ABSTRACT Supply chain processes are essential for managing the distribution of goods from suppliers to consumers. In light of the globalization of the economy, the distances involved in delivery have significantly increased, often spanning thousands of kilometers across various countries and continents, utilizing multiple modes of transportation, including land, maritime, and air. The primary objective of the supply chain process is to ensure the quality and safety of goods during transit, thereby mitigating the risks of damage, deterioration, and spoilage. This requires real‐time monitoring of various environmental conditions, such as temperature and humidity, to which goods are subjected. This paper tackles the critical challenge of monitoring real‐time conditions in goods transportation by innovatively designing and implementing an Internet of Things (IoT) system, together with a set of customized evaluation metrics. Unlike conventional approaches, our work introduces a practical and scalable prototype that takes advantage of readily available low‐cost technologies: temperature and light sensors integrated with a Raspberry Pi. This device continuously collects and transmits environmental data to a database server. Metrics will be defined to evaluate the quality of the goods. In addition, a dedicated web application will be developed that enables the complete analysis and visualization of the collected data. By establishing a quantifiable framework and providing a cost‐effective end‐to‐end monitoring solution, our study fills a significant gap in the current cold chain logistics landscape.

Centralised architecture models are often adopted in the development of smart cities to take advantage of the technologies provided by dominant companies such as Google, Meta, and Amazon. This approach often comes with significant drawbacks, such as (i) application developers becoming dependent on the policies and rules imposed by large companies, which are subject to change, and (ii) users having their data collected and used haphazardly, and often without authorisation, which can undermine the trust that users place in the solution. Infrastructure for smart cities should, therefore, incorporate decentralised technologies that satisfy or reinforce important quality attributes such as trustworthiness, privacy, and security. The main objective of this article is to survey and discuss how the services of a smart city can be implemented using decentralised architectures; we explain the advantages and disadvantages of decentralised architectures and emerging technologies. We review the specialised literature and compile a set of emerging technologies that are essential to conceive a decentralised architectural solution for smart cities. The current state-of-the-art in decentralisation shows that this model can be implemented with current technologies and help to satisfy the quality attributes mentioned above, and potentially reinforce the degree of trustworthiness of the solution. We also propose a four-dimension guideline that functions as a conceptual driver for structuring actions for researchers, system architects, policymakers, and city authorities in the design, evaluation, and long-term maintenance of decentralised smart cities, thereby enhancing their capacity to address escalating urban challenges. We conclude that the set of technologies discussed in this article has the potential to be reused and replicated across smart cities. • Choice between C-architecture and D-architecture for smart cities. • Concerns about interoperability, privacy, vendor lock-in, and sustainability. • Decentralisation offers improved interoperability, privacy, and sustainability. • Approach to decentralised digital identity, permissions, and integration solutions.

ABSTRACT Cloud migration is the process of moving data, files, and applications to a cloud computing environment. With the success of cloud computing, cloud migration is becoming fashionable. However, different cloud service providers have their own migration processes as currently, no standard cloud‐based software migration procedure exists to guide how to move digital resources to the cloud. Moreover, there are serious security risks associated with cloud migration processes that threaten business processes that have not been systematically analyzed. In addition, no formal models and security metrics exist to evaluate and analyze these risks. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a generic approach with real customer use cases. In this study, firstly, we will develop a general cloud‐based software migration procedure to help organizations migrate their digital resources to cloud platforms. Secondly, we will develop a risk assessment model for analyzing migration processes. Thirdly, on the basis of this risk assessment model, we use stochastic colored Petri nets to describe the dynamic behavior of the model, thus the concurrency, synchronization, mutual exclusion, and conflicts can be analyzed to assess the risks of migration automatically. Fourthly, security metrics will be defined to quantitatively evaluate the risks and vulnerabilities of the organizations. We believe that this study can help chief information officers identify which risk will have more opportunity to occur during the migration processes and make informed decisions about software migration and security.

The cost and lack of flexibility of health care systems represent a major obstacle for the elderly and poor citizens. The current technologies are reserved for hospitals and large clinics in the developed countries have high costs and maintenance. Therefore, it is necessary to bring health monitoring closer to the patients and healthcare providers in a cost-effective way. This study aims to build a platform that is ready to expand to use all the sensors to predict illnesses and conditions in hospitals and homes. The system is based on two Arduino Uno microcontroller units (MCU), environmental sensors, health sensors (MySignals), and Arduino IDE. Fuzzy Logic is used to push and pull data from the cloud to mobile and web visualization plus an alert system. This study tested 15 sensors in both health and ambient environments the integration of both groups of sensors can produce more accurate predictions. In addition, metrics will be used to decide the range of readings that are industry-specific for each sensor.

Supply chain processes are used for controlling the delivery of goods from suppliers to consumers. With the globalization of the economy, delivery distances are on the increase and might involve thousands of kilometers across countries and even continents and different means of transport including land, water, and air transport. The task of the supply chain process is to guarantee the quality and safety of the goods at transportation time to prevent potential damage, deterioration, and decay. This requires real-time monitoring and observance of several conditions (e.g., temperature and humidity) to which the goods are exposed. To address the problem, this paper discusses the implementation of an IoT system and relevant metrics for monitoring, in real-time, the conditions that goods face during transportation. In the prototype that we have implemented, we use conventional low-cost cost widely available technologies, namely, temperature and light sensors connected to a Raspberry Pi device that sends the sensors' data to a database server. We then analyze the data with the help of a web application that we have also implemented.

We discuss a practical implementation and performance evaluation of a desktop cloud environment that enables international corporations to make their data available to their staff members transparently, regardless of the location of the data and the staff members. It has been implemented for the benefit of the European and American multinational retail companies that operate in the Yangtze River Delta region, these companies normally collect large amounts of sensitive data that demand protection. It is meant to be used as an alternative to off-the-shelf solutions that companies cannot import due to restrictions that the Chinese government has currently in force. As such, it must comply with both local and international regulations imposed by the government. Notably, it is expected to comply with the data security and data protection regulations imposed by the Chinese government and at the same time with international regulations such as the GDPR followed by European countries. Our implementation takes advantage of the functions (e.g., deployment of virtual applications, desktop control management, and secure network access) provided by Citrix — a technology that we have selected after evaluating it against other well-known virtualization technologies. We have divided the implementation and discussion of our system into two parts: network virtualization and virtual architecture. In the end, Login VSI is used to test the performance of our system.

Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) is widely used in different fields of Software Engineering, notoriously, in Enterprise Application Integrations (EAIs). EAI encompasses methodologies, techniques and tools that a software engineer can use to create integration solutions. SBSE is currently an active research topic of increasing interest. The number and diversity of publications produced yearly are large to the extent that it is hard to identify the active research groups, their locations, techniques used and research topics that have not received enough attention. To answer these questions categorically, we have conducted systematic mapping study of the literature. In this paper, we report our methodology and findings. In our study, we used systematic search strategies that resulted in the retrieval of 560 articles, of which we first selected 25. Second, on the basis of the authors’ experience, we included eight additional articles. Finally, we used a snowballing sample technique to include another 12 articles. The results demonstrate that during the last two decades (1999–2020) EAI has benefited from the use of Search-Based Software Engineering techniques.

Internet and cloud based services involve electronic interactions that are normally regulated using service agreements (SA). Once an agreement between business partners is in place, a service can be monitored and/or enforced using an SA equivalent electronic contract. Because of the dynamic nature of such Internet and cloud based relationships, the rapidity at which electronic contracts are constructed, verified for correctness, tested, and deployed is an extremely important factor. This paper describes a model checker based framework for supporting the automated testing and deployment of electronic contracts. The central components of the framework are a contract monitoring service called the Contract Compliance Checker (CCC), the SPIN model checker, and EPROMELA, a language developed specifically for modeling electronic contracts. We describe how SPIN can be used to automatically generate execution sequences from an EPROMELA model of a contract, and how such sequences can then b e used to test the correctness of the model equivalent electronic contract deployed to the CCC.

The electronic representation of a contract for a business-to-business (B2B) partnership should be such that it can be used by a monitoring service for compliance checking of B2B interactions at runtime, ensuring that the interactions match the rights and obligations that each partner has promised to honor. With this view in mind, the paper develops a model for checking contractual compliance of business interactions. Specifically, the paper develops a novel way of representing contract clauses using business rules, that is specially suited to compliance checking and describes what events need to be captured from the underlying messaging middleware and how they can be processed in a careful manner to evaluate contractual compliance.

A pay-per-use cloud service should be made available to consumers with an unambiguous resource accounting model that precisely describes all the factors that are taken into account in calculating resource consumption charges. The paper proposes the notion of consumer-centric resource accounting model such that consumers can programmatically compute their consumption charges of a remotely used service. In particular, the notion of strongly consumer-centric accounting model is proposed that requires that all the data needed for calculating billing charges can be collected independently by the consumer (or a trusted third party, TTP); in effect, this means that a consumer (or a TTP) should be in a position to run their own measurement service. Strongly consumer-centric accounting models have the desirable property of openness and transparency, since service users are in a position to verify the charges billed to them. To illustrate the ideas, the accounting model of a given cloud infrastructure service (simple storage service, S3 from Amazon) is evaluated. The exercise reveals some shortcomings which can be fixed as indicated in this paper to make Amazon's model strongly consumer-centric. Service providers can learn from this evaluation study to re-examine their accounting models and perform any amendments.

The paper considers distributed applications where interactions between constituent services take place via messages in an asynchronous environment with unpredictable communication and processing delays; further, interacting parties are not required to be online at the same time. Message-oriented middleware (MoM) is commonly used for connecting such loosely coupled distributed applications. Despite loose coupling, many service interactions have temporal and message validation constraints. A failure to deliver a valid message within its time constraint could cause mutually conflicting views of an interaction (one party regarding it as timely whilst the other party regarding it as untimely) leading to application level inconsistencies. In a loosely coupled system, such inconsistencies could remain undetected for a long time, requiring costly application level recovery procedures. This paper describes how synchronisation support providing multilateral consistency guarantees can be provided using the underlying MoM to prevent inconsistencies from reaching application level.

To form and automatically manage partnerships within a virtual organisation, it is necessary to have an electronic representation of the contract governing business relationships that can be used to mediate the rights and obligations that each interacting entity promises to honour. The paper describes a general method of representing business interactions using a widely used modelling language Promela and discusses how to represent permissions, obligations, prohibitions, actors (agents), time constraints, and message type checking; that is, all the basic parameters that compose most typical business contracts. Two levels of contract representations are described: implementation neutral, and implementation specific, that is a refinement of the former to include technical details such as acknowledgements and synchronization messages that form an important part of any implementation.