Chandigarh University

Abstract: The consumption of various forms of plastics is a challenging environment protection issue. All forms of consumed plastic become waste and require large areas of land for storage because several tons of waste plastics cannot be fully recycled at once. The low biodegradability of plastic and the presence in large quantities of waste plastic negatively impact the environment. Previously, various studies were performed to identify safe and environmentally friendly methods for disposing of plastics. Recently, various forms of plastics have been incorporated in concrete to prevent the direct contact of plastics with the environment because concrete has a longer service life. However, this method is not a dominant method for disposing of waste plastic. This paper presents an overview of some published research regarding the use of waste plastic in concrete. The effects of waste plastic addition on the fresh, mechanical and thermal properties of concrete are also presented in this paper.

Abstract: Nature-inspired algorithms are becoming popular among researchers due to their simplicity and flexibility. The nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms are analysed in terms of their key features like their diversity and adaptation, exploration and exploitation, and attractions and diffusion mechanisms. The success and challenges concerning these algorithms are based on their parameter tuning and parameter control. A comparatively new algorithm motivated by the social hierarchy and hunting behavior of grey wolves is Grey Wolf Optimizer GWO, which is a very successful algorithm for solving real mechanical and optical engineering problems. In the original GWO, half of the iterations are devoted to exploration and the other half are dedicated to exploitation, overlooking the impact of right balance between these two to guarantee an accurate approximation of global optimum. To overcome this shortcoming, a modified GWO mGWO is proposed, which focuses on proper balance between exploration and exploitation that leads to an optimal performance of the algorithm. Simulations based on benchmark problems and WSN clustering problem demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and stability of mGWO compared with the basic GWO and some well-known algorithms.

Abstract: Electric vehicles (EVs) have transformed the smart transportation sector by providing diverse energy management solutions to the smart grid. Energy trading among EVs and charging stations (CS) in a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) environment is one of the popular verticals in smart grid. However, processing the energy trading decisions at remote control centers lead to an increase in delay and network overhead. Apart from these issues, the security concerns while trading the energy in such an environment remain persistent. Therefore, to handle the aforementioned issues, this paper presents SURVIVOR: A Blockchain based Edge-as-a-Service Framework for Secure Energy Trading in software defined networking (SDN)-enabled V2G Environment. In the proposed framework, the energy trading decisions are processed closer to the location of EVs through edge nodes. Moreover, for securing the energy trading transactions, blockchain is used wherein the approver nodes are selected amongst all the present nodes on the basis of a utility function and are made responsible for validating the transactions. Once such nodes are selected, a consensus-based blockchain mechanism for secure energy trading in SDN-enabled V2G environment is presented. In this mechanism, edge nodes are responsible for generating proof-of-work puzzles. The proof-of-work is a unique hash value which is computed for each EV and the transactions for which the approver nodes compute the same proof-of-work for each EV are added in the blockchain. The complete scheme is backed by the SDN architecture to reduce the overall latency and increase the throughput of the smart transportation network. The results obtained prove that the proposed scheme is effective for trading the energy between EVs and CS while securing the underlying trading transactions using blockchain. Moreover, the communication and computation cost of the proposed scheme comes out to be small which proves that it can be used in real-world applications. The latency in the complete transportation sector is also greatly reduced by using the SDN-architecture.

Abstract: We live in the age of After Google (AG), where information is just one click away and talking just one touch away. The near future of the AG age is the Internet of Things (IoT), where physical things connected over a network will take part in Internet activities to exchange information about themselves and their surroundings. In other words, the IoT is nothing but a computing concept in which everyday objects with embedded hardware/devices are connected to a network or are simply online.

Abstract: Since the success of Bitcoin, there have been increased focus of studying the application of blockchain in a broad range of applications, such as in solutions facilitating identity privacy and transaction security using a decentralized architecture via different consensus mechanisms (e.g. proof-of-work) between different geo-located IoT devices/nodes in our increasingly digitalized society (e.g. smart city). In this paper, we survey the usage of blockchain technology for smart communities, focusing on key components of the blockchain applications. We also study the various process models used in the execution of secure transactions. Specifically, we present a detailed taxonomy on the applications, process models used, and communication infrastructure support needed to execute various applications.