have an effective influence on the development of a vocational education teacher in the context of the information and educational environment of a vocational institution. Prospects for further research may include the issues of technical and methodological support, as well as the identification and theoretical substantiation of organizational and pedagogical conditions for the implementation of the model for the development of vocational education teachers in the context of the information and educational environment.
In cites: Gabruk O. O. (2024). Information and educational environment as a leading factor in the professional development of vocational education teachers. Problems of Engineering Pedagogic Education, (83), 136-147. https://doi.org/10.26565/2074-8922-2024-83-12 (in Ukrainian)
Kholmatov Umid S., Mukimova Davlatkhon K., Xalimjonov Elmurod X.
et al.
This article discusses the issues of optoelectronic discrete converters of any type - longitudinal or transverse movement of the external modulating body. In connection with the development of such important sectors of the economy as mechanical engineering, metallurgy, oil and gas, chemical, industrial, construction, food industry and others, it is important to provide them with modern discrete displacement transducers, which allow monitoring and managing such important quantities as liquid level, speed and flow flows of gases and liquids, as well as automative the processes of automatic accounting of piece goods, products, goods, blanks and semifinished products, which allows you to objectively analyze the economic activities of enterprises and plan their further development. The variety of specific features of monitoring and control objects put forward a set of requirements for discrete converters of object parameters: high sensitivity, accuracy, reliability, sufficient noise immunity, manufacturability. An analysis of existing discrete optoelectronic displacement transducers shows that to solve the above problems for monitoring and control, optoelectronic discrete displacement transducers based on hollow and fiber light guides are the most acceptable. In this regard, the improvement and development of optoelectronic discrete displacement transducers based on hollow and fiber light guides is an urgent task.
Renan Lima Baima, Tiago Miguel Barao Caetano, Ana Carolina Oliveira Lima
et al.
The primary objective is to emphasize the merits of active methodologies and cross-disciplinary curricula in Requirement Engineering. This direction promises a holistic and applied trajectory for Computer Engineering education, supported by the outcomes of our case study, where artifact-centric learning proved effective, with 73% of students achieving the highest grade. Self-assessments further corroborated academic excellence, emphasizing students' engagement in skill enhancement and knowledge acquisition.
A tool to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of public spending is proposed here. In the 19th century banknotes had a serial number. However, in modern days the use of digital transactions that do not use physical currency has opened the possibility to digitally track almost each cent of the economy. In this article a serial number or tracking number for each cent, pence or any other monetary unit of the economy is proposed. Then, almost all cents can be tracked by recording the transactions in a public distributed ledger, rather than recording the amount of the transaction, the information recorded in the block of the transaction is the actual serial number or tracking number for each cent that changes ownership. In order to keep the privacy of the transaction, only generic identification of private companies and individuals are recorded along with generic information about the concept of transaction, the region and the date/time. A secondary public distributed ledger whose blocks are identified by a hash reference that is recorded in the bank statement available to the payer and the payee allows for checking the accuracy of the first public distributed ledger by comparing the transactions made in one day, one region and one type of concept. However, the transactions made or received by the government are recorded with a much higher level of detail in the first ledger and a higher level of disclosure in the second ledger. The result is a tool that is able to accurately track public spending, to keep privacy of individuals and companies and to make statistical analysis and experiments or real tests in the economy of a country. This tool has the potential to assist public policymakers in demonstrating the societal benefits resulting from their policies, thereby enabling more informed decision-making for future policy endeavours.