Trustworthiness for Transportation Ecosystems: The Blockchain Vehicle Information System

Abstract

Modern transportation systems, such as computer networks, have become increasingly faster, aiming to “shorten” distances and travel time. This trend allows thinking about new services and induces to reconsider existing ones starting from new technologies, as for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Thereby, an all-encompassing scenario laying at the intersection of several domains, including manufacturing, logistics, traveling, insurance, maintenance, and trading, with the transportation one, can be envisioned. The building block for the resulting transportation ecosystem is an information system that is able to gather and connect all involved stakeholders and domains around the concept of mobility and vehicle to address complex multifaceted problems in an efficient and trustworthy way. This paper proposes the adoption of distributed ledgers to implement such a vehicle-centric information system, distributing data across the network while ensuring trustworthiness. Starting from the vehicle lifecycle immutable and certified information, new services for cross-cuttingly addressing diversity and complexity in the transportation ecosystem can be implemented. The proposed solution merges Multichain and MongoDB technologies to achieve a trade-off between trustworthiness and performance, storing only the metadata in the Multichain network. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by an example on a vehicle trading service showing an overhead for the proposed solution below 18% against a pure MongoDB one on I/O operations.