Blockchain Papers

Javier Villalba-Diez, Joaquín Ordieres-Meré

The book&s;s emphasis is shifted to the future in Chapter 8 , “Emerging Trends and Advanced Topics,” which offers a survey of the cutting-edge ideas and revolutionary technologies that are set to completely alter the logistics industry. The chapter makes the case that logistics is developing into a hyperconnected, intelligent, and autonomous ecosystem rather than a collection of distinct tasks. The convergence of multiple important technological domains, each supported by complex mathematical and engineering principles, is what is driving this evolution. In order to enable strong predictive analytics, demand forecasting, and real-time optimization, artificial intelligence and machine learning are positioned as the brains of logistics operations in the future. This is where the story starts. The idea of “digital twins,” which produce virtual representations of entire supply chain networks in real time, expands on this theme. These virtual models, mathematically grounded in dynamical systems and Markov Decision Processes, allow companies to simulate complex scenarios, assess risks, and test optimization strategies in a virtual environment before physical implementation. From optimization, the chapter moves to the critical issues of trust and security, highlighting Blockchain for Supply Chain Transparency. It explains that blockchain&s;s function will transcend simple record-keeping, creating a decentralized and tamper-proof ledger for all transactions. The text delves into the mathematical foundations securing this trust, including cryptographic hash functions, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), and secure consensus algorithms. The physical implementation of these trends in warehouse automation and robotics is finally examined in this chapter. Multi-agent reinforcement learning and graph-based optimization models are used to coordinate swarms of autonomous mobile robots and cooperative “cobots” in hyper-automated warehouses of the future, achieving previously unheard-of levels of efficiency and adaptability. This idea is expanded to the scale of advanced manufacturing and smart factories, where material flows are coordinated in real-time to satisfy changing manufacturing demands and logistics becomes a deeply integrated, cyber-physical part of the production system itself. According to the chapter&s;s conclusion, the combination of these technologies will result in intelligent, self-adjusting, and extremely resilient logistics networks, offering businesses that adopt this technological change a major competitive edge.

Soumya Narayana, B.H. Jaswanth Gowda, Umme Hani, Mohammed Gulzar Ahmed · 6 authors

Hydrogels are innovative materials characterized by a water-swollen, crosslinked polymeric network capable of retaining substantial amounts of water while maintaining structural integrity. Their unique ability to swell or contract in response to environmental stimuli makes them integral to biomedical applications, including drug delivery, tissue engineering, and wound healing. Among these, "smart" hydrogels, sensitive to stimuli such as pH, temperature, and light, showcase reversible transitions between liquid and semi-solid states. Thermoresponsive hydrogels, exemplified by poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM), are particularly notable for their sensitivity to temperature changes, transitioning near their lower critical solution temperature (LCST) of approximately 32 °C in water. Structurally, PNIPAM-based hydrogels (PNIPAM-HYDs) are chemically versatile, allowing for modifications that enhance biocompatibility and functional adaptability. These properties enable their application in diverse therapeutic areas such as cancer therapy, phototherapy, wound healing, and tissue engineering. In this review, the unique properties and behavior of smart PNIPAM are explored, with an emphasis on diverse synthesis methods and a brief note on biocompatibility. Furthermore, the structural and functional modifications of PNIPAM-HYDs are detailed, along with their biomedical applications in cancer therapy, phototherapy, wound healing, tissue engineering, skin conditions, ocular diseases, etc. Various delivery routes and patents highlighting therapeutic advancements are also examined. Finally, the future prospects of PNIPAM-HYDs remain promising, with ongoing research focused on enhancing their stability, responsiveness, and clinical applicability. Their continued development is expected to revolutionize biomedical technologies, paving the way for more efficient and targeted therapeutic solutions.

Kathirvel Ayyaswamy, Naren Kathirvel, C. P. Maheswaran

The development of numerous cryptocurrencies, dApp monetization, smart personal contracts, decentralized finance apps (Defi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) preceded general adoption of the blockchain concept. Blockchain technology (BT) is digital money that increases in value every hour by a factor of bigger than its previous worth. Even though blockchain's widespread appeal has been confined to its role in the development of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a number of other applications are currently being developed steadily. This demonstrates the promise of decentralized technology and the undeniable influence of blockchain on business across many industries. Because of these built-in characteristics, blockchain is now used in a number of sectors, including real estate, finance, agriculture field, healthcare sector, education institutions, design and manufacturing unit, and retail shopping. The chapter provides a thorough explanation of the various use cases and areas of BT.

Kathirvel Ayyaswamy, A. K. Naren, B. Santhoshi

By 2027, the blockchain market will have a valuation of 163 billion US dollars. In fact, a firm may find it too much to comprehend and use the technology that has taken off. Blockchain is a distributed database that is shared by multiple system nodes. The reason it is named Blockchain is that it gathers data in encrypted blocks that are connected to other sets of blocks to create a virtual chain. The development of numerous cryptocurrencies, dApp monetization smart personal contracts, decentralized finance apps (Defi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) preceded general adoption of the blockchain concept. blockchain technology (BT) is digital money, which increases in value every hour by a factor of bigger than its previous worth. Even though blockchain's widespread appeal has been confined to its role in the development of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a number of other applications are currently being developed steadily. This demonstrates the promise of decentralized technology and the undeniable influence of blockchain on business across many industries.

Naren Kathirvel, Kathirvel Ayyaswamy

The development of numerous cryptocurrencies, dApp monetization Smart personal Contracts, Decentralized Finance apps (Defi), and Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) preceded general adoption of the Blockchain concept. Blockchain Technology (BT) is digital money, which increases in value every hour by a factor of bigger than its previous worth. Even though Blockchain's widespread appeal has been confined to its role in the development of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a number of other applications are currently being developed steadily. This demonstrates the promise of decentralized technology and the undeniable influence of blockchain on business across many industries. These days, businesses use blockchain technology and its various features, like as ICOs and smart contracts, for a variety of objectives that are related to their daily operations.

Kathirvel Ayyaswamy, Naren Kathirvel, C. Subramanian, C. P. Maheswaran

Blockchain is a distributed database that is shared by multiple system nodes. The reason it is named blockchain is that it gathers data in encrypted blocks that are connected to other sets of blocks to create a virtual chain. The development of numerous cryptocurrencies, dApp monetization, smart personal contracts, decentralized finance apps (Defi), and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), preceded general adoption of the blockchain concept. Blockchain technology (BT) is digital money, which increases in value every hour by a factor of bigger than its previous worth. Even though blockchain's widespread appeal has been confined to its role in the development of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a number of other applications are currently being developed steadily. This demonstrates the promise of decentralized technology and the undeniable influence of blockchain on business across many industries.

Bence Tureczki, Henriette SteinernKomoroczki, Katalin Szenes

This article presents a blockchain-supported evaluation and publishing method for kinematic models. As a modeling tool, OpenSim was chosen. The blockchain facilitates the hiding of the private part of the model, preserving the authors’ rights, and, at the same time, the publication of that part to be evaluated. For this evaluation, such excellence criteria are offered that were originally created for supporting corporate activities. The secret part of the model is tokenized by Ethereum-based NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). These tokens will provide for copyright issues.

Abdullah Lakhan, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Dheyaa Ahmed Ibrahim, Karrar Hameed Abdulkareem

Due to emerging developments in sports games, the usage of bio-ankle sensors has been growing progressively. Whereas, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is an emerging network that boosts bio-inspired sensors’ performances onto the fog-cloud network. However, a sequence of processes is required to complete the healthcare process for one sportsman. Therefore, workflow-enabled bio-inspired sensors tasks scheduled in IoMT postures different challenges. For instance, cost-efficient scheduling, security, and data validation in distributed hospitals to share their data. In this paper, we devise bio-inspired robotics-enabled schemes in the blockchain-fog-cloud-assisted IoMT environment. The goal is to minimize execution cost and blockchain of applications. Based on the proposed system, the study devises bio-inspired robotics function blockchain task scheduling (BIR-FBTS) schemes, determining the optimal assignment of tasks to the available nodes. The simulation results show that the proposed methods minimized 50% of the service cost and 40% of mined cost in the system compared to all existing bio-inspired healthcare systems.

Jens Ducrée

Since its inception in the late 2000s, blockchain has emerged as a powerful tool for creating trust without intermediaries to incentivize global communities for working for a common goal, such as the improvement of its very ecosystem, its applications and community adoption. While first blockchains were mainly devised for confirming transactions of their innate cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, smart-contract blockchains like Ethereum can interface with the real-world through so-called “oracles”, which feed trustful off-chain information. This paper introduces digital twins of physical objects and processes as computational oracles to effectively unleash the tremendous opportunity offered by blockchain to the realm of fundamental science, research and technology development (RTD). The crowdsourcing concept is illustrated with the example of centrifugal flow control in microfluidic “Lab-on-a-Disc” (LoaD) systems.

Rachael N. Parker, Dana M. Cairns, Wenyao A. Wu, Kathryn E. Jordan · 8 authors

Three-dimensional organoid tissue culture models are a promising approach for the study of biological processes including diseases. Advances in these tissue culture technologies improve in vitro analysis compared to standard 2D cellular approaches and are more representative of the physiological environment. However, a major challenge associated with organoid systems stems from the laborious processing involved in the analysis of large numbers of organoids. Here the design, characterization, and application of silk-elastin-like protein-based smart carrier arrays for processing organoids is presented. Fabrication of hydrogel-based carrier systems at room temperature result in organized arrays of organoids that maintain tissue culture plate orientation and could be processed simultaneously for histology. The system works by transfer of the organoids to the hydrogel arrays after which the material is subjected to 65 °C to induce hydrogel contraction to secure the organoids, resulting in multisample constructs and allowing for placement on a microscope slide. Histological processing and immunostaining of these arrayed cerebral organoids analyzed within the contracted silk-elastin-like proteins (SELP) show retention of native organoid features compared to controls without the hydrogel carrier system, thus avoiding any artifacts. These SELP carriers present a useful approach for improving efficiency of scaled organoid screening and processing.

Eric J. Leaman, Brian Q. Geuther, Bahareh Behkam

No abstract is available for this record.

Amy Q. Shen, B. D. Hamlington, Michael Knoblauch, Winfried S. Peters · 5 authors

With the discovery in plants of the proteinaceous forisome crystalloid (Knoblauch, et al. 2003), a novel, non-living, ATP-independent biological material became available to the designer of smart materials for advanced actuating and sensing. The in vitro studies of Knoblauch, et al. show that forisomes (2-4 micron wide and 10-40 micron long) can be repeatedly stimulated to contract and expand anisotropically by shifting either the ambient pH or the ambient calcium ion concentration. Because of their unique abilities to develop and reverse strains greater than 20% in time periods less than one second, forisomes have the potential to outperform current smart materials as advanced, biomimetic, multi-functional, smart sensors or actuators. Probing forisome material properties is an immediate need to lay the foundation for synthesizing forisomebased smart materials for health monitoring of structural integrity in civil infrastructure and for aerospace hardware. Microfluidics is a growing, vibrant technology with increasingly diverse applications. Here, we use microfluidics to study the surface interaction between forisome and substrate and the conformational dynamics of forisomes within a confined geometry to lay the foundation for forisome-based smart materials synthesis in controlled and repeatable environment.