Biblio

In an agricultural supply chain, farmers, food processors, transportation agencies, importers, and exporters must comply with different regulations imposed by one or more jurisdictions depending on the nature of their business operations. Supply chain stakeholders conventionally transport their goods, along with the corresponding documentation via regulators for compliance checks. This is generally followed by a tedious and manual process to ensure the goods meet regulatory requirements. However, supply chain systems are changing through digitization. In digitized supply chains, data is shared with the relevant stakeholders through digital supply chain platforms, including blockchain technology. In such datadriven digital supply chains, the regulators may be able to leverage digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to automate the compliance verification process. However, a barrier to progress is the risk that information will not be credible, thus reversing the gains that automation could achieve. Automating compliance based on inaccurate data may compromise the safety and credibility of the agricultural supply chain, which discourages regulators and other stakeholders from adopting and relying on automation. Within this article we consider the challenges of digital supply chains when we describe parts of the compliance management process and how it can be automated to improve the operational efficiency of agricultural supply chains. We introduce assisted autonomy as a means to pragmatically automate the compliance verification process by combining the power of digital systems while keeping the human in-the-loop. We argue that autonomous compliance is possible, but that the need for human led inspection processes will never be replaced by machines, however it can be minimised through “assisted autonomy”.

There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation in a decentralized and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block is proposed to avoid large sized blocks. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.

There has been increasing interest in adopting BlockChain (BC), that underpins the crypto-currency Bitcoin, in Internet of Things (IoT) for security and privacy. However, BCs are computationally expensive and involve high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. This paper proposes a lightweight BC-based architecture for IoT that virtually eliminates the overheads of classic BC, while maintaining most of its security and privacy benefits. IoT devices benefit from a private immutable ledger, that acts similar to BC but is managed centrally, to optimize energy consumption. High resource devices create an overlay network to implement a publicly accessible distributed BC that ensures end-to-end security and privacy. The proposed architecture uses distributed trust to reduce the block validation processing time. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative case study for broader IoT applications. Qualitative evaluation of the architecture under common threat models highlights its effectiveness in providing security and privacy for IoT applications. Simulations demonstrate that our method decreases packet and processing overhead significantly compared to the BC implementation used in Bitcoin.