Trustful Coopetitive Infrastructures for the New Space Exploration Era

In the new space economy, space agencies, large enterprises, and start-ups aim to launch space multi-robot systems (MRS) for various in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) purposes, such as mapping, soil evaluation, and utility provisioning. However, these stakeholders' competing economic interests may hinder effective collaboration on a centralized digital platform. To address this issue, neutral and transparent infrastructures could facilitate coordination and value exchange among heterogeneous space MRS. While related work has expressed legitimate concerns about the technical challenges associated with blockchain use in space, we argue that weighing its potential economic benefits against its drawbacks is necessary. This paper presents a novel architectural framework and a comprehensive set of requirements for integrating blockchain technology in MRS, aiming to enhance coordination and data integrity in space exploration missions. We explored distributed ledger technology (DLT) to design a non-proprietary architecture for heterogeneous MRS and validated the prototype in a simulated lunar environment. The analyses of our implementation suggest global ISRU efficiency improvements for map exploration, compared to a corresponding group of individually acting robots, and that fostering a coopetitive environment may provide additional revenue opportunities for stakeholders.

Designing Trustful Cooperation Ecosystems is Key to the New Space Exploration Era

In the emerging space economy, autonomous robotic missions with specialized goals such as mapping and mining are gaining traction, with agencies and enterprises increasingly investing resources. Multirobot systems (MRS) research has provided many approaches to establish control and communication layers to facilitate collaboration from a technical perspective, such as granting more autonomy to heterogeneous robotic groups through auction-based interactions in mesh networks. However, stakeholders' competing economic interests often prevent them from cooperating within a proprietary ecosystem. Related work suggests that distributed ledger technology (DLT) might serve as a mechanism for enterprises to coordinate workflows and trade services to explore space resources through a transparent, reliable, non-proprietary digital platform. We challenge this perspective by pointing to the core technical weaknesses of blockchains, in particular, increased energy consumption, low throughput, and full transparency through redundancy. Our objective is to advance the discussion in a direction where the benefits of DLT from an economic perspective are weighted against the drawbacks from a technical perspective. We finally present a possible DLT-driven heterogeneous MRS for map exploration to study the opportunities for economic collaboration and competitiveness.

Federated Learning: Organizational Opportunities, Challenges, and Adoption Strategies

Restrictive rules for data sharing in many industries have led to the development of \ac{FL}. \ac{FL} is a \ac{ML} technique that allows distributed clients to train models collaboratively without the need to share their respective training data with others. In this article, we first explore the technical basics of FL and its potential applications. Second, we present a conceptual framework for the adoption of \ac{FL}, mapping organizations along the lines of their \ac{AI} capabilities and environment. We then discuss why exemplary organizations in different industries, including industry consortia, established banks, public authorities, and data-intensive SMEs might consider different approaches to \ac{FL}. To conclude, we argue that \ac{FL} presents an institutional shift with ample interdisciplinary research opportunities for the business and information systems engineering community.

Secure Federated Learning for Residential Short Term Load Forecasting

The inclusion of intermittent and renewable energy sources has increased the importance of demand forecasting in power systems. Smart meters can play a critical role in demand forecasting due to the measurement granularity they provide. Consumers' privacy concerns, reluctance of utilities and vendors to share data with competitors or third parties, and regulatory constraints are some constraints smart meter forecasting faces. This paper examines a collaborative machine learning method for short-term demand forecasting using smart meter data as a solution to the previous constraints. Privacy preserving techniques and federated learning enable to ensure consumers' confidentiality concerning both, their data, the models generated using it (Differential Privacy), and the communication mean (Secure Aggregation). The methods evaluated take into account several scenarios that explore how traditional centralized approaches could be projected in the direction of a decentralized, collaborative and private system. The results obtained over the evaluations provided almost perfect privacy budgets (1.39,$10e^{-5}$) and (2.01,$10e^{-5}$) with a negligible performance compromise.