Search Results (40)

The adoption of blockchain-based smart contracts for the trading of goods and services promises greater transparency, automation, and trustlessness, but also raises challenges related to payment integration and modularity. While business analysts (BAs) can express business logic and control flow using BPMN and decision rules using DMN, payment tasks that involve concrete transfers (on-chain, off-chain, cross-chain, or hybrid) require careful implementation by developers due to platform-specific constraints and semantic richness. To address this separation of concerns, we introduce a methodology within the context of the smart contract-as-a-service (SCaaS) approach that supports (1) identifying and mapping generic payment tasks in BPMN to pre-deployed payment smart contracts, (2) augmenting BPMN models with matching payment fragments from a pattern repository, and (3) automatically transforming the augmented models into smart contracts that invoke the appropriate payment services. Our approach builds on prior work in automated BPMN-to-smart contract transformation using Discrete Event–Hierarchical State Machine (DE-HSM) multi-modal modeling to capture process semantics and nested transactions, while enabling payment service reuse, extensibility, and the separation of concerns. We illustrate this methodology via representative use cases spanning conventional, DeFi, and cross-chain payments, and discuss the implications for modular contract deployment and maintainability. Full article

The rapid integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies is transforming electrical power systems into intelligent, interconnected, and data-driven infrastructures, enabling advanced monitoring, control, and optimization across the entire energy value chain. IoT-based smart electrical systems enable advanced monitoring, control, and optimization of energy generation, distribution, and consumption, while also introducing new challenges related to interoperability, security, scalability, and data management. Despite the growing body of literature, existing surveys typically address these challenges in isolation, focusing on individual technological or operational aspects and thus failing to capture their strong cross-dependencies in real-world deployments. This paper delivers a comprehensive survey that systematically analyzes and interrelates nine key dimensions that prior literature largely examines in separate silos: architectural models, communication protocols, reference standards, cybersecurity and privacy mechanisms, data processing paradigms (edge, fog, and cloud), interoperability solutions, energy management strategies, application scenarios, and future research directions. Unlike conventional reviews confined to single-layer or domain-specific perspectives, this survey adopts a holistic, cross-layer approach, explicitly linking architectural choices, protocol stacks, interoperability frameworks, and security mechanisms with application and energy management requirements. Full article

Quantum computing threatens the security foundations of global financial systems, exposing long-lived data and signed digital assets to “harvest-now, decrypt-later” attacks. While the timeline for cryptographically relevant quantum computers remains uncertain, regulatory signals from the USA, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia converge: financial institutions and payment infrastructures must begin migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) now to preserve confidentiality, integrity, and systemic stability. This paper maps emerging standards and roadmaps, contrasting binding requirements like the EU’s DORA crypto-agility provisions with non-binding guidance from NIST, ENISA, and ETSI. Despite a shared intent to secure high-risk use cases by 2030–2031 and complete migration by 2035, divergences in enforcement and milestones create uncertainty for cross-border banks and financial market infrastructures. In parallel, technical adoption is advancing: major browsers, cryptographic libraries (OpenSSL/BoringSSL), and CDNs (e.g., AWS CloudFront) have deployed hybrid PQC key exchange in TLS 1.3, proving confidentiality defenses are viable at internet scale. The paper synthesizes historical transition lessons, sector-specific regulatory drivers, and operational constraints in payment infrastructures to derive a new, principle-based migration: crypto-agility, risk-prioritized scoping, hybrid deployment, vendor and supply-chain alignment, independent testing, and proactive supervisory engagement. Acting now reduces long-tail exposure and ensures readiness for imminent compliance and interoperability deadlines. Full article

The application of blockchain technology in large-scale sustainable scenarios requires advancement. Therefore, high-performance cross-chain infrastructure is essential for domains like green supply chain management and peer-to-peer renewable energy trading. This study proposes an integrated modeling framework, whose core innovation is the combination of Phase-Type (PH) distribution, the $GI/PH/1$ queuing model, and quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) process theory to systematically describe the multi-stage service and dynamic interactions in a notary-based cross-chain system. This framework overcomes the limitations of traditional models that rely on oversimplified service assumptions. By utilizing matrix-analytic methods, it enables the precise quantification of key performance metrics, such as system throughput, response time, and rejection rate. This research provides a unified, scalable theoretical tool for cross-chain performance evaluation and establishes a methodological foundation for optimizing system resource allocation and sustainable infrastructure design. Full article

Blockchain is increasingly applied in the agri-food sector to enhance traceability, data integrity, and accountability. However, its broader role in food system sustainability remains insufficiently characterized, particularly when examined against global megatrends shaping future agri-food transitions. This paper investigates how blockchain technology can reinforce sustainable, inclusive, and resilient food systems under the effect of major global megatrends. A structured literature review of peer-reviewed and industry sources was conducted to identify evidence on blockchain-enabled improvements in transparency, certification, and supply chain coordination. Complementary analysis of a curated dataset of European and international pilot implementations evaluated technological architectures, governance models, and demonstrated performance outcomes. Additionally, stakeholder-based foresight activities and scenarios representing alternative blockchain adoption pathways, developed within the TRUSTyFOOD project (GA: 101060534), were used to examine the interconnection between blockchain adoption and megatrends. Evidence from the literature and pilot cases indicates that blockchain can strengthen product-level traceability and improve verification of sustainability and safety claims. Cross-case analysis also reveals persistent constraints, including heterogeneous technical standards, limited interoperability, high deployment costs for smallholders, and governance risks arising from consortium-led platforms. Blockchain can function as an enabling digital layer for sustainable and resilient food systems and should be embedded in wider, participatory strategies that align digital innovation with long-term sustainability and equity goals in the agri-food sector. Full article

Background: Achieving deep decarbonization in global supply chains is essential for advancing net-zero objectives; however, the integrative role of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics in this transition remains insufficiently explored. This study examines how these technologies support carbon-emission reduction across supply chain operations. Methods: A curated corpus of 83 Scopus-indexed peer-reviewed articles published between 2013 and 2025 is analyzed and organized into six domains covering supply chain and logistics, warehousing operations, AI methodologies, robotic systems, emission-mitigation strategies, and implementation barriers. Results: AI-driven optimization consistently reduces transport emissions by enhancing routing efficiency, load consolidation, and multimodal coordination. Robotic systems simultaneously improve energy efficiency and precision in warehousing, yielding substantial indirect emission reductions. Major barriers include the high energy consumption of certain AI models, limited data interoperability, and poor scalability of current applications. Conclusions: AI and robotics hold substantial transformative potential for advancing supply chain decarbonization; nevertheless, their net environmental impact depends on improving the energy efficiency of digital infrastructures and strengthening cross-organizational data governance mechanisms. The proposed framework delineates technological and organizational pathways that can guide future research and industrial implementation, providing novel insights and actionable guidance for researchers and practitioners aiming to accelerate the low-carbon transition. Full article

Compliant cross-border data flows face persistent challenges from fragmented regulatory regimes, inconsistent enforcement, and limited trust among stakeholders. Current approaches typically rely on centralized oversight or excessive data disclosure, both compromising regulatory interoperability and operational security. This paper introduces a trust-oriented blockchain architecture that enables secure cross-border data exchange while ensuring verifiable compliance without revealing sensitive content. The architecture decouples policy enforcement, privacy-preserving validation, and cross-jurisdiction auditability, enabling entities to share cryptographically verifiable compliance proofs rather than raw data. To capture the behavioral dynamics across heterogeneous regulatory environments, we incorporate a strategic interaction layer that models how domestic firms, foreign enterprises, and cross-border data platforms adjust decisions under varying incentive structures. These insights guide the design of an adaptive compliance verification pipeline that maintains trust equilibrium across participants. Our design records only cryptographic digests and structured compliance evidence on-chain, while off-chain components execute privacy-preserving checks using secure computation and decentralized storage. Through a case-driven evaluation, we show that the proposed architecture reduces governance friction, enhances institutional trust, and achieves interoperable compliance validation with minimal disclosure overhead. Through component-level evaluation and architectural analysis, this work establishes a technical foundation for secure, transparent, and regulation-aligned cross-border data governance. The framework provides a blueprint for future multi-party pilot deployments in operational environments. Full article

Blockchain has been widely proposed to strengthen data management security through decentralization, immutability, and auditable transactions, capabilities increasingly recognized as enablers of sustainable digital ecosystems and resilient institutions; however, existing studies remain dispersed across domains and rarely consolidate governance, interoperability, and evaluation criteria. This paper conducts a systematic literature review of 70 peer-reviewed studies published between 2018 and 2024, using IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Springer, ScienceDirect, and ACM Digital Library as primary sources and following Kitchenham’s guidelines and the PRISMA 2020 flow, to examine how blockchain has been applied to secure data in healthcare, IoT, smart cities, supply chains, and cloud environments. The analysis identifies four methodological streams—empirical implementations, cryptographic/security protocols, blockchain–machine learning integrations, and conceptual frameworks—and shows that most contributions are technology-driven, with limited attention to standard metrics, regulatory compliance, and cross-platform integration. In addition, the review reveals that very few works articulate governance models that align technical solutions with organizational policies, which creates a gap for institutions seeking trustworthy, auditable, and privacy-preserving deployments. The review contributes a structured mapping of effectiveness criteria (confidentiality, auditability, availability, and compliance) and highlights the need for governance models and interoperable architectures to move from prototypes to production systems. Future work should prioritize large-scale validations, policy-aligned blockchain solutions, and comparative evaluations across sectors. Full article

Verifiable Credentials (VCs) are a core component of decentralized identity systems, enabling individuals to prove claims without centralized intermediaries. However, managing VC revocation across segregated blockchain networks remains a key interoperability challenge. In this paper, we present a bidirectional blockchain bridge that enables the cross-chain verification of VCs between two Ethereum-compatible private blockchain networks: Geth and Besu. The system allows credentials issued and revoked on one chain to be validated from another without duplicating infrastructure or compromising security. Our architecture combines on-chain smart contracts with an off-chain relay, ensuring auditable, low-latency credential checks across chains. Our proposal is validated through an open-source working prototype. It is particularly relevant for domains where independent organizations must validate shared credentials across segregated blockchain infrastructures, including education, healthcare, and governmental identity services. Full article

In smart home projects, building data management at the design stage increasingly relies on digital-twin assets delivered via game engines. Without a clear governance workflow, however, these practices tend to generate non-standard building data on the consumption side, causing broken data chains and increasing construction and management risks. To address this problem, this study proposes a traceability-oriented governance workflow that strengthens IfcGUID compliance and automatically detects and converts inconsistent digital-twin assets into IFC-compliant, auditable data, thereby reducing data chain breakage and improving cross-system traceability in building data management. The workflow uses IfcGUID as a cross-system primary key and is evaluated in a virtual smart home project through a pre-test–repair–post-test experiment at the design stage. We examine four indicators of IfcGUID quality—completeness, validity, uniqueness, and stability—together with a bridge recognition rate that reflects game engine interoperability on the consumption side. The results show that all four IfcGUID indicators converge towards 1 after applying the workflow, and the bridge recognition rate approaches 100%, indicating that the risk of data chain breakage, measured on an IFC basis, is substantially reduced. Within existing toolchains, this workflow provides design teams, visualization teams, clients, and auditors with a low-cost and reproducible path for standardizing design-stage digital-twin assets and establishing a traceable, auditable baseline for cross-system interoperability and lifecycle building data management and data reuse. Full article

Despite increasing interest in AI, IoT, and blockchain for sustainable transportation, existing reviews remain fragmented—focusing on single technologies, descriptive benefits, or narrow applications—without providing an integrated synthesis across domains. This study conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines and a bibliometric analysis of 102 peer-reviewed papers to provide the concurrent integrative synthesis of AI, IoT, and blockchain in enabling sustainable transport. Data were drawn from Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar, and analyzed using VOSviewer to identify research clusters, emerging themes, and knowledge gaps. The results reveal three thematic clusters: smart traffic systems for congestion management, sustainable logistics and supply chains, and data-driven urban governance. Across these clusters, AI is more mature in predictive modeling, IoT remains fragmented in interoperability, and blockchain is still at a pilot stage with governance and scalability issues. The analysis highlights synergies (e.g., AI–IoT integration for real-time optimization) and persistent challenges (e.g., standardization, data security). This review contributes a strategic research roadmap linking bibliometric hotspots with policy and practice implications. By explicitly identifying gaps in governance, interoperability, and cross-domain integration, the study offers actionable directions for both researchers and policymakers to accelerate digital transitions in transport. Full article

Blockchain-based cold chain logistics (BCCL) systems establish a new logistics data-sharing mechanism with blockchain technology, which destroys the traditional data island problem and promotes cross-institutional data interoperability. However, security vulnerabilities, risks of data loss, exposure of private information, and particularly the emergence of quantum-based attacks pose heightened threats to the existing BCCL framework. This paper first introduces a transaction privacy preserving (TPP) model for BCCLS that aggregates the blockchain and ring signcryption scheme together to strengthen the security of the data exchange process. Then, a lattice-based ring signcryption (LRSC) scheme is proposed. This LRSC utilizes the lattice assumption to enhance resistance against quantum attacks while employing ring mechanisms to safeguard the anonymity and privacy of the actual signer. It also executes signature and encryption algorithms simultaneously to improve algorithm execution efficiency. Moreover, the formal security proof results show that this LRSC can capture the signer’s confidentiality and unforgeability. Experimental findings indicate that the LRSC scheme achieves higher efficiency compared with comparable approaches. The proposed TPP model and LRSC scheme effectively facilitate cross-institutional logistics data exchange and enhance the utilization of logistics information via the BCCL system. Full article

Achieving decarbonization targets in the aviation sector requires transformative approaches to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production. In this pursuit, feedstock innovation has emerged as a critical challenge. This research uses the U.S. SAF Grand Challenge as a case study, focusing on its feedstock innovation workstream, to investigate how Industry 4.0 technologies can fulfill that workstream’s objectives. An integrative literature review, drawing on academic, industry, and policy sources, is used to evaluate the Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) of Industry 4.0 technology applications across the SAF biomass supply chain. The analysis identifies several key technologies as essential for improving yield prediction, optimizing resource allocation, and linking stochastic models to techno-economic analyses (TEAs): IoT-enabled sensor networks, probabilistic/precision forecasting, and automated quality monitoring. Results reveal an uneven maturity landscape, with some applications demonstrating near-commercial readiness, while others remain in early research or pilot stages, particularly in areas such as logistics, interoperability, and forecasting. The study contributes a structured TRL-based assessment that not only maps maturity but also highlights critical gaps and corresponding policy implications, including data governance, standardization frameworks, and cross-sector collaboration. By aligning digital innovation pathways with SAF deployment priorities, the findings offer both theoretical insights and practical guidance for advancing sustainable aviation fuel adoption and accelerating progress toward net-zero aviation. Full article

Current systems for exchanging medical records struggle with efficiency and privacy issues. While establishing the Electronic Medical Record Exchange Center (EEC) in 2012 was intended to alleviate these issues, its centralized structure has brought about new attack vectors, such as performance bottlenecks, single points of failure, and an absence of patient consent over their data. Methods: This paper describes a novel EMR Gateway system that uses blockchain technology to exchange electronic medical records electronically, overcome the limitations of current centralized systems for sharing EMR, and leverage decentralization to enhance resilience, data privacy, and patient autonomy. Our proposed system is built on two interconnected blockchains: a Decentralized Identity Blockchain (DID-Chain) based on Ethereum for managing user identities via smart contracts, and an Electronic Medical Record Blockchain (EMR-Chain) implemented on Hyperledger Fabric to handle medical record indexes and fine-grained access control. To address the dual requirements of cross-platform data exchange and patient privacy, the system was developed based on the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, incorporating stringent de-identification protocols. Our system is built using the FHIR standard. Think of it as a common language that lets different healthcare systems talk to each other without confusion. Plus, we are very serious about patient privacy and remove all personal details from the data to keep it confidential. When we tested its performance, the system handled things well. It can take in about 40 transactions every second and pull out data faster, at around 49 per second. To give you some perspective, this is far more than what the average hospital in Taiwan dealt with back in 2018. This shows our system is very solid and more than ready to handle even bigger workloads in the future. Full article

The increasing complexity and digitization of modern supply chains have created an urgent demand for transparent, traceable, and trustworthy systems of data management. Blockchain, with its core features of immutability, decentralization, and smart contracts, has emerged as a promising solution for strengthening data-driven supply chain operations. This paper presents a narrative review synthesizing insights from academic research, industry reports, and regulatory documents to examine blockchain’s role in enhancing transparency, traceability, and trust. References were identified through targeted searches of major databases and gray literature sources, with emphasis on diverse sectors and global perspectives, rather than exhaustive coverage. The review maps how blockchain’s technical capabilities—such as data integrity preservation, access control, automated validation, and provenance tracking—support these outcomes, and assesses the empirical indicators used to evaluate them. A sectoral applicability analysis distinguishes contexts in which blockchain adoption offers clear advantages from those where benefits are limited. The review also identifies critical research gaps, including inconsistent definitions of core concepts, insufficient interoperability standards, overreliance on subjective performance measures, and lack of longitudinal cost–benefit evidence. Finally, it proposes directions for future research, including the development of sector-specific adoption frameworks, integration with complementary technologies, and cross-border regulatory harmonization. Full article