The growth of the enterprise blockchain research supporting supply chain management calls for investigations of their impact and mindfulness of their design, use cases, and pilots. With a blockchain design for the Proof of Delivery (PoD) process management, this paper contributes to learning about performance measurement and the transaction costs implications during the development and application of smart contracts. An experimental design science approach is applied to develop an open-source blockchain to explore ways to make the delivery processes more efficient, the proof of delivery more reliable, and the performance measurements more accurate. The theory of Transaction Costs is applied to evaluate the cost implications of the adoption of smart contracts in the management of the PoD. The findings show that smart contracts make the delivery processes more efficient and proof of delivery more reliable. Yet, the methods and metrics are too complex and qualitative, limiting the smart contract’s capability to measure performance. Our findings indicate potential transaction costs reduction by implementing a blockchain-based performance measurement. The complexities of the delivery process and proof of delivery call for pre-contractual steps to identify the processes and performance metrics to design blockchains. Smart contracts need further development and digital aids to handle qualitative inspections and proof of delivery generation during the delivery process. The blockchain requires the system’s capacity to record off-chain transactions, such as in case of disputes resolutions. The authors extended blockchain research beyond the theoretical level, designing an open-source blockchain for supply chain management within the use case, pilot design, and case study.

The manufacturing industry comprises various departments, and the supply chain is crucial in ensuring uninterrupted commodity flow during production. However, traditional supply chain systems face transparency, data visibility, and security challenges. This scientific article presents a Proof of Concept (PoC) that explores integrating IoT devices with blockchain technology to address these issues. Our PoC focuses on enabling IoT devices to autonomously sign transactions to the blockchain using IoT devices’ authenticated private keys, eliminating the need for external wallets. This approach offers scalability, efficiency, and real-time responsiveness benefits. Leveraging the devices’ transaction processing capabilities enhances scalability, allowing for a higher transaction volume. Automation of transaction signing streamlines the process, improving efficiency and eliminating delays caused by human interaction. Real-time responsiveness is ensured, eliminating any latency introduced by external wallets. We provide a detailed workflow of the use case and simulation results, making our research findings more accessible. Through this work, we demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of this method in scenarios where continuous, automated interaction with the blockchain is required through IoT devices. The PoC code is publicly available on GitHub.

The application of renewable energy sources in the power grid increases the necessity of tracking the systems state, especially in smart grids, where there is a bidirectional transfer of data and power. The complexity of coupling between communication and the electrical infrastructure in a smart grid will create a higher chance for security breach. Increasing the state estimation accuracy will help the smart grid operator efficiently manage the system. The paper proposes an integration of distributed state estimation with a blockchain designed communication platform. Additionally, the asynchronous manner for data transmission, which is more likely to happen in the real world, has been considered as the second task of this research. Finally, a detailed analysis of the blockchainbased application in distributed state estimation is provided. The numerical analysis shows that the proposed method meets real-world performance requirements and brings high security and reliability to the distributed state estimation process.

People trade thousands of non-fungible tokens (NFT) daily. The NFT prices are expressed in cryptocurrency, and it is volatile. As the interest in the NFTs changes, their prices vary with time too. Is there an immanent meter to order NFTs by their value? Within a single collection, a vector of features–traits–characterizes NFT. People construct rarity meters based on the assumed value of the trait vector rarity. But this process lacks formalism. In this paper, we formulate the optimal rarity meter problem and provide a pipeline for optimal rarity meter design. A proposed tournament score function is an essential part of the construction. We demonstrate the approach for the Kanaria NFT collection.

With the increase in passenger’s traffic across globe, the global demand of aircrafts manufacturing and distribution should be assured as per regional requirement. Regional predictions in terms of passengers’ movement, aircraft demand, etc., have been made e.g. continent have individual prediction of increase in passengers’ traffic. With these forecasted increase in passengers’ traffic, we illustrate requirement of types of aircrafts as per geographical regions. Different size of aircrafts is taken into account and is compared with increase in passengers’ traffic. With this increasing demand, planning in aircraft manufacturing industries is necessary, considering situations like, limited airside capacity, airline companies’ demands, etc., planning in manufacturing of aircrafts is extremely essential in terms of maintaining the ratio of demand, requirement, replacement and decommission of aircrafts with respect to manufacturing speed and supply. Taking perception of aircraft manufacturers, we will analyse the factors on which the aircraft manufacturing relies on.