Juan Castanedo Galán

The IoT (Internet of Things) has played a promising role in e-healthcare applications during the last decade. Medical sensors record a variety of data and transmit them over the IoT network to facilitate remote patient monitoring. When a patient visits a hospital he may need to connect or disconnect medical devices from the medical healthcare system frequently. Also, multiple entities (e.g., doctors, medical staff, etc.) need access to patient data and require distinct sets of patient data. As a result of the dynamic nature of medical devices, medical users require frequent access to data, which raises complex security concerns. Granting access to a whole set of data creates privacy issues. Also, each of these medical user need to grant access rights to a specific set of medical data, which is quite a tedious task. In order to provide role-based access to medical users, this study proposes a blockchain-based framework for authenticating multiple entities based on the trust domain to reduce the administrative burden. This study is further validated by simulation on the infura blockchain using solidity and Python. The results demonstrate that role-based authorization and multi-entities authentication have been implemented and the owner of medical data can control access rights at any time and grant medical users easy access to a set of data in a healthcare system. The system has minimal latency compared to existing blockchain systems that lack multi-entity authentication and role-based authorization.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovative technology that presents effective and attractive solutions to revolutionize various domains. Numerous solutions based on the IoT have been designed to automate industries, manufacturing units, and production houses to mitigate human involvement in hazardous operations. Owing to the large number of publications in the IoT paradigm, in particular those focusing on industrial IoT (IIoT), a comprehensive survey is significantly important to provide insights into recent developments. This survey presents the workings of the IoT-based smart industry and its major components and proposes the state-of-the-art network infrastructure, including structured layers of IIoT architecture, IIoT network topologies, protocols, and devices. Furthermore, the relationship between IoT-based industries and key technologies is analyzed, including big data storage, cloud computing, and data analytics. A detailed discussion of IIoT-based application domains, smartphone application solutions, and sensor- and device-based IIoT applications developed for the management of the smart industry is also presented. Consequently, IIoT-based security attacks and their relevant countermeasures are highlighted. By analyzing the essential components, their security risks, and available solutions, future research directions regarding the implementation of IIoT are outlined. Finally, a comprehensive discussion of open research challenges and issues related to the smart industry is also presented.

Adaptive equalization is crucial in mitigating distortions and compensating for frequency response variations in communication systems. It aims to enhance signal quality by adjusting the characteristics of the received signal. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms have shown promise in optimizing the tap weights of the equalizer. However, there is a need to enhance the optimization capabilities of PSO further to improve the equalization performance. This paper provides a comprehensive study of the issues and challenges of adaptive filtering by comparing different variants of PSO and analyzing the performance by combining PSO with other optimization algorithms to achieve better convergence, accuracy, and adaptability. Traditional PSO algorithms often suffer from high computational complexity and slow convergence rates, limiting their effectiveness in solving complex optimization problems. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a set of techniques aimed at reducing the complexity and accelerating the convergence of PSO.

Railway track faults may lead to railway accidents and cause human and financial loss. Spatial, temporal, and weather elements, and wear and tear, lead to ballast, loose nuts, misalignment, and cracks leading to accidents. Manual inspection of such defects is time-consuming and prone to errors. Automatic inspection provides a fast, reliable, and unbiased solution. However, highly accurate fault detection is challenging due to the lack of public datasets, noisy data, inefficient models, etc. To obtain better performance, this study presents a novel approach that relies on mel frequency cepstral coefficient features from acoustic data. The primary objective of this study is to increase fault detection performance. As well as designing an ensemble model, we utilize selective features using chi-square(chi2) that have high importance with respect to the target class. Extensive experiments were carried out to analyze the efficiency of the proposed approach. The experimental results suggest that using 60 features, 40 original features, and 20 chi2 features produces optimal results both regarding accuracy and computational complexity. A mean accuracy score of 0.99 was obtained using the proposed approach with machine learning models using the collected data. Moreover, this performance was significantly better than that of existing approaches; however, the performance of models may vary in real-world settings.

Society and the environment are severely impacted by catastrophic events, specifically floods. Inadequate emergency preparedness and response are frequently the result of the absence of a comprehensive plan for flood management. This article proposes a novel flood disaster management (FDM) system using the full lifecycle disaster event model (FLCNDEM), an abstract model based on the function super object. The proposed FDM system integrates data from existing flood protocols, languages, and patterns and analyzes viewing requests at various phases of an event to enhance preparedness and response. The construction of a task library and knowledge base to initialize FLCNDEM results in FLCDEM flooding response. The proposed FDM system improves the emergency response by offering a comprehensive framework for flood management, including pre-disaster planning, real-time monitoring, and post-disaster evaluation. The proposed system can be modified to accommodate various flood scenarios and enhance global flood management.

Disaster management is a critical area that requires efficient methods and techniques to address various challenges. This comprehensive assessment offers an in-depth overview of disaster management systems, methods, obstacles, and potential future paths. Specifically, it focuses on flood control, a significant and recurrent category of natural disasters. The analysis begins by exploring various types of natural catastrophes, including earthquakes, wildfires, and floods. It then delves into the different domains that collectively contribute to effective flood management. These domains encompass cutting-edge technologies such as big data analysis and cloud computing, providing scalable and reliable infrastructure for data storage, processing, and analysis. The study investigates the potential of the Internet of Things and sensor networks to gather real-time data from flood-prone areas, enhancing situational awareness and enabling prompt actions. Model-driven engineering is examined for its utility in developing and modeling flood scenarios, aiding in preparation and response planning. This study includes the Google Earth engine (GEE) and examines previous studies involving GEE. Moreover, we discuss remote sensing; remote sensing is undoubtedly a valuable tool for disaster management, and offers geographical data in various situations. We explore the application of Geographical Information System (GIS) and Spatial Data Management for visualizing and analyzing spatial data and facilitating informed decision-making and resource allocation during floods. In the final section, the focus shifts to the utilization of machine learning and data analytics in flood management. These methodologies offer predictive models and data-driven insights, enhancing early warning systems, risk assessment, and mitigation strategies. Through this in-depth analysis, the significance of incorporating these spheres into flood control procedures is highlighted, with the aim of improving disaster management techniques and enhancing resilience in flood-prone regions. The paper addresses existing challenges and provides future research directions, ultimately striving for a clearer and more coherent representation of disaster management techniques.

Traffic accidents present significant risks to human life, leading to a high number of fatalities and injuries. According to the World Health Organization’s 2022 worldwide status report on road safety, there were 27,582 deaths linked to traffic-related events, including 4448 fatalities at the collision scenes. Drunk driving is one of the leading causes contributing to the rising count of deadly accidents. Current methods to assess driver alcohol consumption are vulnerable to network risks, such as data corruption, identity theft, and man-in-the-middle attacks. In addition, these systems are subject to security restrictions that have been largely overlooked in earlier research focused on driver information. This study intends to develop a platform that combines the Internet of Things (IoT) with blockchain technology in order to address these concerns and improve the security of user data. In this work, we present a device- and blockchain-based dashboard solution for a centralized police monitoring account. The equipment is responsible for determining the driver’s impairment level by monitoring the driver’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) and the stability of the vehicle. At predetermined times, integrated blockchain transactions are executed, transmitting data straight to the central police account. This eliminates the need for a central server, ensuring the immutability of data and the existence of blockchain transactions that are independent of any central authority. Our system delivers scalability, compatibility, and faster execution times by adopting this approach. Through comparative research, we have identified a significant increase in the need for security measures in relevant scenarios, highlighting the importance of our suggested model.

The precise prediction of power estimates of wind–solar renewable energy sources becomes challenging due to their intermittent nature and difference in intensity between day and night. Machine-learning algorithms are non-linear mapping functions to approximate any given function from known input–output pairs and can be used for this purpose. This paper presents an artificial neural network (ANN)-based method to predict hybrid wind–solar resources and estimate power generation by correlating wind speed and solar radiation for real-time data. The proposed ANN allows optimization of the hybrid system’s operation by efficient wind and solar energy production estimation for a given set of weather conditions. The proposed model uses temperature, humidity, air pressure, solar radiation, optimum angle, and target values of known wind speeds, solar radiation, and optimum angle. A normalization function to narrow the error distribution and an iterative method with the Levenberg–Marquardt training function is used to reduce error. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach against the existing wind, solar, or wind–solar estimation methods. It is envisaged that such an intelligent yet simplified method for predicting wind speed, solar radiation, and optimum angle, and designing wind–solar hybrid systems can improve the accuracy and efficiency of renewable energy generation.

Project-based organizations need to procure different commodities, and the failure/success of a project depends heavily on procurement management. Companies must refine and develop methods to simplify and optimize the procurement process in a highly competitive environment. This paper presents a methodology to help managers of project-based organizations analyze procurement processes to determine the optimal framework for simultaneously addressing multiple objectives. These goals include minimizing the time between the generation and required approval for a purchase, identifying unnamed activities, and allocating the budget efficiently. In this paper, we apply process mining algorithms to a dataset consisting of event logs on Oracle Financials-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) procurement processes in ERP systems and demonstrate interesting results leading to project procurement intelligence (PPI). The provided log data is the real-life data consisting of 180,462 events referring to seven activities within 43,101 cases. The logged procurement processes are filtered and analyzed using the open-source process mining frameworks PrOM and Disco. As a result of the process mining activities, a simulation of the discovered process model derived from the event log of the entire procurement process is presented, and the most frequent potential behaviors are identified. This analysis and extraction of frequent processes from corporate event logs help organizations understand, adapt, and redesign procurement operations and, most importantly, make them more efficient and of higher quality. This study shows that after the successful formulation of guiding principles, data refinement, and process structure optimization, the case study results are considered significant by the organization’s management.