Abstract
Highly integrated metropolitan smart cities are increasingly vulnerable to cascading systemic failures, adversarial data poisoning, and the centralized manipulation of critical control software. This paper introduces the Metropolitan Ethical Hive Network (M-EHN), a decentralized cyber-physical architecture for autonomous urban resource management. The M-EHN decouples real-time edge orchestration from macro-logistics optimization across a three-tiered autonomous hierarchy. To eliminate remote exploitation vectors, a physically isolated, ASIC-driven hardware validation core enforces hard-coded safety invariants through transient, zero-knowledge cryptographic handshakes. By shifting system boundaries from volatile software configurations to immutable gate-geometry, the M-EHN ensures fault-tolerant infrastructure operations resilient against both targeted cyber-warfare and administrative overreach.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Eckes, Christopher L., "THE METROPOLITAN ETHICAL HIVE NETWORK (M-EHN): A DECENTRALIZED COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR FAULT-TOLERANT URBAN LOGISTICS", Technical Disclosure Commons, (June 16, 2026)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/10464