Blockchain Guided Trustworthy Interactions for Distributed Disaster Management

Abstract

Given the devastating outcomes of the recent hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods across the globe, governments all over the world started to pay serious attention to their disaster management protocols. The current reliance on centralized, infrastructure-dependent solutions is a serious threat to the whole management process. The entire process is mainly about processing help requests based on real-time information about the disaster, and efficiently responding to such requests by dispensing a set of limited resources available at the management's disposal. Relying on independent anonymous help givers can expand the resource availability and facilitate help provisioning. Further, Crowdsourcing can be a valuable source of information that can better guide help provisioning process. However, establishing dynamic trust relationship between help requesters, information providers, and help givers is the key enabler to such enhancement. Help requests should be probably authenticated not to waste the valuable resources, help provisioning should be rewarded to motivate help givers, and Data sharing should be verified not to act on false information. In this paper, we present a decentralized Blockchain based trust management framework to facilitate cooperative anonymous help provisioning at disaster time considering infrastructure-supported scenario.