In Smart Grid (SG), Transactive Energy Management (TEM) is one of the most promising approaches to boost consumer participation in energy generation, energy management, and establishing decentralized energy market models using Peer-to-Peer (P2P). In P2P, a prosumer produces electric energy at their place using Renewable Energy Resources (RES) such as solar energy, wind energy, etc. Then, this generated energy is traded with consumers (who need the energy) in a nearby locality. P2P facilitates energy exchange in localized micro-energy markets of the TEM system. Such decentralized P2P energy management could cater to diverse prosumers and utility business models. However, the existing P2P approaches suffer from several issues such as single-point-of-failure, network bandwidth, scalability, trust, and security issues. To handle the aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a Decentralized and Transparent P2P Energy Trading (DT-P2PET) scheme using blockchain. The proposed DT-P2PET scheme aims to reduce the grid’s energy generation and management burden while also increasing profit for both consumers and prosumers through a dynamic pricing mechanism. The DT-P2PET scheme uses Ethereum-blockchain-based Smart Contracts (SCs) and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for the P2P energy trading. Furthermore, a recommender mechanism is also introduced in this study to increase the number of prosumers. The Ethereum SCs are designed and deployed to perform P2P in real time in the proposed DT-P2PET scheme. The DT-P2PET scheme is evaluated based on the various parameters such as profit generation (for prosumer and consumer both), data storage cost, network bandwidth, and data transfer rate in contrast to the existing approaches.

Smart grid (SG) systems necessitate secure demand response management (DRM) schemes for real-time decisions making to increase the effectiveness and stability of SG systems along with data security. Motivated from the aforementioned discussion, in this article, we propose Q-SDRM, a secure DRM scheme for home energy management (HEM) using reinforcement learning (RL) and ethereum blockchain (EBC) to facilitate energy consumption reduction and decrease energy costs. In cooperation with RL, $Q$ -learning is adopted to make optimal price decisions using Markov decision process (MDP) to reduce energy consumption, which benefits both consumers and utility providers. Then, Q-SDRM uses ethereum smart-contract (ESC) to deal with data security issues and incorporate with off-chain storage interplanetary file system (IPFS) that handles data storage costs issue. Experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed Q-SDRM scheme, which significantly reduces energy consumption and energy cost. The proposed scheme also provides secure access to energy data in real time compared with state-of-the-art approaches regarding different evaluation metrics, such as scalability, overall energy cost, and data storage cost.

With the growth in food products’ usage, ensuring their quality and safety has become progressively difficult. Specifically, food traceability turns out to be a very critical task for retailers, sellers, consumers, surveillance authorities, and other stakeholders in the food supply chain system. There are requirements for food authenticity verification (correct declaration of cultivation, origin, and variety), quality checks (e.g., justification for higher prices), and preventing food products from fraudsters in the food industry. The ubiquitous and promising technology of blockchain ensures the traceability of food trade networks with high potential and handles the aforementioned issues. Blockchain makes the food industry more transparent at all levels by storing data immutably and enabling quick tracking across the stages of the food supply chain. Hence, commodities, stakeholders, and semi-finished food items can be recognized significantly faster. Motivated by these facts, in this paper, we present an in-depth survey of state-of-the-art approaches to the food industry’s security, food traceability, and food supply chain management. Further, we propose a blockchain-based secure and decentralized food industry architecture to alleviate security and privacy aspects and present a comprehensive solution taxonomy for a blockchain-based food industry. Then, a comparative analysis of existing approaches with respect to various parameters, i.e., scalability, latency, and food quality, is presented, which facilitates the end-user in selecting approaches based on the merits over other approaches. Finally, we provide insights into the open issues and research challenges with concluding remarks.

The existing grid infrastructure has already begun transforming into the next-generation cyber-physical smart grid (SG) system. This transformation has improved the grid’s reliability and efficiency but has exposed severe vulnerabilities due to growing cyberattacks and threats. For example, malicious actors may be able to tamper with system readings, parameters, and energy prices and penetrate to get direct access to the data. Several works exist to handle the aforementioned issues, but they have not been fully explored. Consequently, this paper proposes an AI-ADP scheme for the SG system, which is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based attack-detection and prevention (ADP) mechanism by using a cryptography-driven recommender system to ensure data security and integrity. The proposed AI-ADP scheme is divided into two phases: (i) attack detection and (ii) attack prevention. We employed the extreme gradient-boosting (XGBoost) mechanism for attack detection and classification. It is a new ensemble learning methodology that offers many advantages over similar methods, including built-in features, etc. Then, SHA-512 is used to secure the communication that employs faster performance, allowing the transmission of more data with the same security level. The performance of the proposed AI-ADP scheme is evaluated based on various parameters, such as attack-detection accuracy, cycles used per byte, and total cycles used. The proposed AI-ADP scheme outperformed the existing approaches and obtained 99.12% accuracy, which is relatively high compared to the pre-existing methods.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has a significant impact on people’s lives, occupations, businesses, and economies globally. The world economic market is experiencing a big shift and the share market has observed crashes day-by-day. Even, the Indian economy has witnessed a slowdown in the current pandemic, and recovery of it is quite difficult. The restrictions and restrain strategies (e.g., lockdown and social distancing) introduced by the government leave many professions and facilities in a dormant state, catalyzing economy downfall. It necessitates to improve economy along with control strategies of COVID-19, which is a challenging task. To handle the above-mentioned issues, this article proposes a novel economy-boosting scheme, i.e., $\xi $ boost , which is a fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data analytics (BDA) integrated with the Internet-of-Things (IoT)-based data communication. Here, a bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM) model is anticipated for early prediction of total positive cases as well as the economy. Then, it calculates an optimal subsegment of days, in which trade and commerce related restrictions could be reduced to control a sharp decline in the economy. Next, a spark-based pre and post unlock (PPU) analytics is carried out on the rise of COVID-19 cases to validate the intensity of testing in the country and deciding economy-boosting activities. Then, the $\xi $ boost scheme is evaluated based on various factors such as prediction accuracy and others while comparing to existing approaches. It facilitates healthy and profitable smart cities by the means to control pandemic with subsequent economy rise.