Fog computing can provide an effective solution to the challenges presented by today’s ever-emerging Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures. As the number of interconnected devices progressively increases, these infrastructures require better solutions to ensure high scalability and processing capacity, along with an efficient use of available resources. This is why this paper presents a distributed Fog architecture, specifically designed to address the challenges and difficulties presented by heterogeneous IoT environments. This Fog architecture is used as an intermediate layer between the IoT devices and the final layer, it has been designed after the previous analysis of the requirements to be met for the solution, then the modularization of the architecture has been carried out so that it can be easily distributed, and finally, an implementation has been generated on a real environment as a validation case of the proposal.

This study introduces Fort2BCK, an advanced security framework designed to mitigate critical vulnerabilities in healthcare blockchain implementation, specifically data manipulation, unauthorised access and weaknesses in consensus protocols. Fort2BCK employs a dual verification mechanism, combining native consensus algorithm validation with the application of advanced cryptographic signatures (RSA, ECDSA and zero knowledge proofs, ZKPs), thus providing an additional layer of authentication, auditing and resistance to malicious attacks. In contrast to traditional approaches, Fort2BCK significantly reduces the risks of fraud and forgery by independently cryptographically verifying each block before it is integrated into the blockchain, strengthening security in scenarios where conventional consensus models may be vulnerable. In addition, its interoperability with multiple blockchain architectures, including proof of work (PoW), proof of stake (PoS) and delegated proof of stake (DPoS), allows it to effectively mitigate attacks such as the 51% attack in PoW and the nothing-at-stake problem in PoS, through an integrated external validation layer. To evaluate the effectiveness of Fort2BCK, experiments were conducted on a simulated hybrid blockchain network with 100 nodes and 50,000 transactions. The results revealed that Fort2BCK increases security by 35% against block rewrite attacks and decreases the rate of fraudulent transactions by 42%, compared to conventional blockchain systems, while maintaining a computational overhead of less than 8%. Additionally, Fort2BCK ensures compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR, ensuring that blockchain systems for the healthcare sector meet legal and privacy requirements. These findings demonstrate that Fort2BCK optimises the security, scalability and privacy of medical blockchains, facilitating the secure digitisation of healthcare systems and strengthening trust in clinical data management.

Traditionally, drinking water supply infrastructures have been designed to store as much water as possible and to do so during the energy cheap hours. This approach is unsustainable today. The use of digital systems capable of modeling the behavior of infrastructures and the creation of intelligent control systems can help to make drinking water supply systems more efficient and effective, while still meeting minimum service requirements. This work proposes the development of a control system, based on multi-agent systems (MAS), capable of generating an intelligent control over a drinking water infrastructure, based on the use of local interests of the agents and with an emergent behavior coherent with the needs. To validate the proposal, a simulator based on the infrastructures of a medium-sized Spanish city of 5000 inhabitants has been built and the control has been simulated using the MAS. The results show how the system can maintain the objectives set, handling unknown situations, and facilitating the development of future physical systems based on a just-in-time paradigm that guarantees sustainability, as it allows the generation of virtualizations of the infrastructures and their behavior, thus being able to study the best option for an infrastructure to resolve a supply situation.

Most modern computer systems operate in distributed environments. To develop and test such applications, services, and systems, it is necessary to consider the physical devices, architectures, communication, security and deployment mechanisms involved. However, the requirements’ specification process still replicates that of traditional applications: details remain implicit and are hidden in the description. As a result, specifications are difficult to identify and, ultimately, tests are designed in the traditional way: they overlook constraints and fail to achieve the desired effects. Our objective is to design a methodology for specifying requirements in both traditional software and applications deployed in distributed environments. We present an iterative and incremental requirements specification methodology. This methodology allows us to describe functional requirements and incorporate non-functional or quality constraints, which is the main contribution of this proposal. To ensure that quality requirements are specified during the design phase, the methodology proposes a series of phases, stages and artefacts that ensure the discovery and consideration of these requirements. In order to find out the strengths and weaknesses of our methodology, we have carried out a comparative study with other similar proposals in the literature. To this end, evaluation criteria were defined by considering standards and good practices in Requirements Engineering. The results of the comparative study show that our methodology constitutes a solid procedure for a detailed requirements specification from the beginning of the software development cycle. This represents an advance over the rest of the proposals studied. Our methodology contributes to the simplification of the design and execution phases of software testing, enabling traceability between the specified requirements and the designed test cases.

This paper presents a model of integration and management for robotic functional components that make up the robotic control system. To that end, we use the human neuroregulatory system as the basis for the decomposition of tasks and actions behavior, and we rely on the SOA paradigm for the design of a distributed architecture that allows the viability of the system. This proposal will ensure a total decoupling between modules by promoting the reusability and features such as pattern-based design, while the system is fully distributed ensuring high flexibility, scalability, robustness and fault tolerance.

The maturity of IT, in conjunction with certain modern theories about Business Processes Management (BPM), has propitiated an appropriate scenario for meeting the needs of new business models, which are increasingly centred on mass customization. Integration solutions provided within the framework of manufacturing organisations have opened up a wide range of possibilities in process management, which, paradoxically, is causing the traditional bottleneck between the enterprise level and production levels to now be transferred to the process management and modelling levels. This paper proposes the incorporation of knowledge into the definition of the processes and services involved by means of an ontology, thus maximising the automation of process modelling and facilitating the work of process engineers.

At present, with the expansion of information technologies at the industry, it is vital to implant proactive, self-managed systems that ensure continuous operation and, therefore, business continuity. This article proposes a regeneration system for industrial production elements that transfers the concept of high availability to the manufacturing levels of the organisation, acting automatically under open protocols when there is degradation or failure of any of the components, ensuring that normal operation is resumed within a delimited time. In addition to this proposal, we present a development scenario that allows the validity of the approach to be confirmed, while verifying the drastic reduction in recovery times, the support for the significant heterogeneity existing in these scenarios and their high level of automation, while practically dispensing with the intervention of system administrators

In the present paper we propose a method that permits visualization of manufacturing devices from a functional perspective. The aim of this method is to raise the abstraction level of manufacturing devices from the lower levels of production to the enterprise level of the business model. The target of this new approach is to integrate in a transparent way the resources, processes and, in general, the business logic of manufacturing levels using existing business models and achieving business continuity and process automation. The proposed method comprises two phases: the first phase that we have named industrial machinery normalization process; and the second phase that we have named manufacturing processes reorganization process. This paper focuses mainly on the former, i.e. specification of the hardware normalization and industrial machinery functionalities process.