Carlos Coutinho

Fleet logistics management requires reliable monitoring of temperature-sensitive goods and asset utilization to meet regulatory requirements and operational efficiency targets. This paper presents an integrated framework combining blockchain technology and IoT sensors to enhance internal process efficiency and data integrity in logistics operations. The research develops and deploys a permissioned blockchain system within a Portuguese logistics company, enabling empirical evaluation of core performance metrics including end-to-end latency, transaction throughput, and audit traceability under operational conditions. A pilot study involving 12 sensors distributed across transport operations demonstrates measurable improvements in audit preparation efficiency. Analysis indicates that low-latency event registration (meaning 5 seconds) supports operational monitoring requirements, whilst automated evidence generation with cryptographic proofs reduces manual verification overhead in internal and external audit processes. The study establishes performance benchmarks and cost-benefit analysis comparing blockchain adoption against centralized logging solutions with digital signatures. The architecture enhances decision-making transparency by providing logistics managers with cryptographically verifiable operational data, whilst governance insights support organizations implementing blockchain-based integrity mechanisms in regulated environments.

Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) refers to a set of tools and processes that can assist the shared use of networked production facilities. In the core of this paradigm is a vision where manufacturing environments shall profit from an online set of tools and services that can be tailored to the requirements coming from the different manufacturers, thus reaching a higher degree of flexibility and an increase in production efficiency. 320In the context of MaaS, the Horizon 2020 European Connected Factory Platform for Agile Manufacturing (EFPF) provides an operational instantiation of a large-scale MaaS across Europe, integrating a diverse set of services such as data analytics, factory connectors, and an interoperable Data Spine to proportionate a high level of automation across different shop-floors. This chapter explains the EFPF MaaS concept, going over its architectural design, and giving insight into how developers and SMEs can profit from the EFPF open-source SDK to generate new products, and how these products can be integrated into the EFPF broad marketplace. The chapter gives insight also to the different pilots developed in the project, explaining challenges faced, and proposed solutions.

Picking reliable partners, negotiating synchronously with all partners, and managing similar proposals are challenging tasks for any manager. This challenge is even harder when it concerns small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who need to deal with short budgets and evident size limitations, often leading them to avoid handling very large contracts. This size problem can only be mitigated by collaboration efforts between multiple SMEs, but then again this brings back the initially stated issues. To address these problems, this paper proposes a collaborative negotiation system that automates the outsourcing part by assisting the manager throughout a negotiation. The described system provides a comprehensive view of all negotiations, facilitates simultaneous bilateral negotiations, and provides support for ensuring interoperability among multiple partners negotiating on a task described by multiple attributes. In addition, it relies on an ontology to cope with the challenges of semantic interoperability, it automates the selection of reliable partners by using a lattice-based approach, and it manages similar proposals by allowing domain experts to define a satisfaction degree for each SME. To showcase this method, this research focused on small and medium-size dairy farms (DFs) and describes a negotiation scenario in which a few DFs are able to assess and generate proposals.

The cooperation of multiple networked microgrids can be one of the best solutions for solving inconsistency between energy production and consumption, which is essential for a more sustainable operation for the manufacturing business. In this paper, we are interested in the collaborative interactions among autonomous microgrids grouped into an alliance to optimise their energy exchange and scheduling as well as ensuring seamless collaboration and interoperability among their distributed systems. Each autonomous microgrid schedules its local power supply and demand, but it may decide to collaborate with other microgrids within the alliance, with minimum information exchange, to better fulfil customer power demands. In this context, this paper proposes a cloud-based collaborative framework where distributed autonomous microgrids can find an optimal solution by negotiating the exchange of energy in order to reduce the need for peak capacity avoiding the risk of blackouts and brownouts. To illustrate this approach, it is described a negotiation scenario in which several microgrids are able to evaluate and generate offers via multi-agent communication protocol.

Businesses and organizations have for long been trying to tackle the most prominent issues regarding identity management and systems. Traditionally, the proof of trust concerning the identification of a citizen, a customer or a participant in any business or transaction consisted always in a physical evidence (e.g., a signature, fingerprint, photo or other) whose value would rely on a trusted third-party such as a notary or attorney that confirmed the veracity of that physical evidence. More recent approaches include novel types of evidence such as digital certificates, but still these have no value unless they are issued and signed by a trusted centralized third-party that confirms the authenticity of the certificate. These are then often used by businesses to identify and trace their parties and stakeholders, in a process known as "Know Your Customer" (KYC). This process is often slow and requires costly human intervention. This paper presents WalliD, a decentralized approach of a secure protocol to handle customer identification using Blockchain. The paper then shows a proof of concept workflow implementation of this protocol developed using an Ethereum Wallet.

The current trends towards globalisation, together with the exponential growth of the number of mobile devices led the markets to a boom in the demand for the development of mobile applications. Moreover, with the expansion and heterogeneity of the mobile devices and platforms, software companies need to search for faster and cheaper ways to develop applications that are able to span as many devices as possible in order to capture the market. Currently, Android and iOS Operating Systems roughly share and dominate the mobile market, with timid expressions of other competitors. Each of these mobile operating systems was developed using their own languages and strategy and offer SDKs for development of applications using their libraries - known as native apps. On the other hand, the evolution of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript created generic alternatives to create mobile apps that run on devices on all operating systems, however lacking some capabilities to access the device's full potential. Alongside came the novel hybrid cross-platform development frameworks, which try to take the best of both worlds. Native versus hybrid platforms the trend in mobile app development using hybrid platforms and their advantage. It would not be great with just one language to develop mobile applications for all mobile devices?

This paper tackles the interoperability problems of enterprise information systems by presenting a distributive model-driven platform for parallel coordination of multiple negotiations in data-intensive collaborative working environments. The proposed model was validated and verified by an industrial application scenario within the European research project H2020 C2NET (Cloud Collaborative Manufacturing Networks). This real scenario developed data-intensive collaborative and cloud-enabled tools that allow the optimisation of the supply network of manufacturing SMEs, proposing a negotiation solution based on a model-driven interoperable decentralised architecture.

Maintaining the interoperability in a dynamic competitive manufacturing environment in which different business enterprises collaborate is difficult to achieve. Our approach highlights negotiation as the best solution to solve interoperability problems by reaching the common decision suitable for all managers of various enterprises in the most optimized amount of time. In this context, this paper proposes a multi-agent negotiation model, able to coordinate several negotiations taking place in parallel among multiple participants. It is described the negotiation strategy for evaluating and generating offers and the protocol for sending the offers to the other agents. This model can be used in the H2020 C2NET project for supporting manufacturing.