Biblio

New technologies, such as augmented reality (AR) are used to enhance human capabilities and extend human functioning; nevertheless they may cause distraction and incorrect human functioning. Systems including socio entities (such as human) and technical entities (such as augmented reality) are called socio-technical systems. In order to do risk assessment in such systems, considering new dependability threats caused by augmented reality is essential, for example failure of an extended human function is a new type of dependability threat introduced to the system because of new technologies. In particular, it is required to identify these new dependability threats and extend modeling and analyzing techniques to be able to uncover their potential impacts. This research aims at providing a framework for risk assessment in AR-equipped socio-technical systems by identifying AR-extended human failures and AR-caused faults leading to human failures. Our work also extends modeling elements in an existing metamodel for modeling socio-technical systems, to enable AR-relevant dependability threats modeling. This extended metamodel is expected to be used for extending analysis techniques to analyze AR-equipped socio-technical systems.

The upsurge of Industrial Internet of Things is forcing industrial information systems to enable less hierarchical information flow. The connections between humans, devices, and their digital twins are growing in numbers, creating a need for new kind of security and trust solutions. To address these needs, industries are applying distributed ledger technologies, aka blockchains. A significant number of use cases have been studied in the sectors of logistics, energy markets, smart grid security, and food safety, with frequently reported benefits in transparency, reduced costs, and disintermediation. However, distributed ledger technologies have challenges with transaction throughput, latency, and resource requirements, which render the technology unusable in many cases, particularly with constrained Internet of Things devices.To overcome these challenges within the Industrial Internet of Things, we suggest a set of interledger approaches that enable trusted information exchange across different ledgers and constrained devices. With these approaches, the technically most suitable ledger technology can be selected for each use case while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of the most widespread ledger implementations. We present state of the art for distributed ledger technologies to support the use of interledger approaches in industrial settings.

Due to its costly and time-consuming nature and a wide range of passive barrier elements and tools for their breaching, testing the delay time of passive barriers is only possible as an experimental tool to verify expert judgements of said delay times. The article focuses on the possibility of creating and utilizing a new method of acquiring values of delay time for various passive barrier elements using expert judgements which could add to the creation of charts where interactions between the used elements of mechanical barriers and the potential tools for their bypassing would be assigned a temporal value. The article consists of basic description of methods of expert judgements previously applied for making prognoses of socio-economic development and in other societal areas, which are called soft system. In terms of the problem of delay time, this method needed to be modified in such a way that the prospective output would be expressible by a specific quantitative value. To achieve this goal, each stage of the expert judgements was adjusted to the use of suitable scientific methods to select appropriate experts and then to achieve and process the expert data. High emphasis was placed on evaluation of quality and reliability of the expert judgements, which takes into account the specifics of expert selection such as their low numbers, specialization and practical experience.

The interconnection of networks between several techno-socio-economic sectors such as energy, transport, and communication, questions the manageability and resilience of the digital society. System interdependencies alter the fundamental dynamics that govern isolated systems, which can unexpectedly trigger catastrophic instabilities such as cascading failures. This paper envisions a general-purpose, yet simple prototyping of self-management software systems that can turn system interdependencies from a cause of instability to an opportunity for higher resilience. Such prototyping proves to be challenging given the highly interdisciplinary scope of interdependent networks. Different system dynamics and organizational constraints such as the distributed nature of interdependent networks or the autonomy and authority of system operators over their controlled infrastructure perplex the design for a general prototyping approach, which earlier work has not yet addressed. This paper contributes such a modular design solution implemented as an open source software extension of SFINA, the Simulation Framework for Intelligent Network Adaptations. The applicability of the software artifact is demonstrated with the introduction of a novel self-healing mechanism for interdependent power networks, which optimizes power flow exchanges between a damaged and a healer network to mitigate power cascading failures. Results show a significant decrease in the damage spread by self-healing synergies, while the degree of interconnectivity between the power networks indicates a tradeoff between links survivability and load served. The contributions of this paper aspire to bring closer several research communities working on modeling and simulation of different domains with an economic and societal impact on the resilience of real-world interdependent networks.

Faced with a turbulent economic, political and social environment, Companies need to build effective risk management systems in their supply chains. Risk management can only be effective when the risks identification and analysis are enough accurate. In this perspective, this paper proposes a risk assessment approach based on the analytic hierarchy process and group decision making. In this study, a new method is introduced that will reduce the impact of incoherent judgments on group decision-making, It is, the “reduced weight function” that decreases the weight associated to a member of the expert panel based on the consistency of its judgments.

Earth provides natural resources, such as fossil fuels and minerals, that are vital for Europe's economy. As the global demand grows, especially for strategic metals, commodity prices rapidly rise and there is an identifiable risk of an increasing supply shortage of some metals, including those identified as critical to Europe's high technology sector. Hence a major element in any economy's long-term strategy must be to respond to the increasing pressure on natural resources to ensure security of supply for these strategic metals. In today's rapidly changing global economic landscape, mining in the deep sea, specifically at extinct hydrothermal vents and the vast areas covered by polymetallic nodules, has gone from a distant possibility to a likely reality within just a decade. The extremely hostile conditions found on the deep-ocean floor pose specific challenges, both technically and environmentally, which are demanding and entirely different from land-based mining. At present, European offshore industries and marine research institutions have significant experience and technology and are well positioned to develop engineering and knowledge-based solutions to resource exploitation in these challenging and sensitive environments. However, to keep this position there is a need to initiate pilot studies to develop breakthrough methodologies for the exploration, assessment and extraction of deep-sea minerals, as well as investigate the implications for economic and environmental sustainability. The Blue Mining project will address all aspects of the entire value chain in this field, from resource discovery to resource assessment, from exploitation technologies to the legal and regulatory framework.