In recent times, Blockchain has emerged as a transformational technology with the ability to disrupt and evolve multiple domains. As a decentralized, immutable distributed ledger, Blockchain technology is one of the most recent entrants to the comprehensive ideology of Smart Cities. The rise of urbanization and increased citizen participation have led to various technology integrations in our present-day cities. For cities to become smart, we need standard frameworks and procedures for integrating technology, citizens and governments. In this paper, we explore the potential of Blockchain technology as an enabler for e-governance in smart cities. We examine the daily challenges of citizens and compare them with the benefits being offered by Blockchain integration. On the basis of a comprehensive literature review, we identified four key areas of e-governance wherein Blockchain can provide monumental advantages. In the context of Blockchain integration for e-governance, the paper presents a survey of prominent published works discussing various urban applications.

Over the last couple of years, Blockchain technology has emerged as a game-changer for various industry domains, ranging from FinTech and the supply chain to healthcare and education, thereby enabling them to meet the competitive market demands and end-user requirements. Blockchain technology gained its popularity after the massive success of Bitcoin, of which it constitutes the backbone technology. While blockchain is still emerging and finding its foothold across domains, Cloud computing is comparatively well defined and established. Organizations such as Amazon, IBM, Google, and Microsoft have extensively invested in Cloud and continue to provide a plethora of related services to a wide range of customers. The pay-per-use policy and easy access to resources are some of the biggest advantages of Cloud, but it continues to face challenges like data security, compliance, interoperability, and data management. In this article, we present the advantages of integrating Cloud and blockchain technology along with applications of Blockchain-as-a-Service. The article presents itself with a detailed survey illustrating recent works combining the amalgamation of both technologies. The survey also talks about blockchain–cloud services being offered by existing Cloud Service providers.

The cold-chain supply of perishable fruits continues to face challenges such as fuel wastage, fragmented stakeholder coordination, and limited real-time adaptability. Traditional solutions, based on static routing and centralized control, fall short in addressing the dynamic, distributed, and secure demands of modern food supply chains. This study presents a novel end-to-end architecture that integrates multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), blockchain technology, and generative artificial intelligence. The system features large language model (LLM)-mediated negotiation for inter-enterprise coordination, Pareto-based reward optimization balancing spoilage, energy consumption, delivery time, and climate and emission impact. Smart contracts and Non-Fungible Token (NFT)-based traceability are deployed over a private Ethereum blockchain to ensure compliance, trust, and decentralized governance. Modular agents—trained using centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE)—handle routing, temperature regulation, spoilage prediction, inventory, and delivery scheduling. Generative AI simulates demand variability and disruption scenarios to strengthen resilient infrastructure. Experiments demonstrate up to 50% reduction in spoilage, 35% energy savings, and 25% lower emissions. The system also cuts travel time by 30% and improves delivery reliability and fruit quality. This work offers a scalable, intelligent, and sustainable supply chain framework, especially suitable for resource-constrained or intermittently connected environments, laying the foundation for future-ready food logistics systems.

The paper reviews the efforts to compose SOAP, non-SOAP and non-web services. Traditionally efforts were made for composite SOAP services, however, these efforts did not include the RESTful and non-web services. A SOAP service uses structured exchange methodology for dealing with web services while a non-SOAP follows different approach. The research paper reviews the invoking and composing a combination of SOAP, non-SOAP, and non-web services into a composite process to execute complex tasks on various devices. It also shows the systematic integration of the SOAP, non-SOAP and non-web services describing the composition of heterogeneous services than the ones conventionally used from the perspective of resource consumption. The paper further compares and reviews different layout model for the discovery of services, selection of services and composition of services in Cloud computing. Recent research trends in service composition are identified and then research about microservices are evaluated and shown in the form of table and graphs.

The increasing complexity of urban energy systems requires decentralized, sustainable, and scalable solutions. The paper presents a new multi-layered framework for smart energy management in microgrids by bringing together advanced forecasting, decentralized decision-making, evolutionary optimization and blockchain-based coordination. Unlike previous research addressing these components separately, the proposed architecture combines five interdependent layers that include forecasting, decision-making, optimization, sustainability modeling, and blockchain implementation. A key innovation is the use of Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) for interpretable multi-horizon forecasting of energy demand, renewable generation, and electric vehicle (EV) availability which outperforms conventional LSTM, GRU and RNN models. Another novelty is the hybridization of Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), to simultaneously support discrete and continuous decision variables, allowing for dynamic pricing, efficient energy dispatching and adaptive EV scheduling. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) which is improved by sustainability shaping by including carbon intensity, renewable utilization ratio, peak to average load ratio and net present value in agent rewards. Finally, Ethereum-based smart contracts add another unique contribution by providing the implementation of transparent and tamper-proof peer-to-peer energy trading and automated sustainability incentives. The proposed framework strengthens resilient infrastructure through decentralized coordination and intelligent optimization while contributing to climate mitigation by reducing carbon intensity and enhancing renewable integration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a 14.6% reduction in carbon intensity, a 12.3% increase in renewable utilization ratio, and a 9.7% improvement in peak-to-average load ratio compared with baseline models. The TFT-based forecasting model achieves RMSE = 0.041 kWh and MAE = 0.032 kWh, outperforming LSTM and GRU by 11% and 8%, respectively.

This chapter presents an overview of service-oriented architecture and web technologies with the objective of presenting challenging issues concerned with various aspects of integrating heterogeneous web applications.