【Abstract】Blockchain Technology (BCT) is expanding day by day and is used in all pillars of life and projects. In this research, we survey applicable BCT in project management for the first time. We presented a Resource-Constrained Time-Cost-Quality-Energy-Environment Tradeoff Problem by considering BCT, Risk and Robustness (RCTCQEETPBCTRR) in project scheduling. We utilize hybrid robust stochastic programming, worst case, and Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) to cope with uncertainty and risks. This type of robustification and risk-averse is presented in this research. A real case study is presented in a healthcare project. We utilize GAMS-CPLEX to solve the model. Finally, we analyze finish time, conservative coefficient, the confidence level of CVaR, and the number of scenarios. The most important research result is that applying BCT decreases cost, energy, and pollution and increases quality. Moreover, the total gap between RCTCQEETPBCTRR and without BCT is approximately 2.6%. When compacting finish time happens or if the conservative coefficient increases to 100%, costs, energy, and pollution environment increase, but quality decreases. If the confidence level of CVaR increases, the cost, energy, and environment function functions grow up, and quality is approximately not changed.
【Abstract】In an era where environmental and social pressures on companies are increasing, sustainable supply chain management is essential for the efficient operation and survivability of the organizations (members of the chain). Digital transformation and the adoption of new technologies could support the development of sustainable strategies, as they support supply chain processes, decrease operational costs, enable control and monitoring of operations and support green practices. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between sustainable supply chain management and digital transformation through the adoption of specific technologies (Blockchain technology, big data analytics, internet of things). It aims at theory building and the development of a conceptual framework, enabling the explanation of under which circumstances the above combination could lead to the development of sustainable performances. It also aims to examine how companies can increase their competitive advantage and/or increase their business performance, contributing both to academics and practitioners. After conducting a literature review analysis, a significant gap was detected. There are a few studies providing theoretical approaches to examining all three pillars of sustainability, while at the same time analyzing the impact of big data analytics, internet of things and blockchain technology on the development of sustainable supply chains. Aiming to address this gap, this paper primarily conducts a literature review, identifies definitions and theories used to explain the different pillars of flexibility, and examines the effect of different technologies. It then develops a theoretical conceptual framework, which could enable both academics and practitioners to examine the impact of the adoption of different technologies on sustainable supply chain management. The findings of this research reveal that digital transformation plays an important role to companies, as the combination of different technologies may lead to the development of significant capabilities, increasing sustainable performances and enabling the development of sustainable strategies, which can improve companies' position in the market.
【Abstract】A blockchain, as a form of distributed ledger technology, represents the unanimity of replication, synchronization, and sharing of data among various geographical sites. Blockchains have demonstrated impressive and effective applications throughout many aspects of the business. Blockchain technology can lead to the advent of the construction of Digital Twins (DTs). DTs involve the real representation of physical devices digitally as a virtual representation of both elements and dynamics prior to the building and deployment of actual devices. DT products can be built using blockchain-based technology in order to achieve sustainability. The technology of DT is one of the emerging novel technologies of Industry 4.0, along with artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). Therefore, the present study adopts intelligent decision-making techniques to conduct a biased analysis of the drivers, barriers, and risks involved in applying blockchain technologies to the sustainable production of DTs. The proposed model illustrates the use of neutrosophic theory to handle the uncertain conditions of real-life situations and the indeterminate cases evolved in decision-makers' judgments and perspectives. In addition, the model applies the analysis of Multi-criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods through the use of ordered weighted averaging (OWA) and the Technique of Order Preference Similarity to the Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to achieve optimal rankings for DT production providers based on consistent weighted decision-maker's judgments in order to maintain and to assure sustainability. An empirical study is applied to the uncertain environment to aid decision-makers in achieving ideal decisions for DT providers with respect to various DT challenges, promoting sustainability and determining the best service providers. The Monte Carlo simulation method is used to illustrate, predict, and forecast the importance of the weights of decision-makers' judgments as well as the direct impact on the sustainability of DT production.
【Abstract】The purpose of this study is to overcome coordination flaws and enhance end-to-end security in the drug distribution market (DDM). One of the major issues in drug market coordination management is the absence of a centralized monitoring system to provide adequate market control and offer real-time prices, availability, and authentication data. Further, tampering is another serious issue affecting the DDM, and as a consequence, there is a significant global market for counterfeit drugs. This vast counterfeit drug business presents a security risk to the distribution system. This study presents a blockchain-based solution to challenges such as coordination failure, secure drug delivery, and pharmaceutical authenticity. To optimize the drug distribution process (DDP), a framework for drug distribution is presented. The proposed framework is evaluated using mathematical modeling and a real-life case study. According to our results, the proposed technique helps to maintain market equilibrium by guaranteeing that there is adequate demand while maintaining supply. Using the suggested framework, massive data created by the medication supply chain would be appropriately handled, allowing market forces to be better regulated and no manufactured shortages to inflate medicine prices. The proposed framework calls for the Drug Regulatory Authority (DRA) to authenticate users on blockchain and to monitor end-to-end DDP. Using the proposed framework, big data generated through drug supply chain will be properly managed; thus, market forces will be better controlled, and no artificial shortages will be generated to raise drug costs.
【Abstract】Cryptocurrencies can be considered as mathematical money. As the most famous cryptocurrency, the Bitcoin price forecasting model is one of the popular mathematical models in financial technology because of its large price fluctuations and complexity. This paper proposes a novel ensemble deep learning model to predict Bitcoin's next 30 min prices by using price data, technical indicators and sentiment indexes, which integrates two kinds of neural networks, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gate recurrent unit (GRU), with stacking ensemble technique to improve the accuracy of decision. Because of the real-time updates of comments on social media, this paper uses social media texts instead of news websites as the source data of public opinion. It is processed by linguistic statistical method to form the sentiment indexes. Meanwhile, as a financial market forecasting model, the model selects the technical indicators as input as well. Real data from September 2017 to January 2021 is used to train and evaluate the model. The experimental results show that the near-real time prediction has a better performance, with a mean absolute error (MAE) 88.74% better than the daily prediction. The purpose of this work is to explain our solution and show that the ensemble method has better performance and can better help investors in making the right investment decision than other traditional models.
【Abstract】With the rapid development of blockchains, blockchain systems are moving on from a stand-alone manner to cross-chain interactions, and achieving interoperability is emerging as one of the essential features of blockchains. Unfortunately, existing mechanisms such as XCLAIM mostly focus on exchanging assets between two blockchains and it is slow and expensive to process each cross-chain trade among more than two blockchains as multiple transactions are required. In this paper, we present Interopera, a decentralized and efficient cross-chain trading protocol among two or more blockchains. Interopera atomically processes each cross-chain trade faster and more cheaply with fewer transactions by a two-phase lock/unlock process. Interopera also achieves efficient cross-chain communication by our presented Partitioned-FlyClient and Tx-FlyClient. Partitioned-FlyClient is based on FlyClient but more efficient with smaller proof size, reducing the storage and bandwidth overheads. Tx-FlyClient maintains efficiency even when cross-chain trades become frequent, instead of other mechanisms only being effective under low cross-chain trades volumes. We also develop a proof-of-concept implementation and the results demonstrate high efficiency of our protocol.
【Abstract】With the rapid development of 6G communication technology, data security of the Internet of Things (IoT) has become a key challenge. This paper first analyzes the security issues and risks of IoT data storage in 6G, and then constructs a blockchain-based zero-trust data storage scheme (ZT-BDS) in 6G edge IoT to ensure data security. Under this framework, an improved scratch-off puzzle based on Proof of Recoverability (PoR) is firstly constructed to realize distributed IoT data storage, which can reduce resource consumption compared with other existing schemes. Secondly, the accumulator is used to replace the Merkle trees to store IoT data in the blockchain. Since the accumulator can provide not only membership proof, but also non-membership proof, the proposed blockchain-based data storage scheme is more secure. Thirdly, PoW is replaced by an improved PoR scheme as the consensus protocol. On the one hand, PoR can verify the integrity of data, which will further enhance the security of IoT data; on the other hand, the proposed PoR is composed of polynomial commitment, which can reduce bandwidth with the aid of the aggregation function of polynomial commitment. Experimental comparisons show that our scheme has better bandwidth and storage capacity.
【Abstract】The theme, background, and signal music usage history information consists of general information such as music information, platform information, and music usage information, and sensitive information such as rights management information, music usage permission range, and contract information. If sensitive information among these is disclosed, disputes such as trade secrets and infringement of personal information protection between companies or between companies and individuals may arise. We propose a selective encryption/decryption method to secure the confidentiality, integrity, reliability and non-repudiation of sensitive music usage history information used in the theme, background, and signal music blockchain environment. In the proposed method, a monitoring company encrypts sensitive information using a secret key for usage history information, which is combined with general information, and digitally signs it using a private key to register it in a block. A trust group can view and access the information at the time of inquiry by verifying the digital signature with the public key of the monitoring company and then can decrypt the sensitive information using the private key.
【Abstract】In the area where privacy is of greater concern, federated learning,a distributed machine learning strategy for preserving privacy,is widely employed in several privacy concern applications. In the meantime, neural architectures became familiar with deep learning approaches for automatic tuning of the architecture of deep neural networks (DNN). While searching with neural architecture and federated learning has experienced several challenges, optimized neural architecture research in federated learning is extensively on demand. DNN faces numerous issues while training such user privacy and ensuring the integrity of the aggregated results obtained from a server. To provide solutions for the above-mentioned issues, enormous federated learning techniques worked towards preserving privacy and were applied in different situations. Still, it is an open challenge that enables users to verify if the cloud server functions appropriately while ensuring users' privacy while training. Federated Learning Method is a new way to improve the accuracy and precision, since the previous approach failed to opt the solutions. Here, Elliptical Curve Cryptography with Blockchain-based Federated Learning (ECC-BFL)is proposed to ensure the confidentiality of users' local gradients while performing federated learning. The parameters such as classification accuracy, running time, Communication overhead, Computation overhead, and transaction speed are considered. The values obtained for these parameters are compared against three standard methods, namely Biparing Method (BM) Homomorphic Cryptosystem (HC), and Multiple Authorities with Attribute-Based Signature scheme (MA-ABS)against proposed Elliptical Curve Cryptography with Blockchain-based Federated Learning (ECC-BFL). As a result, the proposed ECC-BFL achieved 95% of classification accuracy, 65 sec of running time, 76% of communication overhead, 63% of computation overhead, and 92% of transaction speed.
【Abstract】In smart grids, the access verification of a large number of intelligent gateways and terminal devices has become one of the main concerns to ensure system security. This means that smart grids need a new key management method that is safe and efficient and has a low computational cost. Although a large number of scholars have conducted relevant research, most of these schemes cannot balance the computational overhead and security. Therefore, we propose a lightweight and secure key management method, having a low computational overhead, based on blockchain for smart grids. Firstly, we redesigned the architecture of the smart grid based on blockchain and completed the division of various entities. Furthermore, we designed a pairing-free certification authenticated group key agreement method based on blockchain under the architecture. Finally, we achieved higher security attributes, and lower authentication delay and computational overhead, compared to the traditional schemes, as shown in performance analysis and comparison.
【Abstract】In this paper, we investigate the role of Bitcoin as a safe haven against the stock market losses during the spread of COVID-19. The performed analysis was based on a regression model with dummy variables defined around some crucial dates of the pandemic and on the dynamic conditional correlations. To try to model the real dynamics of the markets, we studied the safe-haven properties of Bitcoin against thirteen of the major stock market indexes losses using daily data spanning from 1 July 2019 until 20 February 2021. A similar analysis was also performed for Ether. Results show that this pandemic impacts on the Bitcoin status as safe haven, but we are still far from being able to define Bitcoin as a safe haven.
【Abstract】The paper offers the author's view on national accounting and reporting standards in the context of economy's digitalization. The key trends of digitalization and its impact on accounting are considered - both globally and in Ukraine. The leading technologies that have emerged as a result of the digitalization trend and their impact on accounting and reporting are highlighted. Examples of best practices from developed countries on the new technologies' application in the context of accounting and reporting are provided. A specific focus of the paper is on crypto-assets' accounting. Features of accounting and reporting depending on the nature of certain types of crypto-assets are presented. The best industry practices and positions of leading audit companies in crypto-assets' accounting and reporting are summarized. Examples of developed countries' legislative practices regarding crypto-assets' accounting, reporting and taxation are given. A review of laws and regulations on crypto-assets in Ukraine is performed. Relevant accounting standards that could be applied while considering various aspects of crypto-assets are highlighted. It is identified that the application of effective regulatory frameworks and guidelines is a key challenge in the context of crypto-assets' accounting and reporting. List of questions is presented for a researcher or practitioner to pose in the context of determining the approach to crypto-assets' accounting and reporting. An example of token's accounting in accordance with the existing accounting standards in Ukraine is given. The best practices for external audit of crypto-assets as a part of companies' financial statements audit are summarized. Potential risk areas for external audit in the context of crypto-assets are outlined. The author's vision of the potential evolution directions for national accounting standards in the context of economy's digitalization is presented.
【Abstract】The revolution of Malaysian Construction 4.0 through emerging technologies has brought a paradigm shift that has digitalized the construction sector. There is a need to adopt a computerized protocol to assist in automating the performance of a contract to meet future digital challenges. Therefore, this paper aims to serve as a pioneer study to investigate the implementation of the Malaysian construction industry to adopt smart contracts. This study adopted a qualitative scientific methodology, whereby a systematic review was conducted to gather the benefits and challenges of implementing smart contracts in the construction industry. Further, interview sessions were arranged to collect data from the construction contract management experts. The research findings unveil that due to the self-executing attribute of smart contracts, the implementation of smart contracts could provide a better apportionment of risks in a contract. The study also finds that the challenges in implementing smart contracts are severe. For instance, the smart contract is irreversible and immutable and prone to human error. The study concludes that it is more suitable to apply and implement a smart contract to a short-term contract that is not subjected to variation. Furthermore, a smart contract can enhance the efficiency in managing the contracts, such as reducing time and managing the conflicts and disputes that arise during the contract duration. The developed implementation framework is significant for the construction personnel, especially those dealing with the contract administration. The implementation of smart contracts in construction could boost contract administration and management discipline via investment in this new technology.
【Abstract】This is the first survey conducted in China on the holding of cryptocurrencies. Although cryptocurrencies have existed in the world for more than a decade, because the exchange of cryptocurrencies is banned in China, there is no guidance on the holding of cryptocurrencies in China's accounting standards. Moreover, although the exchange of cryptocurrencies is prohibited by the Chinese government, holdings of cryptocurrencies by Chinese entities and individuals cannot be prevented. Thus, we conducted a survey in investors' attitudes towards cryptocurrencies in Xiamen City, a special economic zone (SEZ) and a pilot free trade zone (FTZ) in China. The survey respondents commonly defined cryptocurrencies as investments (45%), inventories (19%), and intangible assets (36%). A total of 84% of respondents stated that the value of a cryptocurrency should be represented by a fair value. These results are similar to those obtained in a survey by The Digital Assets Accounting Consortium (DAAC), but different to the tentative agenda decision of the International Financial Reporting Standards Interpretations Committee (IFRSIC). Additionally, 65% of respondents stated that they prefer to accept cryptocurrencies as cash equivalent currencies, and these cash equivalent currencies were considered to have two main functions: a medium of exchange (56%) and a monetary unit for pricing goods and services (52%).
【Abstract】The article examines integration of cryptocurrencies as electronic payment systems in e-commerce enterprises. Practical usage of Ethereum and Bitcoin cryptocurrencies as electronic payment systems, as well as factors that may affect their functionality are studied. Coinbase Commerce and Bitpay, as market leaders in cryptocurrency payment providers, were analyzed to compare integration issues and commission analysis with traditional payment systems LiqPay, PayPal. It is determined that the factors influencing the integration of cryptocurrencies in the enterprise include the field in which this enterprise is operating, instability of the national currency, development of information technology. It has been proven that e-commerce companies specializing on selling consumer goods could use hybrid cryptocurrency payments in Bitcoin in 50% of transactions and Ethereum in 65% of transactions in the studied timeframe to reduce the cost of the transaction compared to the LiqPay system.
【Abstract】The blockchain technology has the potential to be applied in a variety of areas of our daily life. From the original Bitcoin cryptocurrency to the current smart contracts, the blockchain has been applied to many domains. Its numerous applications result in much ongoing research in different practical and scientific areas. This new technology is being seen as a revolutionary solution in finance, decentralization, trust, identity, data ownership and data-driven decisions. This paper presents the novel solutions associated with some of the big data areas that can be empowered by the blockchain technology such as healthcare, decentralized personal data protection, digital property, Internet of Things, digital identity, financial services and infrastructure, e-commerce, educational records, educational system, knowledge sharing, insurance, food industry, accounting, auditing and e-voting. Blockchain technology could be used in electronic health records and the establishment and maintenance of birth registers, deaths, marriages, registration of business activities, but also in the organization of elections. The features of this technology can be the redefinition of Internet 3.0 defined as a new type of decentralized infrastructure or network of networks.
【Abstract】Introducing IBchain, a new blockchain architecture with the Internet of Things (IoT), could be an attractive framework regarding improvements in connectivity implementation through the smart cities. Instead of meriting innovation and security, the IoT links people, sites, and products and provides opportunities. Everything that transfers information to the IoT system is integrated by advanced microchips, sensors, and actuators in actual things. The analytical ability of the IoT converts observations into actions, impacting business advancements and significant ways of activity. IoT enables connected objects to transmit information to personal blockchain systems to create tamper-resistant transaction records. The information from sensors and microchips is progressing rapidly with blockchain ledgers, making them more portable and relevant for immediate conversations. In IBchain methodology, the smart objects are permissible to connect securely with other smart objects in diverse situations. IBchain creates an innovative blockchain-based processing configuration through the IoT. The IBchain could analyze blockchain to the main expertise or supports the IoT validation and trustworthiness. It reinforces blockchain and cloud to build an empowering IoT ubiquitous situation for secure communication among the smart devices.