A Distributed Ledger Based Ecosystem as an Approach to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions for Shared Mobility by Incentivizing Users

Abstract

Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is a rapidly growing market with a large potential for the transition of the mobility sector. Business models based on sharing economy in the mobility sector open many opportunities for providers and users to benefit from new types of transportation modes such as light electric vehicles (LEVs). However, there are deficits in the sustainability of sharing systems with such vehicles, which result primarily from the origin of the energy for charging, as well as from the charging processes and the infrastructure used for this purpose. The electricity must be generated from renewable energies and vehicles should ideally be put on charge by the user on-site in the operation area to avoid service rides by mobility service providers. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) can provide solutions for these issues: on the one hand, it can provide proof of origin (PoO) for the electricity; in addition, tokens that can be used to pay for vehicle usage can be generated and assigned to users to incentivize behaviors like charging the vehicles. In this paper a crypto token-based scheme for a PoO for renewable energy, as well as for user incentives to charge the vehicles to make shared mobility services more sustainable is described. The proposed solution includes a concept for a network backend, implemented as a private blockchain network using the open source blockchain solution Hyperledger Fabric. The backend will store data about the usage of LEVs and batteries as well as relevant data of charging and swapping stations. The user incentive tokens and smart contracts for transaction automatization are stored in the backend. Furthermore, a front end consisting of two applications: one for users and stakeholders respectively, is part of the solution.