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The deployment of small-scale renewable energy sources will transform the management of energy grids towards more decentralized solutions in which the prosumers will have a more active role. Regulatory and market barriers are driving the implementation of virtual aggregation models in which the small-scale prosumers work together on a larger scale to gain benefits that could not be obtained on an individual basis. In this paper, we propose to use public blockchain and self-enforcing smart contracts to construct Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) of prosumers to provide energy services. A model has been defined for capturing the prosumer level constraints in terms of available energy profiles and energy service requirements enabling their optimal aggregation in hierarchical structures. A lightweight decentralized solution for VPPs construction is implemented using smart contracts enabling its efficient running on the public blockchain. Smart contracts are encoding the model constraints and are defining functionalities for prosumers to initiate or join a VPP implementing the complete chain of Offer-Operate-Measure-Remunerate actions. The VPP will be managed on top of a distributed ledger technology offering decentralized functionality for tracking and validating the delivery of energy based on the blockchain transactions and for energy and financial settlement, the remuneration being done according to the amount of energy provided by individual prosumers. Experimental results show that the proposed solution runs successfully on the public blockchain with good execution time and can address Balancing Responsible Party requests for additional generation. The overhead in terms of gas consumption and transactional throughput stays within reasonable boundaries.

Myasthenia gravis (MG) is an autoimmune condition, that commonly impacts adult women of reproductive age. Myasthenia gravis in pregnancy is rare, but the incidence is higher in different geographical areas. Pregnancies in mothers with MG can have an unfortunate outcome. Acetylcholine receptor antibodies may pass into the fetal circulation and can affect the fetal neuromuscular junction, generating transient MG or even fetal arthrogryposis. The 2016 and 2021 International Consensus Guidance for Management of Myasthenia Gravis issued by Myasthenia Gravis Foundation of America is lacking in recommendation for fetal surveillance for pregnancies in women with MG. The aim of this paper is to highlight fetal and neonatal complications in mothers with MG and to offer antenatal care insights. Close maternal and pregnancy monitoring can improve pregnancy outcome. Patients with MG should be encouraged to conceive, to avoid triggers for exacerbations of the disease during pregnancy and a multidisciplinary team should be established to ensure the optimal support and therapy.

To ensure the success of energy transition and achieve the target of reducing the carbon footprint of energy systems, the management of energy systems needs to be decentralized. Public blockchains offer favorable features to support energy sector democratization and reinforce citizens’ trust, such as tamper-proof energy data registration and sharing, decentralization, transparency, and support for peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading. However, in blockchain-based P2P energy markets, transactional data are public and accessible, which raises privacy concerns related to prosumers’ energy profiles while lacking scalability and featuring high transactional costs. In this paper, we employ secure multi-party computation (MPC) to assure privacy on a P2P energy flexibility market implementation in Ethereum by combining the prosumers’ flexibility orders data and storing it safely on the chain. We provide an encoding mechanism for orders on the energy market to obfuscate the amount of energy traded by creating groups of prosumers, by splitting the amount of energy from bids and offers, and by creating group-level orders. The solution wraps around the smart contracts-based implementation of an energy flexibility marketplace, assuring privacy features on all market operations such as order submission, matching bids and offers, and commitment in trading and settlement. The experimental results show that the proposed solution is effective in supporting P2P energy flexibility trading, reducing the number of transactions, and gas consumption with a limited computational time overhead.

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