Search Results (56)

Intelligent transport systems are revolutionising all aspects of modern life, increasing the efficiency of commerce, modern living, and international travel. Intelligent transport systems are systems of systems comprised of cyber, physical, and social nodes. They represent unique opportunities but also have potential threats to system operation and correctness. The emergent behaviour in Complex Cyber–Physical–Social Systems (C-CPSSs), caused by events such as cyber-attacks and network outages, have the potential to have devastating effects to critical services across society. It is therefore imperative that the risk of cascading failure is minimised through the fortifying of these systems of systems to achieve resilient mission assurance. This work designs and implements a programmatic model to validate the value of cascading failure simulation and analysis, which is then tested against a C-CPSS intelligent transport system scenario. Results from the model and its implementations highlight the value in identifying both critical nodes and percolation of consequences during a cyber failure, in addition to the importance of including social nodes in models for accurate simulation results. Understanding the relationships between cyber, physical, and social nodes is key to understanding systems’ failures that occur because of or that involve cyber systems, in order to achieve cyber and system resilience. Full article

As cyber systems increasingly converge with physical infrastructure and social processes, they give rise to Complex Cyber–Physical–Social Systems (C-CPSS), whose emergent behaviors pose unique risks to security and mission assurance. Traditional cyber–physical system models often fail to address the unpredictability arising from human and organizational dynamics, leaving critical gaps in how cyber risks are assessed and managed across interconnected domains. The challenge lies in building resilient systems that not only resist disruption, but also absorb, recover, and adapt—especially in the face of complex, nonlinear, and often unintentionally emergent threats. This paper introduces the concept of ‘responsible resilience’, defined as the capacity of systems to adapt to cyber risks using trustworthy, transparent agent-based models that operate within socio-technical contexts. We identify a fundamental research gap in the treatment of social complexity and emergence in existing the cyber–physical system literature. To address this, we propose the E3R modeling paradigm—a novel framework for conceptualizing Emergent, Risk-Relevant Resilience in C-CPSS. This paradigm synthesizes human-in-the-loop diagrams, agent-based Artificial Intelligence simulations, and ontology-driven representations to model the interdependencies and feedback loops driving unpredictable cyber risk propagation more effectively. Compared to conventional cyber–physical system models, E3R accounts for adaptive risks across social, cyber, and physical layers, enabling a more accurate and ethically grounded foundation for cyber defence and mission assurance. Our analysis of the literature review reveals the underrepresentation of socio-emergent risk modeling in the literature, and our results indicate that existing models—especially those in industrial and healthcare applications of cyber–physical systems—lack the generalizability and robustness necessary for complex, cross-domain environments. The E3R framework thus marks a significant step forward in understanding and mitigating emergent threats in future digital ecosystems. Full article

Large-scale heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) control systems in pharmaceutical manufacturing are characterized by complex operational parameters, delayed and often challenging fault detection, and stringent regulatory compliance requirements. To address these issues, this study presents an innovative data-driven fault detection framework that integrates Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with Nonlinear State Estimation Technology (NSET), specifically tailored for highly regulated pharmaceutical production environments. A dataset comprising 13,198 operational records was collected from the SCADA system of a pharmaceutical facility in Zhejiang, China. The data underwent preprocessing and key parameter extraction, after which a nonlinear state estimation predictive model was constructed, with PCA applied for dimensionality reduction and sensitivity enhancement. Fault detection was performed by monitoring deviations in the mixing room temperature, identifying faults when the residuals between observed and predicted values exceeded a statistically determined threshold (mean ± three standard deviations), in accordance with the Laida criterion. The framework’s effectiveness was validated through comparative analysis before and after documented fault events, including temperature sensor drift and abnormal equipment operation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed PCA-NSET model enables timely and accurate detection of both gradual and abrupt faults, facilitating early intervention and reducing potential production downtime. Notably, this framework outperforms traditional fault detection methods by providing higher sensitivity and specificity, while also supporting continuous quality assurance and regulatory compliance in pharmaceutical HVAC applications. The findings underscore the practical value and novelty of the integrated PCA-NSET approach for robust, real-time fault detection in mission-critical industrial environments. Full article

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies enable high-precision positioning with flexible data communication, making real-time/near-real-time monitoring more economical and efficient. In this study, a multi-sensor GNSS-IoT system was developed for measuring precise water surface elevation (WSE). The system, which includes ultrasonic and accelerometer sensors, was deployed on a floating platform in Googong reservoir, Australia, over a four-month period in 2024. WSE data derived from the system were compared against independent reference measurements from the reservoir operator, achieving an accuracy of 7 mm for 6 h averaged solutions and 28 mm for epoch-by-epoch solutions. The results demonstrate the system’s potential for remote, autonomous WSE monitoring and its suitability for validating satellite Earth observation data, particularly from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission. Despite environmental challenges such as moderate gale conditions, the system maintained robust performance, with over 90% of solutions meeting quality assurance standards. This study highlights the advantages of combining the GNSS with IoT technologies and multiple sensors for cost-effective, long-term WSE monitoring in remote and dynamic environments. Future work will focus on optimizing accuracy and expanding applications to diverse aquatic settings. Full article

In-space manufacturing represents a transformative frontier in space exploration and industrial production, offering the potential to revolutionize how goods are produced and resources are utilized beyond Earth. This paper explores the multifaceted aspects of in-space manufacturing, including its evolution, technologies, challenges, and future prospects, while also addressing ethical and legal dimensions critical to its development. Beginning with an overview of its significance and historical context, this paper underscores key concepts such as resource optimization and the reduction of launch costs. It examines terrestrial and space-based manufacturing processes, emphasizing additive manufacturing, advanced materials processing, autonomous robotic systems, and biomanufacturing for pharmaceuticals. Unique challenges posed by the space environment, such as microgravity, vacuum conditions, and radiation exposure, are analyzed alongside issues related to supply chains, quality assurance, and energy management. Drawing from case studies, including missions aboard the International Space Station, this paper evaluates the lessons learned over six decades of innovation in in-space manufacturing. It further explores the potential for large-scale production to support deep-space missions and assesses the commercial and economic feasibility of these technologies. This paper also delves into the policy, legal, and ethical considerations to address as space-based manufacturing becomes integral to future space exploration and the global space economy. Ultimately, this work provides a comprehensive roadmap for advancing in-space manufacturing technologies and integrating them into humanity’s pursuit of sustainable and scalable space exploration. Full article

Acquiring knowledge of aircraft flight dynamics is crucial for simulation, control, mission performance and safety assurance analysis. In the fast-paced UAV market, long flight testing campaigns are hard to achieve, leaving limited controlled flight data and a significant amount of unplanned flight data. This work delves into the application of system identification techniques on unplanned flight data when faced with a shortage of dedicated flight test data. Based on a medium-sized, fixed-wing UAV, it focuses on the system identification of longitudinal dynamics using structural routine flight test data of pitch down and pitch up manoeuvres with no specific guidelines for the control inputs given. The proposed solution uses first- and second-order parameter-based models to build a non-linear dynamic model which, using a least square error optimisation algorithm in a time domain formulation, has its parameters tuned to converge the model behaviour with the real aircraft dynamics. The optimisation uses a combination of pitch, altitude, airspeed and pitch rate responses as a measure of model accuracy. Very significant improvements regarding the UAV model response are found when trimmed flight manoeuvres are used, resulting in proper estimation of important aerodynamic and control derivatives. Pitching moment and control derivatives are shown to be the crucial parameters. However, difficulties in estimation are shown for untrimmed flight manoeuvres. Better results were obtained when using multiple manoeuvres simultaneously in the optimisation error metric, as opposed to single manoeuvres that led to system bias. The proposed system identification procedure can be applied to any fixed-wing UAV without the need for specific flight testing campaigns. Full article

Background/Objectives: Fracture-related infections (FRIs) are a significant complication in conflict zones, where limited resources and damaged infrastructure complicate orthopedic care. Methods: This study retrospectively reviews the management of FRIs during medical missions to Gaza from April to July 2024. Results: Among 135 patients treated for war-related fractures, 30% were identified with suspected FRIs, which were primarily following explosive injuries. Contributing factors to the high incidence of infection included malnutrition, poor sanitation, and the scarcity of sterile surgical supplies. The absence of standard infection control measures further complicated treatment. Conclusions: These findings highlight the critical need for a comprehensive approach that incorporates infection prevention, sustainable healthcare planning, and quality assurance tailored to the realities of conflict zones. The study underscores the importance of international support to ensure the availability of essential medical supplies and to develop effective, context-specific strategies for infection management. By applying these insights, healthcare providers can improve patient outcomes and reduce the burden of FRIs in resource-limited settings affected by conflict. Full article

Indoor air quality (IAQ) poses a significant public health concern, and exposures to high levels of fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) and carbon dioxide (CO₂) could have detrimental health impacts. This study focused on assessing the indoor air pollutants in a residential house located in the town of Mission, Hidalgo County, South Texas, USA. The PM_2.5 and CO₂ were monitored indoors: the kitchen and the bedroom. This investigation also aimed to elucidate the effects of household activities such as cooking and human occupancy on these pollutants. Low-cost sensors (LCSs) from TSI AirAssure™ were used in this study. They were deployed within the breathing zone at approximately 1.5 m above the ground. Calibration of the low-cost sensors against Federal Equivalent Method (FEM) instruments was undertaken using a multiple linear regression method (MLR) model to improve the data accuracy. The indoor PM_2.5 levels were significantly influenced by cooking activities, with the peak PM_2.5 concentrations reaching up to 118.45 μg/m³. The CO₂ levels in the bedroom increased during the occupant’s sleeping period, reaching as high as 1149.73 ppm. The health risk assessment was assessed through toxicity potential (TP) calculations for the PM_2.5 concentrations. TP values of 0.21 and 0.20 were obtained in the kitchen and bedroom, respectively. The TP values were below the health hazard threshold (i.e., TP < 1). These low TP values could be attributed to the use of electric stoves and efficient ventilation systems. This research highlights the effectiveness of low-cost sensors for continuous IAQ monitoring and helps promote better awareness of and necessary interventions for salubrious indoor microenvironments. Full article

The purpose of this study is to determine the impact of an internal auditor’s activities in Romania, through their specific activities, on ESG reporting and sustainable development goals (SDGs). Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) are three criteria by which an organization’s operations are characterized as sustainable, responsible, or ethical. Even though, for business, the SDGs have been called “a 2030 purchase order for business and government action today”, the alignment between environmental, social, and governance performance and sustainable development goals helps practitioners in observing corporate contributions to sustainable growth. This research aims to identify whether internal auditors in Romania are able to contribute to ESG reporting and the achievement of the sustainable development goals through specific objective assurance and advisory activities. Using the questionnaire, the data were collected from professional accountants who carry out internal audit missions. The main findings confirm a strong and directly significant connection between the internal audit’s perception of the management’s view of the SDGs and how the entity can contribute to achieving the SDG objectives. The results also showed a direct and medium-intensity impact of the variables, capturing the important role of internal audits in ESG reporting. Our study showed that internal audits can help with reporting ESG and sustainable development objectives through their activity. However, according to our statistical results, the internal auditors do not offer at all (or rarely offer) objective assurance and counseling related to these subjects. Moreover, it is observed that, in these situations, the management does not have a clear vision and has not taken measures to achieve the sustainable development goals and ESG factors. Full article

The worldwide launch of neoliberalism ushered everyone into an atomized society. Neoliberalism transforms Homo sapiens into Homo economicus, a narcissistic self-entrepreneur that positions their body as a factory, skills as resources, and earnings as products while relying less on others. Such atomization of individuals undermines the community. Following the Cartesian moment, enlightenment, and postmodernism’s later wave, the world is disenchanted, deprived of unity in the form of community fragmentation. Foucault offered a Greco–Roman philosophical remedy for contemporary society, focusing on the formulation of ‘Spiritual-Corporality’ through the practice of care of the self. Foucault believed the one who takes good care of himself is often self-assured of his ability, expectations, and missions in relationships with others, he does not resort to tyranny in those relationships, giving him an ethical advantage in caring for his family and fellow citizens. If everyone strives to take care of themselves, the city-state will prosper. However, Foucault relied on Stoic philosophy over other ancient schools and failed to provide concrete practices on how to bind ourselves with others through care of the self. In partial agreement with Foucault, the present study chooses Hadot’s spiritual exercise as a more accurate terminology to justify Greco–Roman philosophies’ affordance to contemporary social unification. After reviewing the philosophies of Aristotle, the Stoics, and Epicurus, the present study selected the spiritual exercises of ‘hitting the mean as deliberation’, ‘reframing of self’, and ‘thinking outside the box’ as suitable practices for community flourishing. Full article

One of the main security challenges when federating separate Internet of Things (IoT) administrative domains is effective Identity and Access Management, which is required to establish trust and secure communication between federated IoT devices. The primary goal of the work is to develop a “lightweight” protocol to enable authentication and authorization of IoT devices in federated environments and ensure the secure communication of IoT devices. We propose a novel Lightweight Authentication and Authorization Framework for Federated IoT (LAAFFI) which takes advantage of the unique fingerprint of IoT devices based on their configuration and additional hardware modules, such as Physical Unclonable Function, to provide flexible authentication and authorization based on Distributed Ledger technology. Moreover, LAAFFI supports IoT devices with limited computing resources and devices not equipped with secure storage space. We implemented a prototype of LAAFFI and evaluated its performance in the Hyperledger Fabric-based IoT framework. Three main metrics were evaluated: latency, throughput (number of operations or transactions per second), and network resource utilization rate (transmission overhead introduced by the LAAFFI protocol). The performance tests conducted confirmed the high efficiency and suitability of the protocol for federated IoT environments. Also, all LAAFFI components are scalable as confirmed by tests. We formally evaluated LAAFFI security using Verifpal as a formal verification tool. Based on the models developed for Verifpal, we validated their security properties, such as message secrecy, authenticity, and freshness. Our results show that the proposed solution can improve the security of federated IoT environments while providing zero-day interoperability and high scalability. Compared to existing solutions, LAAFFI is more efficient due to the use of symmetric cryptography and algorithms adapted for operations involving IoT devices. LAAFFI supports multiple authorization mechanisms, and since it also offers authentication and accountability, it meets the requirements of Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA). It uses Distributed Ledger (DL) and smart contracts to ensure that the request complies with the policies agreed between the organizations. LAAFFI offers authentication of devices belonging to a single organization and different organizations, with the assurance that the encryption key will be shared with another device only if the appropriate security policy is met. The proposed protocol is particularly useful for ensuring the security of federated IoT environments created ad hoc for special missions, e.g., operations conducted by NATO countries and disaster relief operations Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) involving military forces and civilian services, where immediate interoperability is required. Full article

This study aims to explore the experiences of frontline hospital nurses over 18 months of struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic. The qualitative thematic analysis method was applied. Twenty-three nurses from nine tertiary hospitals in Israel were interviewed using semi-structured interviews via the ZOOM platform between August and September 2021. Interviews were video recorded and transcribed verbatim. Trustworthiness was assured by using qualitative criteria and the COREQ checklist. Results: Both negative and positive experiences were reported: threat and uncertainty along with awareness of their important mission; anxiety and helplessness alongside courage and heroism. Personal management strategies emerged: regulating overwhelming emotions and managing work–life balance. Team support emerged as the most meaningful source of nurses’ struggle with the pandemic. A sense of intimacy and solidarity enabled the processing of the shared traumatic experiences. Conclusions: A deeper understanding of nurses’ experiences through the pandemic was gained. Informal peer support has proven effective in struggling with the events. Formal interventions, such as affective–cognitive processing of traumatic events, need to be integrated into practice. Healthcare policymakers should promote better support for caregivers, which will contribute to their well-being and impact the quality of care they provide. Full article

To address the issue of limited application scenarios associated with connectivity assurance based on two-dimensional (2D) trajectory planning, this paper proposes an improved deep reinforcement learning (DRL) -based three-dimensional (3D) trajectory planning method for cellular unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communication. By considering the 3D space environment and integrating factors such as UAV mission completion time and connectivity, we develop an objective function for path optimization and utilize the advanced dueling double deep Q network (D3QN) to optimize it. Additionally, we introduce the prioritized experience replay (PER) mechanism to enhance learning efficiency and expedite convergence. In order to further aid in trajectory planning, our method incorporates a simultaneous navigation and radio mapping (SNARM) framework that generates simulated 3D radio maps and simulates flight processes by utilizing measurement signals from the UAV during flight, thereby reducing actual flight costs. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively enable UAVs to avoid weak coverage regions in space, thereby reducing the weighted sum of flight time and expected interruption time. Full article

This work investigates the pseudo-command restricted problem for tailless unmanned aerial vehicles with snake-shaped maneuver flight missions. The main challenge of designing such a pseudo-command restricted controller lies in the fact that the necessity of control allocation means it will be difficult to provide a precise envelope of pseudo-command to the flight controller; designing a compensation system to deal with insufficient capabilities beyond this envelope is another challenge. The envelope of pseudo-command can be expressed by attainable moment sets, which leave some open problems, such as how to obtain the attainable moment sets online and how to reduce the computational complexity of the algorithm, as well as how to ensure independent control allocation and the convexity of attainable moments sets. In this article, an innovative algorithm is proposed for the calculation of attainable moment sets, which can be implemented by fitting wind tunnel data into a function to solve the problems presented above. Furthermore, the algorithm is independent of control allocation and can be obtained online. Moreover, based on the above attainable moment sets algorithm, a flight performance assurance system is designed, which not only guarantees that the command is constrained within the envelope so that its behavior is more predictable, but also supports adaptive compensation for the pseudo-command restricted controller. Finally, the effectiveness of the AMS algorithm and the advantages of the pseudo-command restricted control system are validated through two sets of independent simulations. Full article

This study analyzes the research quality assurance processes in Chilean universities. Data from 29 universities accredited by the National Accreditation Commission were collected. The relationship between institutional accreditation and research performance was analyzed using length in years of institutional accreditation and eight research metrics used as the indicators of quantity, quality, and impact of a university’s outputs at an international level. The results showed that quality assurance in research of Chilean universities is mainly associated with quantity and not with the quality and impact of academic publications. There was also no relationship between the number of publications and their quality, even finding cases with negative correlations. In addition to the above, the relationship between international metrics to evaluate research performance (i.e., international collaboration, field-weighted citation impact, and output in the top 10% citation percentiles) showed the existence of three clusters of heterogeneous composition regarding the distribution of universities with different years of institutional accreditation. These findings call for a new focus on improving regulatory processes to evaluate research performance and adequately promote institutions’ development and the effectiveness of their mission. Full article