Search Results (1,010)

Ensuring the quality, reliability, and efficiency of cold chain logistics for thermolabile pharmaceutical products, particularly vaccines, remains a critical challenge in global health supply chains. These biologics require stringent temperature control throughout storage, transport, and distribution to preserve their efficacy. Persistent issues such as maintaining product integrity, accurately forecasting vaccine demand, and fostering trust among stakeholders often result in inefficiencies, waste, and public mistrust. This study proposes an intelligent digital management framework specifically designed for vaccine cold chains, integrating blockchain, the Internet of Things (IoT), and machine learning (ML) to address these challenges in a holistic and sustainable manner. The main innovation of the study lies in combining secure traceability, real-time cold chain monitoring, and predictive decision support within a unified vaccine cold chain management framework rather than treating these functions as isolated technological solutions. Using WHO immunization coverage data and vaccine-related review data, the framework supports vaccine demand forecasting through the Informer model and stakeholder trust assessment through BERT-based sentiment analysis. In the sentiment analysis task, the BERT model achieved ~80% accuracy on dominant sentiment classes, with a weighted F1-score of 0.6974, demonstrating strong performance on imbalanced datasets. By minimizing vaccine spoilage and enabling more accurate demand planning, the system reduces excess production and distribution, thus lowering resource consumption, carbon emissions, and financial waste. Moreover, trust-informed analytics support better alignment of supply with actual community needs, fostering equity and resilience in vaccine distribution. While this framework has been validated through simulations and experimental evaluation, further real-world testing is needed to assess long-term stability and stakeholder adoption. Nonetheless, it provides a scalable and adaptive foundation for advancing sustainability and transparency in pharmaceutical cold chains. Full article

Despite growing recognition of blockchain technology’s potential to enhance traceability, verifiability, and integrity in financial reporting, empirical evidence from regulated banking environments in developing economies remains scarce. This study investigates whether blockchain adoption is positively associated with transparency and accounting disclosure in digital financial reports among Jordanian listed banks. A structured questionnaire was distributed to managers, financial managers, and accountants across 15 banks listed on the Amman Stock Exchange, yielding 312 valid responses. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with 5000 bootstrap subsamples was employed for data analysis. The results show that blockchain adoption is positively and significantly associated with transparency (β = 0.361, p < 0.001) and accounting disclosure (β = 0.437, p < 0.001), explaining 13.0% and 19.1% of the variance, respectively. These findings suggest that blockchain-enabled systems are perceived by banking professionals as contributing to greater reporting credibility. By providing empirical evidence from a developing economy banking sector, this study indicates that blockchain adoption may serve as a governance-supporting mechanism associated with improved perceived transparency and disclosure quality. Full article

Ukraine’s reconstruction, estimated at $524 billion over the next decade, presents an unprecedented opportunity to embed circular economy principles into industrial rebuilding, but the financial architecture currently deployed for reconstruction is structurally blind to circular outcomes. This paper examines how digital tools and innovative financing mechanisms can channel investment toward circular industrial reconstruction in Ukraine, drawing on Germany’s National Circular Economy Strategy (NCES, adopted December 2024) as a reference model. A comparative institutional analysis combines a documentary review of Ukrainian reconstruction policy frameworks (Ukraine Plan 2024–2027, RDNA4, Ukraine Facility) and German NCES instruments with the construction of a financing−technology pathway typology. Five pathways are proposed: circular bond issuance with Digital Product Passport integration; blended finance with blockchain impact verification; EU Facility conditionality with AI-driven resource management; war risk insurance with circular construction standards; and SME digitalisation credit with circular economy competency building. Each pathway is assessed against five criteria: investment scale, risk mitigation, circular measurement, digital readiness, and institutional feasibility, and applied to four industrial corridors (Dnipro region, Zaporizhzhia region, Kharkiv region, and Donetsk region). The analysis reveals that no single pathway is sufficient; a layered strategy differentiating by region is required. Digital tools, particularly the Digital Product Passport and blockchain traceability, serve as partial substitutes for institutional trust in post-conflict settings, reducing information asymmetry between investors and project operators. The paper contributes a practically oriented framework at the under-theorised intersection of post-conflict reconstruction finance and circular economy scholarship. Full article

The rapid evolution of fintech has accelerated the integration of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies into crowdfunding platforms, reshaping entrepreneurial finance and challenging traditional conceptions of money, intermediation, and financial risk. This study empirically examines the socio-cultural, demographic, and behavioural factors influencing funders’ perceptions and investment decisions in crypto-crowdfunding, an emerging model situated at the intersection of digital currencies, financial inclusion, and decentralised capital formation. Using primary survey data from a focus group of 50 respondents measuring perceptions through a structured five-point Likert questionnaire, the analysis investigates how risk perception, trust and security, investor awareness, and perceived benefits shape participation in crypto-crowdfunded projects. The findings indicate that blockchain-based features such as transparency and decentralisation are associated with variations in perceived trust and risk assessment, rather than uniformly enhancing investor confidence. Socio-demographic characteristics emerge as significant determinants of investor awareness, perceived risks, and expected benefits, confirming pronounced behavioural heterogeneity in digital-finance participation. Regression results reveal strong interdependencies between trust, risk perception, and awareness, underscoring the importance of informational quality and risk-governance mechanisms in supporting sustainable adoption. By providing empirical evidence on individual-level determinants of participation in crypto-crowdfunding, the study contributes to the literature on the future of money by clarifying how crypto-crowdfunding operates as a behavioural-financial phenomenon embedded in decentralised governance structures. Full article

In this paper, we present a system built on Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) that leverages Confidential Computing (CC) technologies to strengthen data privacy guarantees beyond those achievable through application-level mechanisms alone. While HLF natively supports data confidentiality through Private Collections (PCs), which restrict data visibility to a subset of authorized network participants, these mechanisms do not protect data at the hardware level: a privileged or compromised hosting platform can access plaintext data in memory and on the filesystem irrespective of HLF access control policies. To address this limitation, we integrate CC into HLF by adopting Intel Software Guard Extensions (SGX) in conjunction with the Gramine framework. This integration enables the execution of HLF components—peer nodes, orderers, Chaincodes and client applications—within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Furthermore, to securely grant access to selected data to a trusted third-party software (TPS) external to the blockchain network, we leverage the Remote Attestation (RA) feature provided by CC, as streamlined by Gramine and enforced on a per-request basis, ensuring that only verified enclaves (or “SGX enclaves”) with expected measurements may access private data. In addition, the Sealing mechanism is employed to persistently store cryptographic material required by HLF components on the filesystem while preserving both confidentiality and integrity. Together, PCs, RA, Sealing, and enclave-based execution establish a layered privacy guarantee: PCs enforce application-level data segregation among channel participants; RA provides measurement-based access control for an external TPS; Sealing ensures that cryptographic material and blockchain state remain encrypted on the filesystem; and enclave-based execution protects data in use through hardware-level memory encryption. The proposed system has been applied and experimentally validated in a logistics use case in the Port of Genoa: benchmarks against an experimental HLF deployment demonstrate an average 95th-percentile (p95) performance overhead of approximately 1.3× attributable to SGX memory encryption and Gramine-based enclave execution, whereas an elevated memory usage footprint (33–35 GB per organization) has been measured, mainly due to the Gramine environment: this remains an open direction for future work. Full article

This study investigates the evolving relationship between supply chain integration (SCI) and firm performance through a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 148 publications retrieved from the Scopus database. Using VOSviewer 1.6.20 software, the research maps the intellectual structure of the field, highlighting influential authors, journals, and thematic developments. Findings reveal that SCI conceptualized across internal, supplier, and customer integration has consistently been linked to improved operational efficiency, responsiveness, and competitive advantage. However, empirical evidence also indicates mixed outcomes, particularly under conditions of environmental uncertainty and excessive dependence on partners. Recent scholarship demonstrates a notable shift toward sustainability-oriented integration and the adoption of digital technologies such as blockchain, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence, which collectively enhance resilience and adaptability. The analysis underscores gaps in research across developing economies and service industries, suggesting opportunities for future inquiry. Overall, the study deepens understanding of SCI’s role in shaping resilient, sustainable, and technologically enabled supply chains. Full article

This paper presents a comprehensive review of existing research on the integration of blockchain technologies with the trust service ecosystem governed by the Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) Regulation of the European Union (EU). While Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and electronic signature (ES) systems deployed under eIDAS provide strong cryptographic guarantees, standardized protocols, and cross-border legal recognition, their operational model remains largely centralized, concentrating trust in supervised authorities and service providers. This centralization raises concerns related to transparency, auditability, and resilience that blockchain, with its decentralized consensus and immutable distributed ledgers, has been increasingly explored to address. This review covers the most relevant application domains in which blockchain has been proposed as a complementary layer for Trust Service Providers (TSPs): certificate lifecycle management, remote signature services, signature preservation, signature validation, timestamping, content provenance and authenticity, and the European digital identity (EUDI) Wallet ecosystem. For each domain, this paper analyzes how blockchain can strengthen auditability and distributed trust while preserving the interoperability, legal assurance, and standards compliance required by eIDAS and ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) frameworks. A quantitative comparison of latency, throughput, and operational costs between blockchain-augmented and traditional architectures is provided, together with a technology maturity classification for each application domain. Finally, the paper identifies current limitations, including scalability, regulatory alignment, privacy constraints, and the absence of production-scale pilot data, and outlines open research challenges for the adoption of blockchain in regulated digital trust services. Full article

Quantum computing challenges the long-term security assumptions of blockchain systems that rely on classical public-key cryptography, motivating the adoption of post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution (QKD). This review maps research fronts at the intersection of blockchain and quantum-safe security, linking threat assumptions to post-quantum mechanisms, blockchain layers, and QKD positioning. Records were retrieved from Scopus and Web of Science using a two-block query and filtered through a PRISMA-guided workflow for bibliometric mapping. The final corpus comprises 648 journal articles and shows accelerated publication growth after 2023, with scientific production concentrated in a small set of leading countries. Keyword structures indicate that IoT-centric deployments dominate the semantic backbone, where authentication and intelligent methods co-occur with blockchain security primitives, while post-quantum and privacy-preserving constructs form a cohesive technical stream. QKD appears as a distinct but more specialized theme, typically discussed at the system level and shaped by infrastructure and scalability constraints. Overall, the literature is moving from conceptual risk articulation toward engineering integration; however, progress is limited by inconsistent reporting of threat models, post-quantum parameter sets, and ledger-level cost trade-offs, highlighting the need for auditable and reproducible evaluation. Full article

Against the backdrop of a technological revolution centered on green and low-carbon development, the deep integration of digitalization and greening has become a core engine for high-quality progress. Moving beyond linear perspectives of environmental governance, this study constructs tripartite evolutionary game models to dissect the strategic interactions among government, enterprises, and consumers. Focusing on the institutional context of e-commerce, we examine how platform-enabled transparency mechanisms (e.g., blockchain traceability and carbon labeling) shape these interactions through key parameters: greenwashing detection (θ), premium loss coefficient (η), and information screening cost (C_D). The analysis reveals that the long-term trajectory is fundamentally determined by the intrinsic economic viability of corporate transformation. Government intervention acts as an equilibrium selector, influencing the speed of convergence, while product value (consumer utility and premium) and platform transparency determine the sustainability of the equilibrium. Critically, the tripartite model shows that the optimal outcome—full enterprise transformation and consumer adoption—can be achieved without sustained government intervention when product fundamentals are sufficiently attractive. This demonstrates the potential for market self-regulation to sustain digital–green synergy. The study makes three contributions: it captures the full tripartite feedback loop, reveals the saturation effect of policy intensity, and embeds platform transparency mechanisms into an evolutionary framework. The findings reframe the government’s role as a temporary enabler and position e-commerce platforms as key governance intermediaries, offering a theoretical basis for adaptive governance strategies in digital commerce. Full article

This research examines the emerging ecosystem of models that are developed and run across a distributed network of computers called decentralized artificial intelligence. The focus is to understand these models in the healthcare context and with a focus on their core components: technologies, governance frameworks, and real-world applications. A systematic literature review was conducted, analyzing peer-reviewed studies from PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science to map the current landscape of the field. The primary objective was to synthesize the current research on decentralized approaches in healthcare, including core approaches like federated learning and blockchain-based AI models, as well as emerging concepts such as agentic AI blockchain-based AI models and DAOs, to comprehend their application in clinical and operational settings. The research assesses the maturity of these implementations, ranging from pilot programs to large-scale organizational settings. It also identified the key computational and technical methods and platforms used and the key benefits and challenges influencing their adoption. The findings underscore the pivotal role of the decentralized paradigm in addressing the fundamental limitations of traditional AI, including data privacy, trust, institutional silos, and regulatory complexity. Insights are also offered for healthcare providers, technology developers, researchers, and policymakers aiming to navigate and leverage decentralized AI to build more equitable, efficient, and collaborative healthcare systems. Full article

This study synthesizes peer-reviewed literature to examine how blockchain technology supports Automated Project Governance (APG), focusing on the organizational, institutional, and human conditions under which potential governance contribution is realized. A systematic literature review was conducted in accordance with PRISMA 2020 guidelines, yielding twenty-one empirically and conceptually grounded studies. Screening reliability was strengthened through independent dual screening at the full-text eligibility stage (inter-rater κ = 0.81). Seven blockchain-enabled governance mechanisms are synthesized and comparatively assessed in terms of evidentiary support and research maturity, suggesting that blockchain’s decentralized and immutable architecture may support transparency, accountability, and coordination when embedded within appropriate governance arrangements, but these benefits do not arise automatically from technological adoption. The synthesis further identifies enabling conditions, including stakeholder acceptance, organizational governance readiness, and institutional alignment, and maps explicit research gaps for each mechanism to guide future empirical inquiry. By grounding the synthesis in the Technology Acceptance Model and Institutional Theory, the study provides a literature-derived, socio-technical framework for understanding blockchain adoption in APG and offers governance-oriented insights for organizations and policymakers. Full article

Digital transformation is reshaping construction asset compliance, but fragmented information and weak evidence trails still constrain effective management. This systematic grey literature review (2014–2025) identifies technologies supporting asset management and compliance assurance and compares adoption maturity across the United Kingdom (UK), the United States (US), Singapore, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Using multi-channel search strategies and the AACODS appraisal (Authority, Accuracy, Coverage, Objectivity, Date, Significance), 131 records were identified; 92 full texts reviewed; 82 eligible; and 43 sources retained. Coding identified a recurring five-technology “core digital stack”: Building Information Modelling (BIM), Digital Twins (DT), Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML), and Blockchain (BC). Within the retained corpus, BIM and AI/ML were the most frequently referenced technologies, whereas BC was referenced more selectively and discussed mainly for tamper-evident traceability. DT and IoT were typically discussed alongside BIM, while IoT also frequently co-occurred with AI/ML in analytics-led compliance workflows. A (Region × Technology) maturity matrix suggests higher, policy-led maturity where mandates and audit-ready information align with national frameworks (UK, Singapore), and more uneven, project-led adoption in decentralised contexts (US, GCC). Overall, the findings emphasise that effective compliance relies on integrated, evidence-focused digital stacks supported by standardised information governance rather than isolated tools. Full article

The widespread adoption of smart contracts, self-executing agreements on the blockchain, is hindered by the complexity of translating real-world contracts, often written in multiple languages, into their digital counterparts. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing an innovative approach based on Contract Text Markup Language (CTML), an extensible markup language specifically designed to facilitate the automatic generation of smart contracts from multilingual contracts. CTML overcomes traditional method limitations by employing a two-stage transformation process: (1) Contract Abstraction and Markup: CTML redefines grammar rules and incorporates encoding extensions to transform multilingual contracts into structured, marked-up contracts. This process effectively abstracts the essential details of the original contract, enabling language-agnostic interpretation. (2) Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Translation and Smart Contract Code Generation: The marked-up contract is then seamlessly translated into a DSL program, capturing the legal concepts in a machine-readable format. Finally, the DSL program is automatically compiled into executable smart contract code, ready for deployment on the blockchain. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a legal contract in both English and Chinese. Therefore, the CTML-based approach can automatically generate smart contracts from multilingual contracts, enabling a more inclusive and accessible smart contract ecosystem. Full article

The sustainable management of waste is a significant problem facing humanity, especially in regions with low recycling rates and a lack of infrastructure. For example, Romania has a recycling rate of only 12%, a long way from meeting the European Union’s target of 42%. This article proposes a framework for sustainable waste management, called CETHTB-Chain, by combining the circular economy, Triple Helix Twins collaboration, and blockchain technology. To test the viability of this framework, a Monte Carlo simulation with 10,000 iterations and system dynamics modelling with a 10-year simulation period was conducted. The Monte Carlo simulation revealed that CETHTB-Chain can improve recycling rates by a mean of 45.6% (95% CI, 38.6–52.6%), material recovery rates by 62.7% (95% CI, 54.4–70.0%), cost savings by 18.53 euros per ton, and CO₂ reduction by 629 kg per ton of waste. System dynamics modelling revealed that CETHTB-Chain is feasible for implementation, following S-curve growth, with recycling rates of 38.6% in 7–10 years. Sensitivity analysis revealed that blockchain technology adoption (ρ = 0.612) and citizen participation (ρ = 0.379) were key drivers of CETHTB-Chain performance. By combining Monte Carlo simulation and system dynamics modelling, this article has shown CETHTB-Chain to be a statistically significant and temporally feasible blueprint for transitioning from a linear economy to a circular economy in waste management. By engaging academia, industry, and government in a collaborative relationship facilitated by blockchain technology, CETHTB-Chain has provided valuable evidence for strategic planning in waste management in the European Union. Full article