Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), like Blockchain, are characterized by features such as transparency, traceability, and security by design. These features make the adoption of Blockchain attractive to enhance information security, privacy, and trustworthiness in very different contexts. This paper provides a comprehensive survey and aims at analyzing and assessing the use of Blockchain in the context of Distributed Trust and Reputation Management Systems (DTRMS). The analysis includes academic research as well as initiatives undertaken in the business domain. The paper defines two taxonomies for both Blockchain and DTRMS and applies a Formal Concept Analysis. Such an approach allowed us to identify the most recurrent and stable features in the current scientific landscape and several important implications among the two taxonomies. The results of the analysis have revealed significant trends and emerging practices in the current implementations that have been distilled into recommendations to guide Blockchain's adoption in DTRMS systems.
Due to the continuous increment in complexity of the socio-technical systems, decision makers call for new methods which are able to support timely as well as accurate decision-making related to resilience management. The current methods tend to be polarized on: efficiency-thoroughness forcing decision makers in making decisions on the base of resource availability instead of the problem to be solved. This paper presents a new fast-forward, cost-effective, and thorough enough framework to quantify resilience of a complex socio-technical system. The approach extends the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) with a numerical method for the quantification of the analysis (Q-FRAM). In particular, it has been extended and operationalized the qualitative concepts of functional variability and dumping capacities into a method in which key performance indicators are derived from the model and aggregated into four indicators representing the FRAM resilience cornerstones (anticipate, respond, monitor, learn) through a bottom-up hierarchical approach. Finally, the four indicators are composed in a unique system resilience index that expresses the total variability present in the system at instant t. A numerical example of the use of the framework is provided together with a validation based on a comparison of the proposed approach with the current landscape.
9 December 2022 in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing
The class of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) includes cyber-physical systems leveraging on self-x technologies that make them capable to learn, adapt to changes, and reason under uncertainties in possibly critical applications and evolving environments. In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in enabling artificial intelligence technologies, such as advanced machine learning, new threats, such as adversarial attacks, and certification challenges, due to the lack of sufficient explainability. However, in order to be trustworthy, those systems also need to be dependable, secure, and resilient according to well-established taxonomies, methodologies, and tools. Therefore, several aspects need to be addressed for TAS, ranging from proper taxonomic classification to the identification of research opportunities and challenges. Given such a context, in this paper address relevant taxonomies and research perspectives in the field of TAS. We start from basic definitions and move towards future perspectives, regulations, and emerging technologies supporting development and operation of TAS.
Today, the complexity of urban systems combined with existing and emerging threats constrains administrations to consider smart technologies and related huge amounts of data generated as a means to take timely and informed decisions. The smart city needs to be prepared for both expected and unexpected situations, and the possibility to mitigate the effect of the uncertainty behind the causes of disruptions through the analysis of all the possible data generated by the city open new possibility for resilience operationalization. This article aims at introducing a new conceptualization for resilience and presenting an innovative full stack solution to exploit Internet of Everything (IoE) and big multimedia data in smart cities to manage resilience of urban transport systems (UTS), which is one of the most critical infrastructures of the city. The approach is based on a novel data driven approach to resilience engineering and functional resonance analysis method (FRAM), to understand and model an UTS in the context of smart cities and to support evidence driven decision making. The paper proposes an architecture taking into account: (a) different kinds of available data generated in the smart city, (b) big data collection and semantic aggregation and enrichment; (c) data sense-making process composed by analytics of different data sources like social media, communication networks, IoT, user behavior; (d) tools for knowledge driven decisions able to combine different information generated by analytics, experience, and structural information of the city into a comprehensive and evidence driven decision model. The solution has been applied in Florence metropolitan city in the context of RESOLUTE H2020 research project of the European Commission.