Abstract Industrial safety inspections, particularly in the mining sector and the industrial Internet of Things (IoT), increasingly rely on multi-robot systems to perform safety inspections and mapping in remote, confined, and hazardous areas inaccessible to humans. However, conventional multi-robot systems often depend on a central robot for data management, leading to vulnerabilities in fault tolerance and data replication during inspections. This centralized approach to inspection data management can result in single points of failure and potential trust disputes among stakeholders, including government agencies, industry representatives, and local communities. To address these challenges, this work proposes a system that combines blockchain technology with a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism to improve the reliability and performance of multi-robot inspections. By leveraging blockchain’s inherent properties of fault tolerance, data replication, transparency, and immutability, our system mitigates the risks associated with centralized control in multi-robot operations in all safety inspection pipelines. We implemented and evaluated our proposed system using CoppeliaSIM, a widely used robot simulator, to validate its feasibility. The evaluation included multiple scenarios: normal operation, node failure, network latency simulations, and a comparison with a centralized system. The results show that our solution enhances fault tolerance and ensures data integrity in multi-robot systems. While the decentralized system has a higher average transaction latency (approximately 1.9 seconds) compared to the centralized system (1.42 milliseconds), it avoids the vulnerabilities linked to single points of failure. This approach not only enhances the reliability of industrial safety inspections but also provides secure data sharing among diverse stakeholders in the industrial safety ecosystem.

Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) is the digital form of a country’s fiat currency, based on Decentralized Ledger Technology (DLT). The increasing interest in CBDCs raises the concern of how to verify user’s identities for achieving regulatory demands, while maintaining user privacy in the CBDC Network. In this paper we explore Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) as a way for users to have full control over credentials issued by trusted Financial Institutions in a CBDC Governance Framework. These credentials can then be used to generate privacy-preserving proofs by their holders to authenticate them in different service providers in the CBDC Network.

Real-world applications in healthcare and supply chain domains produce, exchange, and share data in a multi-stakeholder environment. Data owners want to control their data and privacy in such settings. On the other hand, data consumers demand methods to understand when, how, and who produced the data. These requirements necessitate data governance frameworks that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, and consent management. We introduce a decentralized data governance framework based on blockchain technology and proxy re-encryption to let data owners control and track their data through privacy-enhancing and consent management mechanisms. Besides, our framework allows the data consumers to understand data lineage through a blockchain-based provenance mechanism. We have used Digital e-prescription as the use case since it has multiple stakeholders and sensitive data while enabling the medical fraternity to manage patients’ prescription data, involving patients as data owners, doctors, and pharmacists as data consumers. Our proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation results based on CosmWasm and pyUmbral PRE show that the proposed decentralized system guarantees transparency, privacy, and trust with minimal overhead.

Smart contracts allow application developers to automate business processes through a decentralized computation architecture.Contemporary blockchain platforms such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric offer support for smart contracts through consensus mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work (PoW) or other types of transaction validation and ordering services.This article exploits smart contracts in the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) blockchain platforms.In particular, we explore Tendermint and Hyperledger Besu, BFT blockchain platforms, and apply them to a decentralized e-prescription case study to evaluate their effectiveness.We adopt Hyperledger Besu and Tendermint in this research, given that both are BFT-based blockchains.Also, it is noteworthy that smart contracts in BFT blockchain platforms such as Tendermint are not well established and not widely adopted yet.Our article empirically evaluates the performance of smart contracts in Tendermint and Hyperledger Besu using a decentralized medical prescription case study and compares their results with Ethereum, a PoW blockchain.Our results demonstrate that BFT blockchain platforms are efficient for multistakeholder applications such as e-prescription and supply chains.To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the implementation of smart contracts in BFT blockchain platforms, such as Tendermint and Hyperledger Besu.

Real-world applications in healthcare and supply chain domains produce, exchange, and share data in a multi-stakeholder environment. Data owners want to control their data and privacy in such settings. On the other hand, data consumers demand methods to understand when, how, and who produced the data. These requirements necessitate data governance frameworks that guarantee data provenance, privacy protection, consent management, and selective disclosure. We introduce a decentralized data governance framework based on blockchain technology, proxy re-encryption, and Boneh, Boyen, and Shacham (BBS) signatures to let data owners control, selectively share and track their data through privacy-enhancing, consent management, and selective disclosure mechanisms. Besides, our framework allows the data consumers to understand data lineage through a blockchain-based provenance mechanism. We use Digital medical e-prescription as the use case since it handles sensitive data in a multi-stakeholder environment while showing how the medical community can manage patients’ sensitive prescription data, involving patients as data owners, and doctors, and pharmacists as data consumers. Our proof-of-concept implementation and evaluation results based on CosmWasm, Hyperledger Besu, Ethereum, pyUmbral PRE, and BBS signatures show that the proposed decentralized system is platform-agnostic, scalable and guarantees a higher degree of transparency, privacy, and trust with minimal overhead.

Electronic prescription (e-Prescription) is a digital way to manage medical prescriptions and reduce inconsistencies in the communication between doctors, patients, and pharmacies. Smart contracts allow the automation of tasks and business rules in a decentralized architecture (i.e., without the need for an intermediary or central authority). Platforms such as Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric support smart contracts development through a consensus mechanism such as Proof-of-Work or another criterion among the network's participating nodes. This paper explores Tendermint, a Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) based consensus mechanism that has not yet been widely adopted for smart contracts platforms. We apply our devised model to the healthcare application domain, more precisely in the field of e-prescription, and our results demonstrate that smart contracts can be implemented on a BFT-based platform. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating the implementation of smart contracts in a BFT-based platform such as Tendermint. We exploit this domain as there can exist some conflicting interests of profit-taking. For example, pharmacists can increase the medication dosage above the one prescribed by doctors for profit-taking. Such a scenario can occur particularly in countries where healthcare is free of charge and offered as a public service (e.g., Brazil). We show that smart contracts in BFT-based blockchain can help in solving problems in these application scenarios. Finally, our two key contributions in this paper are two-fold: (i) exploit smart-contracts in BFT-based platforms where they (smart contracts) are not very established yet in the blockchain domain; (ii) provide a smart-contract-based e-prescription solution to reduce the costs (no need for a central authority) and scams particularly in countries where the medical service is free and public.