Due to the rapid development of information technology, supply chain network is evolving, which involves a higher level of interdependence between organisations. Conventional production capability evaluation relies on centralised approaches with limited sharing of performance and evaluation data. Besides, traditional evaluation methods are mainly based on subjective manual operation using limited data. In this paper, we propose a production capability evaluation system by incorporating Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning and blockchain technology for supply chain network. It contributes to achieving real-time data collection and automated enterprise production capability evaluation mechanism. Besides, blockchain technology is adopted to enable open and decentralised data storage and sharing, provide fair and automatic trading of data. The proposed system is evaluated through a simulation experiment. It demonstrated how to utilise the proposed system to choose suitable upstream enterprises. The successful development of the system could help to enhance production efficiency, reduce risk and provide a reasonable and more sustainable production management in supply chain network.

Customer service is transforming from traditional manual service toward automated service, which utilizes different computational informatics to achieve a higher efficient and quality services. Automated customer service requires big data and expertise in data analysis as prerequisites. However, many companies, especially small and medium enterprises, do not have sufficient data and experience due to their limited scale and resources. They need to rely on third parties and result in the lack of development of core customer service competency. In order to overcome these challenges, an open and automated customer service platform based on Internet of things (IoT), blockchain and Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is proposed. The data is gathered with the use of IoT devices during the customer service. An open but secured environment to achieve data trading is ensured by using blockchain. AutoML is adopted to automate the data analysis processes for reducing the reliance of costly experts. The proposed platform is analyzed through use case evaluation. A prototype system has also been developed and evaluated. The simulation results show that our platform is scalable and efficient.

One of the significant trends in smart manufacturing is the idea of industrial digitalization, which is enabled through the use of new information technologies, such as the Internet of Things, big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. However, manufacturing industries can only be achieved by combining the physical manufacturing world and digital world, to realize a series of smart manufacturing activities, such as active perception, real-time interaction, automatic processing, intelligent control, and real-time optimization, etc. In this paper, a digital twin-driven approach combines with agent-based decision-making for real-time optimization of motion planning in robotic cellular is proposed, with optimizing the physical and virtual layer at the manufacturing facility. Accordingly, an architecture of the digital twin-driven facility is design, and its operational mechanisms and implementation methods are explained in detail. Moreover, qualitative analysis and a quantitative comparison based on a real robotic cell are provided. Several key findings and observations are generated relating to managerial implications, which are valuable for various users to make manufacturing decisions under the digital twin-driven environment.

Code comments are one of the important documents to help developers review and comprehend source code. In recent studies, researchers have proposed many deep learning models to generate the method header comments (i.e., method comment), which have achieved encouraging results. The comments in the method, which is called inline comment, are also important for program comprehension. Unfortunately, they have not received enough attention in automatic generation when comparing with the method comments. In this paper, we compare and analyze the similarities and differences between the method comments and the inline comments. By applying the existing models of generating method comments to the inline comment generation, we find that these existing models perform worse on the task of inline comment generation. We then further explore the possible reasons and obtain a number of new observations. For example, we find that there are a lot of templates (i.e., comments with the same or similar structures) in the method comment dataset, which makes the models perform better. Some terms were thought to be important (e.g., API calls) in the comment generation by previous study does not significantly affect the quality of the generated comments, which seems counter-intuitive. Our findings may give some implications for building the approaches of method comment or inline comment generation in the future.

A smart contract is a kind of code deployed on the blockchain that executes automatically once an event triggers a clause in the contract. Since smart contracts involve businesses such as asset transfer, they are more vulnerable to attacks, so it is crucial to ensure the security of smart contracts. Because a smart contract cannot be tampered with once deployed on the blockchain, for smart contract developers, it is necessary to fix vulnerabilities before deployment. Compared with many vulnerability detection tools for smart contracts, the amount of automatic fix approaches for smart contracts is relatively limited. These approaches mainly use defined pattern-based methods or heuristic search algorithms for vulnerability repairs. In this article, we propose RLRep , a reinforcement learning-based approach to provide smart contract repair recommendations for smart contract developers automatically. This approach adopts an agent to provide repair action suggestions based on the vulnerable smart contract without any supervision, which can solve the problem of missing labeled data in machine learning-based repair methods. We evaluate our approach on a dataset containing 853 smart contract programs (programming language: Solidity) with different kinds of vulnerabilities. We split them into training and test sets. The result shows that our approach can provide 54.97% correct repair recommendations for smart contracts.

Code commenting plays an important role in program comprehension. Automatic comment generation helps improve software maintenance efficiency. The code comments to annotate a method mainly include header comments and snippet comments. The header comment aims to describe the functionality of the entire method, thereby providing a general comment at the beginning of the method. The snippet comment appears at multiple code segments in the body of a method, where a code segment is called a code snippet. Both of them help developers quickly understand code semantics, thereby improving code readability and code maintainability. However, existing automatic comment generation models mainly focus more on header comments, because there are public datasets to validate the performance. By contrast, it is challenging to collect datasets for snippet comments, because it is difficult to determine their scope. Even worse, code snippets are often too short to capture complete syntax and semantic information. To address this challenge, we propose a novel S nippet C omment Gen eration approach called SCGen . First, we utilize the context of the code snippet to expand the syntax and semantic information. Specifically, 600,243 snippet code-comment pairs are collected from 959 Java projects. Then, we capture variables from code snippets and extract variable-related statements from the context. After that, we devise an algorithm to parse and traverse abstract syntax tree (AST) information of code snippets and corresponding context. Finally, SCGen generates snippet comments after inputting the source code snippet and corresponding AST information into a sequence-to-sequence-based model. We conducted extensive experiments on the dataset we collected to evaluate our SCGen . Our approach obtains 18.23 in BLEU-4 metrics, 18.83 in METEOR, and 23.65 in ROUGE-L, which outperforms state-of-the-art comment generation models.