This paper presents the current state of the gaming industry, which provides an important background for an effective serious game implementation in mobile crowdsensing. An overview of existing solutions, scientific studies and market research highlights the current trends and the potential applications for citizen-centric platforms in the context of Cyber–Physical–Social systems. The proposed solution focuses on serious games applied in urban water management from the perspective of mobile crowdsensing, with a reward-driven mechanism defined for the crowdsensing tasks. The serious game is designed to provide entertainment value by means of gamified interaction with the environment, while the crowdsensing component involves a set of roles for finding, solving and validating water-related issues. The mathematical model of distance-constrained multi-depot vehicle routing problem with heterogeneous fleet capacity is evaluated in the context of the proposed scenario, with random initial conditions given by the location of players, while the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auction model provides an alternative to the centralized task allocation strategy, subject to the same evaluation method. A blockchain component based on the Hyperledger Fabric architecture provides the level of trust required for achieving overall platform utility for different stakeholders in mobile crowdsensing.

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Water resource management represents a fundamental aspect of a modern society. Urban areas present multiple challenges requiring complex solutions, which include multidomain approaches related to the integration of advanced technologies. Water consumption monitoring applications play a significant role in increasing awareness, while machine learning has been proven for the design of intelligent solutions in this field. This paper presents an approach for monitoring and predicting water consumption from the most important water outlets in a household based on a proposed IoT solution. Data processing pipelines were defined, including K-means clustering and evaluation metrics, extracting consumption events, and training classification methods for predicting consumption sources. Continuous water consumption monitoring offers multiple benefits toward improving decision support by combining modern processing techniques, algorithms, and methods.

Water supply systems are essential for a modern society. This article presents an overview of the latest research related to information and communication technology systems for water resource monitoring, control and management. The main objective of our review is to show how emerging technologies offer support for smart administration of water infrastructures. The paper covers research results related to smart cities, smart water monitoring, big data, data analysis and decision support. Our evaluation reveals that there are many possible solutions generated through combinations of advanced methods. Emerging technologies open new possibilities for including new functionalities such as social involvement in water resource management. This review offers support for researchers in the area of water monitoring and management to identify useful models and technologies for designing better solutions.

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Over the past decade, there has been significant evolution in the security field, specifically in the authentication and authorization part. The standard authentication protocol nowadays is OAuth 2.0-based authentication. This method relies on a third-party authentication service provider with complete control over the users’ data, which it can filter or modify at will. Blockchain and decentralization have generated much interest in recent years, and the decentralized web is considered the next significant improvement in the world wide web (also known as Web 3.0). Web3 authentication, also known as decentralized authentication, allows for the secure and decentralized authentication of users on the web. The use cases for this technology include online marketplaces, social media platforms, and other online communities that require user authentication. The advantages of Web3 authentication include increased security and privacy for users and the ability for users to have more control over their data. The proposed system implementation uses Ethereum as the blockchain and a modern web stack to enhance user interaction and usability. The solution brings benefits both to the private and the public sector, proving that it has the capability of becoming the preferred authentication mechanism for any decentralized web application.