The emergence of Blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles stands as a critical method for secure data exchange between vehicles and traffic infrastructures. Yet, significant challenges persist, particularly in terms of limited fault tolerance and constraints associated with storage and computational resources. In this study, we introduce the Stateless-based Lightweight Sharding Mechanism (SLIM) for enhanced secure data exchange. This mechanism is built on three key strategies: 1) SLIM incorporates a robust sharding protocol which includes identity establishment and verification, shard formation, and intra-shard consensus to mitigate the impact of Byzantine nodes within each shard. This protocol is designed to reduce the influence of malicious nodes in each shard, thereby improving fault tolerance and security. 2) To address storage challenges, we employ a stateless verification algorithm to allow service nodes in the Internet of Vehicles to authenticate vehicular data transactions without the need to store the entire historical blockchain data. 3) SLIM also integrates a Stackelberg game model for efficient resource distribution in collaborative networks. By offloading the mining process and data storage to the cloud and allowing roadside units to adjust their storage and computing strategies through the game model, the computing resource requirement of roadside units is thus substantially reduced, leading to optimized revenue generation. The security effectiveness of SLIM is theoretically proven. The simulations and experimental results demonstrate that SLIM’s block size is significantly smaller (66.9 times less) than Ethereum’s, and its block verification time is 67% faster compared to conventional stateless blockchains.

International audience

The Internet‐of‐things, which designates the interconnection of physical objects, is a growing research area with many challenges. One of these challenges is the management of failures and unforeseen situations when using connected devices in real world applications. To this end, the authors propose a self‐adaptation framework to deal with changes and take into account storage, computational and communication constraints. Their self‐adaptation framework relies on constraints expressed in terms of quality of service (QoS) and event‐driven rules to specify control objectives. Internally, the framework generates labelled transitions systems and builds on the fly synchronous controllers to guarantee QoS properties. Moreover, their framework has capabilities to concurrently deal with dynamic control objectives, monitoring and self‐adaptation. To prove the practicality of their framework, they present a healthcare case‐study to remotely monitor a patient at risk of myocardial infarction recurrence. The objective control rules easily specify how wearable devices should coordinate their behaviours to ensure safety, resilience and health‐awareness factors. The implementation of their framework is fully distributed and scalable and include their development of a wearable, remotely configurable, QoS aware cardiac activity sensor.

The Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) designates the interconnection of communication-enabled medical-grade devices and their integration to wider-scale health networks in order to improve patients' health. However, because of the critical nature of health-related systems, the IoMT still faces numerous challenges, more particularly in terms of reliability, safety, and security. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review of recent contributions focused on improving the IoMT through the use of formal methodologies provided by the cyber-physical systems community. We describe the practical application of the democratization of medical devices for both patients and health-care providers. We also identify unexplored research directions and potential trends to solve uncharted research problems.

Most connected objects feature very limited capabilities that present challenges in terms of data processing and connectivity. In addition, heterogeneity of smart Internet-of-Things devices also causes interoperability problems. These limitations lead to strong hardware and software constraints that must be considered as early as possible during the design process. In this paper, we introduce a smart object component-based model to build complex smart objects by composition mechanisms in a similar way to Web service compositions. The smart object model extends artifact types and describes its structure and behavior in terms of attribute value pair, state-based lifecycle and services. Moreover, we propose a formal specification based on the intuitive multiplicative segment of intuitionistic linear logic not only to express consumable resources but also to automate composition from logical proofs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) allows objects to be sensed and managed over distributed networks, which creates opportunities for more direct integration between the physical world and computer-based systems. People-centric sensing or social sensing transforms how we sense the world. Today, social sensing, such as sensing via mobile apps, complements physical sensing (e.g., IoT) by substantially extending the horizon we know about the world in real time. This exploratory paper discusses how we can integrate physical and social sensing to enable better and smarter services. With the support of big data technologies, we use city mobility management services to demonstrate the potential of the proposed integration. A framework rather than a complete implementation will be presented.

Artifact-based processes do not only unify databases and how data tuples are processed through their lifecycles but they also provide a new paradigm to easily express the way business activities should evolve towards achieving goals. In this paper, we tackle the problem of integrating heterogeneous artifacts from different sources in order to provide unified views for managing them. To this end, we introduce an artifact lifecycle integration approach augmented with sets of first-order logic rules to specify mapping and correspondence relationships between artifact lifecycles. Our integration approach is a first step towards a full artifact integration approach taking into account the semantics and complexity of integrating artifact constructs (e.g., information models, states, lifecycles, tasks and conditions).

Most approaches for Web service compositions focus on the technical level as they specify "how-to" achieve the composition instead of providing casual users with means to express "what-to" achieve their business objectives. This new mindset requires extending Web services with the concept of capability, which describes what a service can do to reduce the gap between Web services and business processes. In this paper, we propose a three-layer Web service capability model to capture objectives, to specify actions that achieve objectives, and establish links between capabilities. Based on this model, the capability matching process does not only discover Web services from high level requirements expressed by Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR), but it also derives constraints on Web services.

Service-oriented architectures are increasingly deployed in open, distributed and dynamic environments, which require an end-to-end security awareness security at each phase of the service's lifecycle. Moreover, the security should not only focus on services without considering the risks and threats that might be caused by elements from business activities or underlying hardware and software infrastructure. In this paper, we adopt a holistic approach to define a security conceptual model that covers all elements at the business, service and infrastructure levels and guides each phase in a typical design method for service-oriented architectures. Since the information security is subject to uncertain and unforeseen threats, we propose a fuzzy logic decision system that helps identify security risks based on the security conceptual model and select appropriate security measures based on security objectives.

Mimicking biological ecosystems, digital ecosystems refer to complex and interdependent systems and their underlying infrastructures by which all constituents interact and exhibit as a whole self-organizing, scalable and sustainable behaviors. This emerging topic is of great interest to scholars. Nevertheless, we observe a divergence of opinions and a disagreement about what Digital Ecosystems are, how they are designed, and what their applications should be. In this paper, we present an overall view of the concept of Digital Ecosystem and provide background for a common understanding. Firstly, we identify four factors that have lead to the emergence of Digital Ecosystems and present their definitions, characteristics and categories. Secondly, we discuss models and simulation tools to show current achievements and limitations. Finally, we illustrate the main challenges and shed light on further work in the field of Digital Ecosystems.

In response to increasing economical constraints, enterprise organization has evolved toward new structures such as networked enterprise, supply chains, virtual enterprise, or collaborative business organizations. This structural organization requires the interoperability of business processes (BPs)and information systems. Dealing with interoperability often leads to the deployment of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to design agile collaborative BPs and publish and compose new services. In order to protect each partner's own interests, security strategies must be developed and integrated in the service environment. Unfortunately, traditional security approaches deal with security concerns from a technical perspective (i.e., data transmission or authentication, etc.) and do not support end-to-end security in a distributed environment of business services and collaborative processes. In this paper, we attempt to improve end-to-end security by annotating service descriptions with security objectives used to generate convenient quality of protection (QoP) agreements between partners. Conversely, agreements are processed by a dedicated matching module with respect to security requirements and preferences to select business services, and then, compose their appropriate technical security services.

Version control plays an important role in software industries to manage changes and code development. It is also recognized as embedded parts in various software types such as Content Management Systems, Wikis and Word processors. The emergence of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud computing stimulate the provision of online services via the Internet. Traditional version control systems still provide control over changes to source codes in software engineering, but they are expected to play a major role in service innovation. Incremental changes in service provisions increase value, productivity and consumer satisfaction. From a business perspective, the challenge arises when the revision control helps in to decide whether a new version of a SaaS application should be released and define metrics to determine that users should migrate to a new version after several minor or major revisions. Based on the versionology theory, we introduce a metric-based system to evaluate the distance between successive versions and extrapolate users' resistance to change and their capacity to integrate a new version. We also conducted experiments to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in service differentiation.

Current work on service systems is flourishing. Both researchers and practitioners seek to build service systems to create innovative services and increase productivity in the service sector. Unfortunately, most of the existing work focuses on information systems and their lack of models that not only represent entities in service systems with formal methods, but also illustrate a mechanism to achieve innovative services. In this paper, we firstly propose a general service system framework listing static components used in service production and discussing relationships between them. We then introduce a service model to represent pivotal components in service systems and also discuss how to innovate. Since competencies are important components in service systems, we define an ontological description of required competencies to carry out innovative services. We finally present a simple case study to further explain our formal model.

International audience

Service ecosystems provide distributed evolutionary capabilities allowing services to recombine and evolve in sustainable environments. Web services play a crucial role in service ecosystems since they support interoperable machine-to-machine interactions and help in developing new services from existing services by using a variety of composition languages. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has recently emerged as the de-facto standard for Web service composition. From the security perspective, Web service providers may require different authentication mechanisms to securely invoke their services. The integration of different authentication mechanisms complicates the global authentication scheme of BPEL-based processes and raises a challenge in adopting BPEL in service ecosystems. In this work, we propose the Security Service concept to define activity single sign-on (ASSO) for federated identify-based authentication. The Security Service allows the integration of heterogeneous authentication mechanisms in the context of multiple service providers. We also extend the activity to ensure non-intrusive extension of BPEL language and implement the Security Service in a peer-to-peer network.

Service systems are highly complex and often difficult to study, design and implement given their socio-technical-organisational nature. This complexity leads to a poor understanding as to how service systems can be innovative and competitive. Within the service sector, Knowledge-Intensive Service firms compete by the skills and knowledge of their employees to deliver online business services. However, current service systems for Knowledge-Intensive Service firms are either too static to describe the dynamic mechanism, or too visionary to use in real world applications, which makes activities such as designing, developing, and evolving adaptive service applications unpractical. In this paper, we present a generic service system architecture describing service characteristics with descriptors such as customer-centric, knowledge-driven, reusability, safeguards, interoperability, and Internet delivery channels. Finally, we propose an implementation framework to achieve secure and adaptive service delivery and a service life cycle describing the service production process.

XML semi-structured documents provide a flexible and natural way to capture data. More often, users exchange documents with others or reuse their data in a wide range of tasks. A direct consequence is a growing need to manage semi-structured documents and to gain conventional database functionality. The aim of our research is the development of a comprehensive capturing and mapping data system that ensures flexible and well-adapted information capture and at the same time efficient information retrieval. A transformation process allows the mapping between the semi-structured document model and the traditional database model. It handles data extraction and data restructuring and deals with data mapping rules to feed traditional databases.