Zahra Foroozandeh, Sérgio Ramos, João Soares, Zita Vale
In this paper, a collective residential building is considered in which the following points are taken into consideration: (i) a flexibility value of Contract Power (CP) is considered for each consumer; (ii) it is assumed a single CP for the entire building; (iii) an energy resource manager entity is considered to manage the energy resources in the residential building, such as Electric Vehicles (EVs), Photovoltaic (PV) generation system, and the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). Taking into consideration the previous assumptions, the major goal of this work is to minimize the electricity consumption costs of the residential building by using a Multi-Objective Mixed-Binary Linear Programming (MOMBLP) formulation. The objective function of the MOMBLP model minimizes the electricity cost consumption of each apartment. Then, a Goal Programming (GP) strategy is applied to find the most appropriate solutions for the proposed MOMBLP model. Finally, the performance of the suggested model is evaluated by comparing the obtained results from a Single-Objective Mixed-Binary Linear Programming (SOMBLP) approach in which the whole building consumption cost is minimized. The results show that using the GP strategy a reduction of 7.5% in the total annual energy consumption is verified in comparison with SOMBLP. Moreover, the GP approach leads to fair benefit among building consumers, by finding a solution with less distance from the desired level.
Awais Abdul Khaliq, Adeel Anjum, Abdul Basit Ajmal, Julian Webber · 6 authors
The privacy preservation has received considerable attention from organizations as the growing population is apprehensive regarding personal data being preserved.There are several privacy and security issues in existing systems, such as identity and location disclosure, availability, and authenticity. Smart parking systems utilize third-party parking recommender systems to offer customized parking space recommendations to its users based on user’s past parking experience. However, indiscriminately sharing a user’s data with a third party recommendation system may violate their personal information because their activity and node mobility can be deduced from their previous paring experience. Another problem with existing solutions is that most distributed systems need a third party to anonymize user data to preserve the user’s privacy. Therefore, this article provides three solutions that address the problems mentioned above; at first, based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), we proposed the mutual authentication mechanism using HMAC to provide anonymity and integrity during communication; secondly, given the risks to security and privacy posed by untrustworthy third parties, we used local differential privacy, which uses the Laplace distribution technique to add noise randomly and eliminates any necessity for a third party for data perturbation. And thirdly, in addition to LDP , we utilize the IOTA distributed ledger technology to provide a new level of security that ensures immutability, scalability, and quantum secrecy and decentralized the system. Our experiments demonstrate that, in addition to preserving the driver’s privacy and security, our proposed model has low storage overheads, computation, and communication costs.
Open access
Smart Parking Systems Research
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
D. Malathi, Vijayakumar Ponnusamy, S. Saravanan, D. Deepa · 5 authors
The Public Distribution System (PDS) distributes the subsidized food and non-food items to poor populations through fair price shops (FPS). The PDS has been criticized for its urban bias and its failure to serve the underprivileged sections of the community effectively. The Current system manual-based data management and ledger management gives rise to much corruption in the process of extricating the poor from those who are less needy. There are chances for the block market because of the current methodology of data management. This article proposes a blockchain technology-based smart ration shop system that uses immutable smart contract-based transactions to overcome the issues. The proposed mechanism will provide more transparency and enable access to all the transactions by everyone. The system utilizes IoT technology for asset tracking while moving the food items from distribution centers to a particular ration shop, which avoids malpractice during the transportation of the goods. Voice-based and text-based user-friendly interfaces in local languages were also developed to provide an effective interaction and improve the usability of the system. The performance of the proposed blockchain network is evaluated and reported.
Roman Overko, Rodrigo Ordóñez-Hurtado, Sergiy Zhuk, Robert Shorten
In this paper, we describe an approach to guide drivers searching for a parking space (PS). The proposed system suggests a sequence of routes that drivers should traverse in order to maximise the expected likelihood of finding a PS and minimise the travel distance. This system is built on our recent architecture SPToken, which combines both Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) to realise a system for the estimation of an unknown distribution without disturbing the environment. For this, we use a number of virtual tokens that are passed from vehicle to vehicle to enable a massively parallelised RL system that estimates the best route for a given origin-destination (OD) pair, using crowdsourced information from participant vehicles. Additionally, a moving window with reward memory mechanism is included to better cope with non-stationary environments. Simulation results are given to illustrate the efficacy of our system.
A blockchain, which is well known as one of the distributed ledgers, has attracted in many research fields. In this paper, we discuss the effectiveness and limitation of a blockchain in distributed optimization. In distributed optimization, the original problem is decomposed, and the local problems are solved by multiple agents. In this paper, ADMM (Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers) is utilized as one of the powerful methods in distributed optimization. In ADMM, an aggregator is basically required for collecting the computation result in each agent. Using blockchains, the function of an aggregator can be contained in a distributed ledger, and an aggregator may not be required. As a result, tampering from attackers can be prevented. As an application, we consider energy management systems (EMSs). By numerical experiments, the effectiveness and limitation of blockchain-based distributed optimization are clarified.
For long, different e-voting systems have been provided with the goal of increasing security and minimizing cost. Blockchain is a major breakthrough in the technological industry that provide immense secured platform. With the launch of Ethereum, a decentralized platform which runs decentralized applications (DApps) on it, a secured voting system now seems possible. Many organizations have now shifted their focus on voting through blockchain platforms. There’s a very high chance that a normal voting method won’t lead to a clear majority. There can be many ways to deal with this issue which includes another voting process to take place which can be quite expensive in terms of time and resources. In our paper, we introduce the vote-trading concept where the votes can be redistributed to other candidates in case if there is no clear majority and also this ‘ majority’ factor can be set by the organization according to their requirement. We discuss the design for the blockchain based preferential e-voting system using the Solidity programming language where instead of one vote per candidate, we provide the concept of giving preference to the candidates.
Driverless parking, an influential application of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) model, is one of the clear early benefits for autonomous vehicles, given often narrow spaces and multiple potential hazards (such as pedestrians stepping out from in between other vehicles). In recent years, real momentum has been building up for designing automated parking models for vehicles. However, in such an autonomous parking design, location privacy and identity privacy issues are always overlapping due to the improper sharing of data. Most existing studies barely investigate and poorly address such privacy issues. Motivated by this, we develop (and evaluate) an experience-driven, secure and privacy-aware framework of parking reservations for automated cars. Our idea of using differential privacy with zero-knowledge proof provides both security and privacy guarantees to users. Furthermore, the performance of the developed model is enhanced by exploiting reinforcement learning approach such that the utility of the system and the parking reservation rate can be maximized. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed model.
As a representative example for the construction of a smart city, a smart parking system has been developed in past research and implemented through IoT and cloud technologies. However, the initial installation cost of IoT sensor devices is preventing the spread of this technology, and thus as an alternative, a crowdsensing-based system, operating through data from publicly owned mobile devices, has been proposed. In this paper, we propose a multi-blockchain structure (i.e., constructed with public chain and private chain) in a crowdsensing-based smart parking system. In this structure, many sensing data contributors participate through the opened public blockchain, to transparently provide sensing information and to claim corresponding rewards. The private blockchain provides an environment for sharing the collected information among service providers in real time and for providing parking information to users. The bridge node performs an information relay role between the two blockchains. Performance analysis and security analysis on the implemented proposed system show the feasibility of our proposed system.
The fast penetration of Intelligent Connected Vehicles (ICVs) has become the primary growth engine of the automotive industry in recent years. Urban vehicular network consisting of ICVs is evolving towards a distributed intelligent platform for pervasive sensing, connecting and computing in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and smart cities. In this paper, we propose that parked vehicles (PVs) could be exploited for environment perception and model inference. We describe the system architecture and its typical application scenarios of distributed environment perception for city roads, parking lots, as well as for commercial and residential buildings. PVs are motivated to assist in deep learning model inference for the captured image data in such applications. Regarding the diversity of PVs in deep learning capability, a differential incentive mechanism is elaborately designed based on contract theory to emulate PVsparticipation. The experiment on the dataset of German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark is conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
Nikolay Buldakov, Timur Khalilev, Salvatore Distefano, Manuel Mazzara
This paper discusses an open source solution to smart-parking in highly urbanized areas. Interviews have been conducted with domain experts, user stories defined and a system architecture has been proposed with a case study. Our solution allows independent owners of parking space to be integrated into one unified system, that facilitates the parking situation in a smart city. The utilization of such a system raises the issues of trust and transparency among several actors of the parking process. In order to tackle those, we propose a smart contract-based solution, that brings in trust by encapsulating sensitive relations and processes into transparent and distributed smart contracts.
Mahmoud M. Badr, Wesam Al Amiri, Mostafa M. Fouda, Mohamed Mahmoud · 6 authors
Most of the existing smart parking systems threaten the drivers' privacy by revealing information about their visited locations. Moreover, they are centralized making them vulnerable to a single point of failure and attack, which threatens the availability of the parking service. They also suffer from a lack of transparency, where the centralized service organizer may favor some parking lots by booking their parking slots first. To tackle these concerns, we propose a blockchain-based smart parking system with privacy preservation and reputation management. In our system, a consortium blockchain is created by different parking lots to run the parking system securely and transparently, where the parking offers are recorded on a shared and immutable ledger. We use a commitment technique during the submission of the offers to ensure fair parking rates. Then, we use a private information retrieval technique during the offers retrieval to preserve the drivers' location privacy. Furthermore, to anonymously and efficiently authenticate drivers during the reservation process, we use a short randomizable signature. We also use a time-locked anonymous payment technique to discourage drivers from not committing to their parking reservations and provide a secure and privacy-preserving payment method for parking service. Finally, we integrate a blockchain-based anonymous reputation management scheme into our system, where drivers can anonymously rate the parking service to ensure high quality of service. Our evaluations demonstrate that our smart parking system is secure and capable of preserving drivers' privacy with low communication, computation, and storage overheads.
Open access
Smart Parking Systems Research
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Distributed ledger technology and IoT has revolutionized the world by finding its application in all the domains. It promises to transform the digital infrastructure which powers extensive evolutions and impacts a lot of areas. Vehicle parking is a major problem in major cities around the world in both developed and developing countries. The common problems are unavailability or shortage of parking spaces, no information about tariff and no mean of searching availability of parking space online. The struggle doesn't end even if an individual finds a spot, he is required to pay in cash. This traditional and manual process takes a lot of time and causes a lot of hassle. In this paper, we provide a novel solution to the parking problem using IoT and distributed ledger technology. This system is based on pervasive computing and provides auto check-in and check-out. The user can control the system and their profile using the app on their smartphone. The major advantage of the system is an easy and online payment method. Users can pay for their parking tickets using their credit cards from their smartphone app. This decreases their hassle of carrying cash and coins for purchasing parking tickets. Smart Parking will optimize the parking mechanism, save time, reduce traffic and pollution, and provide an enhanced user experience. It is robust, secure, scalable and automated using the combination of cutting-edge technologies.
H. S. Jennath, S. Adarsh, Nikhil V. Chandran, R. Ananthan · 6 authors
With the advances happening in the area of urbanization, with increased demand for dwellings and ever growing number of vehicles on road, finding a parking spot has become one of the major pain points for the citizens. This is mainly due to the limited parking spaces in the urban areas. To overcome this limitation, one solution is to create more parking spaces. In this work we propose a Blockchain based solution, where parking pools can be created by developing a transparent platform where individuals can rent out their unused land for a stipulated amount of time with little or no legal hassles. A non-fungible token system representing unique parking lots will be created for transparency of the entire system. This also has the added advantage of generating revenue from their otherwise unused property. Smart contracts over Blockchain enforces the contractual agreement between the participants ensuring financial transparency in the proposed system.
Z. Zinonos, Panayiotis Christodoulou, Andreas S. Andreou, Savvas A. Chatzichristofis
The IoT ecosystem is evolving quickly, developing several applications in different sectors. The majority of these applications use centralized infrastructures something that poses several challenges especially related to trust and data security. Recently, blockchain has been introduced as an effective solution to IoT applications trying to provide solutions to these challenges. In this paper, we introduce a new decentralized IoT application using blockchain technology, namely, ParkChain. The ParkChain application operates in a way that no one can delete, revert, hack or question the time a registered vehicle securely entered a parking area. In order to evaluate ParkChain, we have implemented the smart contract on top of Ethereum Blockchain along with a traditional Image Processing / Computer Vision approach for License Plate Recognition, and using a Raspberry Pi we control the access on a parking place. We report on several experiments that assess the performance of ParkChain application.
Open access
Vehicle License Plate Recognition
Smart Parking Systems Research
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Searching for available parking spaces is a major problem for drivers especially in big crowded cities, causing traffic congestion and air pollution, and wasting drivers' time. Smart parking systems are a novel solution to enable drivers to have real-time parking information for pre-booking. However, current smart parking requires drivers to disclose their private information, such as desired destinations. Moreover, the existing schemes are centralized and vulnerable to the bottleneck of the single point of failure and data breaches. In this paper, we propose a distributed privacy-preserving smart parking system using blockchain. A consortium blockchain created by different parking lot owners to ensure security, transparency, and availability is proposed to store their parking offers on the blockchain. To preserve drivers' location privacy, we adopt a private information retrieval (PIR) technique to enable drivers to retrieve parking offers from blockchain nodes privately, without revealing which parking offers are retrieved. Furthermore, a short randomizable signature is used to enable drivers to reserve available parking slots in an anonymous manner. Besides, we introduce an anonymous payment system that cannot link drivers' to specific parking locations. Finally, our performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed scheme can preserve drivers' privacy with low communication and computation overhead.
Facilities management encompasses assets management, space management, IoT management, regulatory/compliance adherence and purchasing and billing issuance. Assets management requires monitoring, fault detection and the use of IoT for detecting conditions and triggering events. Facilities management involves tracking work orders, schedule maintenance, doing preventive management, and also tracking assets status through equipment warranties, life cycle assessments, contracts and agreements. Data management of facilities can now be done using a blockchain instead of a database. Blockchain is a peer-to-peer distributed digital ledger that records data which is accessible and shared by multiple qualifying parties with security enabled. The beauty of blockchain is it provides transparency in data handling, traceability of all transactions and ease of collaboration between qualifying parties. Since facilities management involves issuance of contracts and agreements, smart contracts can be deployed to provides a transparent and faster way to make transactions since they can be automated in blockchain network. In this paper, we have implemented a simple facilities management model using Hyperledger Composer Playground. To quickly develop and test the blockchain business networks, we have chosen to use Playground. In our model, we have built in employee information, vendor information, equipment tracking, fault report and maintenance report information. A token asset is employed to incentivize work completed to satisfaction. We will discuss how parameters like lifecycle, discount factor and depreciation information of equipment and facilities can be built into the model to present a more holistic view of the overall worth of assets at a snapshot.
Block Chain (BC), the technology behind the Bitcoin crypto-currency system. Blockchain helps Build Trusted, Powerful and Transparent Process with the potential to disrupt Intermediaries, Third parties & Expensive processes. Proof-of-Work (PoW), Proof of Stake (PoS), Proof of Authority (PoA), consensus algorithm plays a vital role in ensuring BC security by maintaining a digital ledger of transactions, which is considered to be incorruptible. Firstly, we explore top crypto currencies after that we will explore blockchain and mining concept. In further we will be exploring Ethereum blockchain solidity programming more and make DAPPs on Ethereum blockchain network.
This paper describes how Distributed Ledger Technologies can be used to design a class of cyber-physical systems, as well as to enforce social contracts and to orchestrate the behaviour of agents trying to access a shared resource. The first part of the paper analyses the advantages and disadvantages of using Distributed Ledger Technologies architectures to implement certain control systems in an Internet of Things (IoT) setting, and then focuses on a specific type of DLT based on a Directed Acyclic Graph. In this setting we propose a set of delay differential equations to describe the dynamical behaviour of the Tangle, an IoT-inspired Directed Acyclic Graph designed for the cryptocurrency IOTA. The second part proposes an application of Distributed Ledger Technologies as a mechanism for dynamic deposit pricing, wherein the deposit of digital currency is used to orchestrate access to a network of shared resources. The pricing signal is used as a mechanism to enforce the desired level of compliance according to a predetermined set of rules. After presenting an illustrative example, we analyze the control system and provide sufficient conditions for the stability of the network.