The growing complexity of construction supply chains and the significant impact of the construction industry on the environment demand an understanding of how to reuse and repurpose materials. In response to this critical challenge, research gaps that are significant in promoting material circularity are described. Despite its potential, the use of blockchain technology in construction faces challenges in verifiability, scalability, privacy, and interoperability. We propose a novel multilayer blockchain framework to enhance provenance tracking and data retrieval to enable a reliable audit trail. The framework utilises a privacy-centric solution that combines decentralised and centralised storage, security, and privacy. Furthermore, the framework implements access control to strengthen security and privacy, fostering transparency and information sharing among the stakeholders. These contributions collectively lead to trusted material circularity in a built environment. The implementation framework aims to create a prototype for blockchain applications in construction supply chains.

Edge computing has gained momentum in recent years, as complementary to cloud computing, for supporting applications (e.g. industrial control systems) that require Time-Critical communication guarantees. While edge computing can provide immediate analysis of streaming data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, those devices lack computing capabilities to guarantee reasonable performance for Time-Critical applications. To alleviate this critical problem, the prevalent trend is to offload these data analytics tasks from the edge devices to the cloud. However, existing offloading approaches are static in nature as they are unable to adapt varying workload and network conditions. To handle these issues, we present a novel distributed and QoS-based multi-level queue traffic scheduling system that can undertake semi-automatic bandwidth slicing to process Time-Critical incoming traffic in the edge-cloud environments. Our developed system shows a great enhancement in latency and throughput as well as reduction in energy consumption for edge-cloud environments.

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to train a shared model collaboratively without sharing any personal data. However, selecting a model and adapting it quickly to meet user expectations in a large-scale FL application with heterogeneous devices is challenging. In this paper, we propose a model selection and adaptation system for Federated Learning (FedMSA), which includes a hardware-aware model selection algorithm that trades-off model training efficiency and model performance base on FL developers’ expectation. Meanwhile, considering the expected model should be achieved by dynamic model adaptation, FedMSA supports full automation in building and deployment of the FL task to different hardware at scale. Experiments on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the model selection algorithm of FedMSA in real devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi and Jetson nano).

An emerging evacuation path planning technique that uses Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) to enable real-time danger prediction and user-oriented path planning can ensure the safe and timely navigation of evacuees in complex scenarios such as cruise ships. However, most existing LPWAN-based evacuation models assume pedestrians’ walking speed remains constant and ignore crowd congestion in corridors before exits, which is not appropriate for rocking ships. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a congestion-relived guiding framework with dedicated path planning for emergency evacuation on passenger ships. The basic idea is to averagely minimize the total evacuation time while meeting the deadline for ship capsizing under all circumstances by selecting uncrowded paths for each passenger individually. First, we use probability distributions rather than constant numbers to represent walking time (also called delay) along passageways. A worst-case delay bound with a high level of trustworthiness is also estimated for each passageway under the boundary condition of ship capsizing. Next, we predict the congestion of corridors by modeling the spatiotemporal movement of passengers, and then distribute evacuation loads evenly among corridors to alleviate the congestion. The total expected evacuation time of all corridors is finally minimized based on the delay probability distribution and estimated congestion, and the deadline for ship evacuation under all circumstances is met with the worst-case delay bound. Simulation results show that our approach significantly reduces the total escaping time of crowd evacuation by $45\%$ and $34\%$ while improving the navigation success ratio by more than $20\%$ and $80\%$ compared with the state-of-the-art emergency evacuation systems, namely the look-up table guiding scheme and the group-based guiding evacuation scheme, respectively.

Effective data management is crucial to ensure the security, integrity, and efficiency of blockchain systems. This study proposes a detailed data management taxonomy specifically designed for blockchain technology. The taxonomy provides a structured framework to categorize and address various aspects of data management in blockchain networks. It covers essential aspects, such as data flow, data storage, access control, and querying. It provides a systematic approach to understanding and addressing the unique challenges associated with managing data in blockchain systems. The framework enables informed decision making, promotes effective strategies, and helps to leverage the full potential of blockchain technology.