•Adopting different technologies and techniques create a reliable tracking system.•Blockchain makes the supply chain secure, transparent, authentic and trustworthy.•Blockchain used as a transactional ...network, to run and verify a smart contract.•Dual data storage architecture is required to avoid degrading blockchain performance.•All deployed sensors must be authenticated and must sign data before transmission.
A supply chain is a system of organizations, people, activities, information and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. It is designed to maintain the quality of sensitive goods during the whole shipment. Centralized supply chain management systems expose the supply chain to corruption, fraud, and tampering. Blockchain has emerged as a new distributed information technology; it represents a new approach in supply chain area, where visibility and transparency of product flows are the principal challenges. This paper describes how the blockchain can be integrated into the supply chain architecture to create a reliable, transparent, authentic and secure system. To reach this goal, we studied the benefits of introducing the blockchain to the supply chain and the challenges encountered in a blockchain-based supply chain management ecosystem. We combined theoretical and real-world application studies to build our theory about the requirements for an efficient blockchain-based supply chain.
With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, traditional resource orchestration mechanisms, executed on fog devices, encounter significant scalability, reliability and security ...challenges. To tackle these challenges, recent decentralized algorithms in Fog-IoT use Distributed Ledger Technologies to orchestrate resources and payments between peers. However, while distributed ledgers provide many desirable properties, their consensus mechanism introduces a performance bottleneck. This paper introduces Light-HIDRA, a consensus-less and decentralized resource orchestration system for Fog-IoT environments. At its core, Light-HIDRA uses Byzantine Reliable Broadcast (BRB) to coordinate actions without centralized control, therefore drastically reducing communication overhead and latency compared to consensus-based solutions. Light-HIDRA coordinates the scheduling and execution of workloads, and securely manages the payments that peers receive for dedicating resources to workloads. Light-HIDRA further increases performance and reduces overhead by grouping peers into distinct domains. We conduct an in-depth analysis of the protocol’s security properties, investigating its efficiency and robustness in diverse situations. We evaluate the performance of Light-HIDRA, highlighting its performance over HIDRA, a state-of-the-art baseline that uses smart contracts. Our experiments demonstrate that Light-HIDRA reduces the bandwidth usage by up to 57x, the latency of workload offloading by up to 142x, and shows superior throughput compared to HIDRA.
•Secure and scalable solution for decentralized resource orchestration in Fog-IoT.•Open-source implementation of the Light-HIDRA proposal.•Security analysis to assess resilience against Byzantine attacks and system failures.•Performance and scalability comparison of Light-HIDRA against our baseline HIDRA.•Significant improvements in bandwidth usage, latency, throughput and resource usage.
Access to electric power supply has always had a significant role in promoting improvements in all the society sectors, nevertheless nowadays 1.3 billion of people still do not have electricity ...access. Moreover, most of them live in rural areas of developing countries which are often isolated, scattered populated and characterized by poor infrastructure and services. In this situation, the growing consideration towards the target of universal access to energy has emphasized the role of rural electrification, and off-grid small-scale generation represents one of the most appropriate options. As a consequence, the scientific literature has devoted attention to this topic with a large number of papers. In this frame, the present analysis focuses on off-grid systems for rural electrification and provides a general framework to this topic and an analytical review of the literature. The work is based on the review of more than 350 papers mainly published from 2000 to 2014 within selected journals, and it is organized in two sections. In the first one we describe the role of small-scale generation systems throughout the process of electrification, the main features of rural areas and their typical energy uses, and we propose a new comprehensive taxonomy for off-grid systems for rural electrification. In the second one we develop an extensive review of the selected literature according to the proposed classification and to five main research areas: Technology: layout and components; Models and methods for simulation and sizing; Techno-economic feasibility analyses and sustainability analyses; Case studies analyses; Policy analyses. The work results in a comprehensive review which organizes and capitalizes the main fundamentals of the addressed topic and provides elements to get acquainted with the literature.
Throughout its history, preferably over the last four centuries, the world witnessing game changing and disruptive technologies on certain regular intervals. Wheels, Compass, calendar and pozzolana ...are some of the remarkable inventions in before Christ (B.C) period. Clock, printing press, steam engines, vaccines, electricity, mechanical computer, telegraph, iron and steel, aero plane, transistors, ARPANET, personal computer and Internet are few outstanding innovations fuelled our world for last four centuries. If we look at the time line of inventions, it is dramatically reduced over the advancement of time. Inventions took centuries in B.C, but needs only a few years or a decade in A.D. We would like to add the blockchain technology in this line up, which could fuel new era of inventions in new dimensions.
This technology relies on decentralized concepts, entirely against the present centralized system, the world relies on. Why we still need a third party book keepers or why we still need an third party intermediary for trust and transactions? This article will answer these arguments. This article begins with the conceptual understanding, then reveals its disruptiveness through several case studies across several industries such as Banking, Administration, Supply chain management, Logistics, Asset management, Intellectual property management, Transport and Energy. Blockchain technology has the potential to redefine every one another technology of human beings. Concept of ledger and its evolution, from its voyage from Indian origin single entry ledger to Satoshi Nakamoto’s triple entry ledger has been highlighted, as these are vital to understand the technology behind bit coin. Without mentioning the crypto currencies, the blockchain use cases will not ended up, hence few excerpts of crypto currencies also added.
From cryptography in technology, Anti money laundering, Know your customer, Transaction monitoring in Banking to day to day administration as in the case of land records storage, identity management etc., are few contributions of this article. We also covered the case studies from corporate giants such as Amazon, IBM, MAERSK to the startups like EzyRemit, Signzy etc., and from an individual state of administration Andrapradesh to the entire country, Dubai. It is important for the global engineering education needs to identify and nurture the disruptive technologies, which could contribute to our society in meaningful way. We believe that, blockchain technology belongs to the category of future technologies, which could shape up and fuel the development of global economy for next few decades as internet did for past few decades. Through this article, the young generation engineering pupils, matured practitioners and influential decision makers will understand the potential of blockchain technology and provide impetus to global engineering education.
With dam failure events, there can be changes in water quality and difficulties in the operation of water treatment plants (WTPs) since they were not designed for water treatment under severe ...pollution conditions. To avoid that, it was investigated two strategies based on pre-oxidation, ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) integrated into a conventional treatment process (coagulation, flocculation, and sand filtration) or with each other, with the potential to reduce the risks of drinking water shortage and guarantee a safe drinking water supply. The study considered the context of the Velhas river basin (Brazil), where water quality is compromised by high turbidities (500–3000 NTU) and excessive arsenic (∼0.4 mg/L), iron (∼50 mg/L), and manganese (∼3 mg/L) levels. They were only partially removed by conventional treatments (removals: 74 ± 21%) and potability standards were only achieved after the membrane separation processes were considered (As: <0.01 mg/L, Mn: <0.1 mg/L, and Fe: <0.3 mg/L). The high water quality after RO enables its blend with the stream obtained after sand filters and would allow for greater flexibility during the operation of WTPs operation. Despite the susceptibility to fouling and most frequent maintenance, the pre-oxidation-UF-RO system would also guarantee a safe drinking water supply. The decision for the most adequate strategy was then based on a multicriteria analysis. A retrofit of conventional WTPs by their integration with UF-RO was classified as the best strategy for centralized facilities, whereas pre-oxidation-UF-RO better fits the reality of decentralized treatments given the lower costs and deployment time. The methodology based on multicriteria analysis and water treatment technologies, exemplified by membranes in this study, presented satisfactory results for different scenarios of critical treatment.
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•RO guarantees safe drinking water even in scenarios of severe water quality deterioration.•Fouling was mostly reversible, and the membranes' integrity was not compromised after long-term operation.•UF membrane can retain colloids of As and Mn, different from sand-filter.•Variations in feed concentration of As and Mn do not compromise the RO permeate quality.•Provides quantitative/qualitative information for treatment decision making.
This systematic literature review aimed at presenting experiences on the use of constructed wetlands (CW) as an alternative for the treatment of domestic wastewater in rural areas worldwide. CW units ...are often preceded by a pre-treatment step, although systems comprising arrangements of CW with different flow types are also applied. The literature review showed that the most commonly treatment system used in rural areas comprised septic tanks followed by CW. Overall, CW rural sanitation systems have shown to consistently remove pollutants, with median removal efficiencies equal to 87% for TSS, 89% for COD, 93% for BOD, 70% for Ntotal and 72% for Ptotal. Removal rates of indicator bacteria of up to 4.0 log10 have also been reported. Recent studies have shown CW to be efficient at removing hormones, pharmaceutical compounds and toxicity of wastewater. Consequently, final effluents are often in compliance with effluent discharge and wastewater reuse regulations. The adoption of pre-treatment reduces CW area requirements and clogging issues, and planted CW present benefits in terms of the removal of pollutants including pathogens. Low implementation and operational costs, simplified operation and maintenance, and high-quality final effluents favour CW. Guidelines provided by the local, competent authorities may support the rural application of CW. Finally, CW systems comprise a promising, sustainable solution for rural sanitation which may support access to adequate and equitable sanitation to several people as well as safe wastewater recycling and reuse, as encouraged by UN Sustainable Development Goal 6, Targets 3 and 4.
•Inadequate sanitation systems still exist in rural areas all around the globe.•Decentralized wastewater treatment systems are more suitable to rural areas.•CW units compose simple, low-cost domestic wastewater treatment alternatives.•Pre-treatment + CW have shown to be effective at removing pollutants of wastewater.•CW may support sanitation improvements in rural areas and wastewater reuse (SDG 6).
One of the important issues raised in the field of blockchain networks and decentralized systems is the subject of legislation of these systems. Generally, governments can take action for legislation ...of these systems through five methods including “establishing rules for participants”, “establishing rules for intermediates”, “establishing rules for developers”, “establishing rules for blockchain-based markets”, and “establishing rules through social norms”. However, it should be noted that all these approaches for legislation are imperfect strategies and the governments would not be able to completely stop all the illegal activities on blockchain network and the mentioned strategies would help in reducing the related crimes and hazards.
Electronic government (e-government) uses information and communication technologies to deliver public services to individuals and organisations effectively, efficiently and transparently. ...E-government is one of the most complex systems which needs to be distributed, secured and privacy-preserved, and the failure of these can be very costly both economically and socially. Most of the existing e-government systems such as websites and electronic identity management systems (eIDs) are centralized at duplicated servers and databases. A centralized management and validation system may suffer from a single point of failure and make the system a target to cyber attacks such as malware, denial of service attacks (DoS), and distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). The blockchain technology enables the implementation of highly secure and privacy-preserving decentralized systems where transactions are not under the control of any third party organizations. Using the blockchain technology, exiting data and new data are stored in a sealed compartment of blocks (i.e., ledger) distributed across the network in a verifiable and immutable way. Information security and privacy are enhanced by the blockchain technology in which data are encrypted and distributed across the entire network. This paper proposes a framework of a decentralized e-government peer-to-peer (p2p) system using the blockchain technology, which can ensure both information security and privacy while simultaneously increasing the trust of the public sectors. In addition, a prototype of the proposed system is presented, with the support of a theoretical and qualitative analysis of the security and privacy implications of such system.
The removal of phosphorus (P) from domestic wastewater is primarily to reduce the potential for eutrophication in receiving waters, and is mandated and common in many countries. However, most ...P-removal technologies have been developed for use at larger wastewater treatment plants that have economies-of-scale, rigorous monitoring, and in-house operating expertise. Smaller treatment plants often do not have these luxuries, which is problematic because there is concern that P releases from small treatment systems may have greater environmental impact than previously believed. Here P-removal technologies are reviewed with the goal of determining which treatment options are amenable to small-scale applications. Significant progress has been made in developing some technologies for small-scale application, namely sorptive media. However, as this review shows, there is a shortage of treatment technologies for P-removal at smaller scales, particularly sustainable and reliable options that demand minimal operating and maintenance expertise or are suited to northern latitudes. In view of emerging regulatory pressure, investment should be made in developing new or adapting existing P-removal technologies, specifically for implementation at small-scale treatment works.
The growing demand for energy over the last few decades has increased our dependency on fossil fuel-based sources leading to significant environmental degradation and huge external debt. This article ...addresses the wide spectrum role of some well-planned decentralized-distributed energy networks to realize the need for comprehensive energy planning for inclusive economic growth. An extensive review of different design configurations, their implementation models and socio-economic dimensions are critically presented with solutions for clean energy deliverance. The article recommends that the objectives of uniform energy regulation and its wide range distribution should be based on some novel anticipated models, sufficient enough to fulfil energy demand and to integrate some other energy sources at minimum possible cost for a particular site. The constraints have been well identified at modelling, budgetary and implementation stages as required for uninterrupted and uniform distribution specifically to the far-reaching areas. This study has also resulted in the establishment of the statement that “Technological advancements with specific solutions coordinated through central monitoring are essential because of the fast and reliable implementation of the plan on-ground”. It is also notable that, Role of different and individual stakeholders should be fixed to take an integral part in the advantageous use of decentralized energy network by analysing and utilizing locally available resources.
•This article is a state of the art review on the decentralized energy system (DES).•Shows wide spectrum role of well-planned decentralized-distributed energy networks.•Discusses different design configurations along with socio-economic dimensions.•Reflects limitations and shortcomings in integrating and implementation of DES.•Identifies the barriers, contribution & limitations, implications & Policy suggestions.
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