A. F. M. Suaib Akhter, Tawsif Zaman Arnob, Ekra Binta Noor, Selman Hızal · 5 authors
The popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) is constantly increasing, as they use relatively greener, sustainable energy. However, it is a fact that the charging stations for EVs are yet to meet the demand. It could be a great solution if a peer-to-peer (P2P) charging system could be initiated by anyone who wants to make their garage's charge points publicly available for commercial purposes, named a home charging station (HCS). In this work, our idea is to bring interested charging stations under a network of nodes and a blockchain-based management system, where the blockchain is responsible for ensuring the authenticity of both the charging stations and charge receiver. A cryptocurrency-based payment system has also been proposed to ensure transactions' security, integrity, transparency, and immutability. A reputation management system is applied to maintain the quality of service. Miners with high processing power are used to alleviate lagging during block creation, supported by edge servers. The proposed system has been implemented by using virtual machines. A theoretical analysis is presented to assess the compatibility and possible cost requirements to implement the system in a real-world scenario.
COVID-19 has recently affected global trade flows, and the primary reason is that shipping failed to adapt rapidly to meet the need for on-time delivery. Given blockchain's “revolutionary” potential, this paper aims to understand how blockchain can address longstanding inefficiencies and challenges in the shipping industry. This analysis proposes a model of how an industrywide blockchain-based consortium powered by smart contracts could resolve end-to-end contract issues with trustworthiness, thus improving efficiency in terms of time and cost. A mixed-method approach was conducted. That included 27 surveys and 20 interviews with representatives of shipping industry members. This study contributes to the blockchain and shipping supply chain literature by offering empirical data about the application of an industry-led consortium blockchain with cost, scalability, and volatility perspectives. As for the managerial implications, incentives and education are required to stimulate collaboration and commitment to blockchain for more efficient and effective global shipping trade flows.
Yao Suo Yao Suo, Yingsen Wang Yao Suo, Shichao Luo Yingsen Wang, Qianqian Yang Shichao Luo · 5 authors
<p>Aiming at the problems of difficult charging, long waiting time and energy loss of IoEV (Internet of electric vehicles) during peak charging period, we design a V2V (vehicle to vehicle) energy trading model to simulate the energy trading process. Considering the problems of malicious node attacks and privacy protection, we combine the V2V energy transaction model with a federated chain and explore a distributed ledger to record the V2V energy transaction process. In addition, we design a credibility mechanism to initialize nodes according to their comprehensive strength and select master nodes based on their behavioral performance of participating in consensus, which ensures the reliability of the consensus. Based on this, we propose a more efficient and promising consensus algorithm SV-PBFT (shapley value-PBFT), which simplifies the consensus process, reduces the communication overhead, and improves the consensus efficiency. The SV-PBFT consensus algorithm is used to replace the traditional consensus algorithm in V2V energy trading. The proposed SV-PBFT algorithm is validated by extensive simulation experiments, and numerical results are provided to confirm the good performance of SV-PBFT in V2V energy trading models.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
Shuchih Ernest Chang, Erik Chiaway Chang, Yijou Chen
The ideas of the sharing economy have facilitated innovative business applications, such as Uber and Airbnb. As an example of a sharing economy application, ridesharing services take advantage of underutilized resources to create economic value. However, the unruly design of ridesharing systems may make urban traffic more congested and cause other technology-organization-environment issues. This study explores the application of blockchain and smart contract technologies to enhance ridesharing services by harvesting the blockchain benefits of transaction traceability, process transparency, system automation and disintermediation. After presenting system design and implementation details for building and deploying a blockchain-based system to support the reengineered ridesharing service with required business functions, we conduct functionality/performance tests and theory-based comparative analysis to confirm its feasibility and applicability. The results reveal that our system with blockchain-enabled benefits is superior to incumbent ridesharing systems. Moreover, while prior research rarely reports the design and implementation details of blockchain-based systems to support sharing economy services, this paper primarily contributes to extant literature by not only proposing a layered system architecture adapting blockchain and smart contracts into the desired ridesharing service but also demonstrating the design and implementation details, covering the development tools, the deployment environment and the deployed smart contracts.
Florentina Magda Enescu, Fernando Georgel Bîrleanu, Maria Simona Raboacă, Nicu Bizon · 5 authors
This paper presents a comprehensive review of the technical aspects and challenges in existing public transport services. This review highlights the challenges and solutions for the main subsystems of public transport services, being focused on the influence of public transportation in an urban area with high demographics to identify solutions based on blockchain technology for future development of the current management platforms. More than 2000 research papers, published since 2018 and until now, have been analyzed in Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. The keywords used for the analysis of blockchain integration in public transport are related to technology, services, management, the use of electric vehicles, and the impact of public transport on the environment. In this research, we analyzed why there is a need for integrating the blockchain technologies in public transport.
Ride-sharing services (RSSs) using centralization methods experience various challenges like single point-of-failure, privacy violation, lack of security, and distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack, etc. So, blockchain-based RSSs mitigate such problems through decentralization. Relying on the blockchain only leads to problems such as increase in application response time, chain size, and a high computational cost due to the increase in data storage in blockchain and thus increase the service costs to end users. Additionally, the blockchain lacks to scalability of data because of the inability to store large-sized data and accommodate the grows of ride-sharing data. To overcome these problems, a novel decentralized ride-sharing system that exploits blockchain and Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is proposed. The goal of the proposed system is to move all ride-sharing data outside the blockchain and replacing it with a small hash. The blockchain manages the application state and users. In addition, it automates processes through smart contracts. While the IPFS stores data for blockchain in immutable and integral way. Wherefore, the proposed ride-sharing system integrates IPFS with blockchain for RSSs to retain the provided assurance by the blockchain and provide efficient service to end users. Experimental results proved the applicability and efficiency of RSS based on blockchain and IPFS which provides efficient storage of ride-sharing data, immutable history, and generally better efficiency in a decentralized manner.
The emerging demand for electric vehicles in urban cities leads to the need to install a huge number of charging stations. With this requirement, electric vehicle coordination and scheduling at charging stations in real-time becomes highly tedious. Thus, there is a need for an efficient scheduling mechanism for electric vehicle charging at charging stations. This paper proposes a novel blockchain and Internet of Things-based consensus mechanism called COME for secure and trustable electric vehicle scheduling at charging stations. The proposed mechanism is intending to resolve conflicts at charging stations. The integrated InterPlanetary File System protocol facilitates a cost-efficient mechanism with minimized bandwidth for electric vehicle scheduling. The proposed mechanism ensures that there is no loss for either the electric vehicle or the charging station. We formulate different scenarios for electric vehicle charging and apply different scheduling algorithms, including first-come first-served, longest remaining time first, and coalition game theory. The performance of the proposed COME consensus mechanism is estimated by comparing it with the practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocol and traditional systems based on the charging demand, wait time, conflict resolution, scalability, and InterPlanetary File System bandwidth parameters. The performance results show that the proposed COME consensus mechanism ensures that electric vehicles can have their vehicle charged without any conflict and that the charging station can be satisfied in terms of profit. Moreover, the proposed COME consensus mechanism outperforms the both practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus protocol and the traditional system in terms of scalability and conflict resolution along with additional parameters such as wait time, charging demand, and bandwidth analysis.
Francesco Lo Franco, Vincenzo Cirimele, Mattia Ricco, Vítor Monteiro · 6 authors
Electric car-sharing (ECS) is an increasingly popular service in many European cities. The management of an ECS fleet is more complex than its thermal engine counterpart due to the longer ”refueling“ time and the limited autonomy of the vehicles. To ensure adequate autonomy, the ECS provider needs high-capacity charging hubs located in urban areas where available peak power is often limited by the system power rating. Lastly, electric vehicle (EV) charging is typically entrusted to operators who retrieve discharged EVs in the city and connect them to the charging hub. The timing of the whole charging process may strongly differ among the vehicles due to their different states of charge on arrival at the hub. This makes it difficult to plan the charging events and leads to non-optimal exploitation of charging points. This paper provides a smart charging (SC) method that aims to support the ECS operators’ activity by optimizing the charging points’ utilization. The proposed SC promotes charging duration management by differently allocating powers among vehicles as a function of their state of charge and the desired end-of-charge time. The proposed method has been evaluated by considering a real case study. The results showed the ability to decrease charging points downtime by 71.5% on average with better exploitation of the available contracted power and an increase of 18.8% in the average number of EVs processed per day.
A. A. Talha Talukder, Md. Anisul Islam Mahmud, Arbiya Sultana, Tahmid Hasan Pranto · 6 authors
Food delivery systems are gaining popularity recently due to the expansion of internet connectivity and for the increasing availability of devices. The growing popularity of such systems has raised concerns regarding (i) Information security, (ii) Business to business (B2B) deep discounting race, and (iii) Strict policy enforcement. Sensitive personal data and financial information of the users must be safeguarded. Additionally, in pursuit of gaining profit, the restaurants tend to offer deep discounts resulting in a higher volume of orders than usual. Therefore, the restaurants and the delivery persons fail to maintain the delivery time and often impair the food quality. In this paper, we have proposed a blockchain and smart contract-based food delivery system to address these issues. The main goal is to remove commission schemes and decrease service delays caused by a high volume of orders. The protocols have been deployed and tested on the Ethereum test network. The simulation manifests a successful implementation of our desired system; with the payment being controlled by our system. The actors (restaurant, delivery-person or consumer) are bound to be compliant with the policies or penalized otherwise.
Mohamed Torky, M. A. El-Dosuky, Essam Goda, Václav Snåšel · 5 authors
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a powerful technology for introducing untraditional solutions to many challenges in non-military fields and industrial applications in the next few years. However, the limitations of a drone’s battery and the available optimal charging techniques represent a significant challenge in using UAVs on a large scale. This problem means UAVs are unable to fly for a long time; hence, drones’ services fail dramatically. Due to this challenge, optimizing the scheduling of drone charging may be an unusual solution to drones’ battery problems. Moreover, authenticating drones and verifying their charging transactions with charging stations is an essential associated problem. This paper proposes a scheduling and secure drone charging system in response to these challenges. The proposed system was simulated on a generated dataset consisting of 300 drones and 50 charging station points to evaluate its performance. The optimization of the proposed scheduling methodology was based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and game theory-based auction model. In addition, authenticating and verifying drone charging transactions were executed using a proposed blockchain protocol. The optimization and scheduling results showed the PSO algorithm’s efficiency in optimizing drone routes and preventing drone collisions during charging flights with low error rates with an MAE = 0.0017 and an MSE = 0.0159. Moreover, the investigation to authenticate and verify the drone charging transactions showed the efficiency of the proposed blockchain protocol while simulating the proposed system on the Ethereum platform. The obtained results clarified the efficiency of the proposed blockchain protocol in executing drone charging transactions within a short time and low latency within an average of 0.34 s based on blockchain performance metrics. Moreover, the proposed scheduling methodology achieved a 96.8% success rate of drone charging cases, while only 3.2% of drones failed to charge after three scheduling rounds.
Syed Muhammad Ahsan, Hassan Abbas Khan, and Naveed-ul-Hassan
Smart buildings are being built as a synergetic deployment of electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy sources. Smart charging of EVs and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies are seen as way forward in this context in terms of achieving economic, technological, and environmental advantages. This paper proposes a framework for multi-objective techno-economic optimization for profit maximization of multiple inter-connected buildings (with bilateral contracts) and scheduling of EVs. The optimization problem is modeled as mixed integer linear programming problem, which is solved using CPLEX solver in ILOG optimization studio. The primary building owns the photovoltaic system coupled with storage and charging infrastructure for the fleet of EVs. The optimized charging of EVs at affordable rates using local resources at primary building assists the grid in managing the EVs’ load during peak hours. Results indicate that the primary building gains up to 62% daily profit after factoring in solar, storage, and charging station deployment costs. Additionally, secondary buildings (without solar, storage and charging facilities) earn up to 20% cost savings depending upon the nature of bilateral contracts with primary building. The results further suggest that fleet of EVs gains 35%–65% savings in charging cost based on lower charging rates and V2X operations with primary and secondary buildings.
Rongxin Xu, Qiujun Lan, Shiva Raj Pokhrel, Gang Li
The Internet of Things (IoT) and Distributed ledger technology (DLT) have significantly changed our daily lives. Due to their distributed operational environment and naturally decentralized applications, the convergence of these two technologies indicates a more lavish arrangement for the future. This article develops a comprehensive survey to investigate and illustrate state-of-the-art DLT for various IoT use cases, from smart homes to autonomous vehicles and smart cities. We develop a novel framework for conducting a systematic and comprehensive review of DLT over IoT by extending the knowledge graph approach. With relevant insights from this review, we extract innovative and pragmatic techniques to DLT design that enable high-performance, sustainable, and highly scalable IoT systems. Our findings support designing an end-to-end IoT-native DLT architecture for the future that fully coordinates network-assisted functionalities.
The worldwide targets for carbon-neutral societies increased the penetration of distributed generation and storage. Smart cities now play a key role in achieving these targets by considering the alliances of their demand and supply assets as local citizen energy communities. These communities need to have enough weight to trade electricity in wholesale markets. Trading of electricity can be done in spot markets or by bilateral contracts involving customers and suppliers. This paper is devoted to bilateral contracting, which is modeled as a negotiation process involving an iterative exchange of offers and counter-offers. This article focuses on local citizen energy communities. Specifically, it presents team and single-agent negotiation models, where each member has its sets of strategies and tactics and also its decision model. Community agents are equipped with intra-team strategies and decision protocols. To evaluate the benefits of CECs, models of both coalition formation and management have been adapted. This paper also describes a case study on forward bilateral contracts, involving a retailer agent and three different types of citizen energy communities. The results demonstrate the benefits of CECs during the negotiation of private bilateral contracts of electricity. Furthermore, they also demonstrate that in the case of using a representative strategy, the selection of the mediator may be critical for achieving a good deal.
A loyalty program is a type of incentive to reward customers’ perceived value and enhance their purchasing behavior. The key to the success of a loyalty program is to allow customers to more actively participate in the program. One possible solution is to allow customers to sell out idle loyalty points and buy in the points that they need. On the basis of a call auction, this study designs a peer-to-peer exchange mechanism for customers to realize the above trade. In addition, a blockchain-based system is developed to support the issuance, redemption, and exchange of loyalty points. In this study, Hyperledger Fabric is adopted as the underlying blockchain technology because it has some features that are beneficial to a cross-organizational coalition loyalty program. This study also proposes a feasible multi-host deployment scheme for the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network that is suitable for our application scenario. Finally, some implementation results are given to demonstrate the system process from the perspective of the application layer. The mechanism proposed in this study is helpful to improve the likelihood of successfully exchanging points, thus accelerating the circulation and use of loyalty points.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have gained prominence in smart transportation due to their unparalleled benefits of reduced carbon footprints, improved performance, and intelligent energy trading mechanisms. These potential benefits have increased EV adoption at massive scales, but energy management in EVs is a critical study problem. The problem is further intensified due to the scarcity of charging stations (CSs) in near EV proximity. Moreover, as energy transactions occur over open channels, it presents critical security, privacy, and trust issues among decentralized channels. To address the open limitations of trusted energy management and optimize the pricing control among EV entities (i.e., prosumers and consumers), the paper proposes a scheme that integrates blockchain and a truthful double auction strategy for trustful EV trading. To address the transaction scalability, we integrate an Interplanetary File System (IPFS) with a double auction mechanism handled through the Remix Smart Contract environment. The double auction leverages an optimal payoff condition between peer EVs. To address the communication latency, we present the scheme at the backdrop of Fifth Generation (5G) networks that minimizes the optimal payoff response time. The scheme is simulated against parameters such as convergence, profit for consumers, computation time, and blockchain analysis regarding node commit latency, collusion attacks, and EV energy consumption. The results indicate the scheme’s viability against traditional (non-blockchain) approaches with high reliability, scalability, and improved cost-efficiency.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is converting today’s physical world into a complex and sophisticated network of connected devices on an enormous scale. The existing malicious node detection mechanism in traditional approaches lacks in transparency, availability, or traceability of the detection phase. To overcome these concerns, we provide a decentralized technique using blockchain technology. Despite the fact that blockchain technology is applicable to create that type of models, existing harmony set of instructions are susceptible to do violence to such as DoS and Sybil, making blockchain systems unfeasible. Here, a new Proof-of-Improved-Participation (PoIP) harmony instruction was suggested that benefits the participation rules to select honest peers for mining while limiting malicious peers. Under an evaluation the PoIP outperforms the Proof-of-Work (PoW) instructions are demonstrated, Proof of Stake (PoS) instructions in terms of energy consumption, accuracy, and bandwidth. To compare the three consensus protocols with respect to efficiency, we build a lightweight mining model and find that PoIP consensus has greater efficiency than PoW and PoS. PoIP has 25% lower attack risk than existing consensus. As a consequence, our suggested methodology can provide the needed security with minimal attack risk and high accuracy, according to the analysis results. As a result, suggested consensus is more efficient than existing methods in terms of block generation time. Hence we suggest that suggested consensus is very suitable for IoT-based applications especially in healthcare.
The Internet of Things (IoT) can be conveniently deployed while empowering various applications, where the IoT nodes can form clusters to finish certain missions collectively. In this paper, we propose to employ unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to assist the clustered IoT data collection with blockchain-based security provisioning. In particular, the UAVs generate candidate blocks based on the collected data, which are then audited through a lightweight proof-of-stake consensus mechanism within the UAV-based blockchain network. To motivate efficient blockchain while reducing the operational cost, a stake pool is constructed at the active UAV while encouraging stake investment from other UAVs with profit sharing. The problem is formulated to maximize the overall profit through the blockchain system in unit time by jointly investigating the IoT transmission, incentives through investment and profit sharing, and UAV deployment strategies. Then, the problem is solved in a distributed manner while being decoupled into two layers. The inner layer incorporates IoT transmission and incentive design, which are tackled with large-system approximation and one-leader-multi-follower Stackelberg game analysis, respectively. The outer layer for UAV deployment is undertaken with a multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient approach. Results show the convergence of the proposed learning process and the UAV deployment, and also demonstrated is the performance superiority of our proposal as compared with the baselines.
With the advent of modern technologies, including the IoT and blockchain, smart-parking (SP) systems are becoming smarter and smarter. Similar to other automated systems, and particularly those that require automation or minimal interaction with humans, the SP system is heuristic in delivering performances, such as throughput in terms of latency, efficiency, privacy, and security, and it is considered a long-term cost-effective solution. This study looks ahead to future trends and developments in SP systems and presents an inclusive, long-term, effective, and well-performing smart autonomous vehicle parking (SAVP) system that explores and employs the emerging fog-computing and blockchain technologies as robust solutions to strengthen the existing collaborative IoT-cloud platform to build and manage SP systems for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In other words, the proposed SAVP system offers a smart-parking solution, both indoors and outdoors, and mainly for AVs looking for vacant parking, wherein the fog nodes act as a middleware layer that provides various parking operations closer to IoT-enabled edge devices. To address the challenges of privacy and security, a lightweight integrated blockchain and cryptography (LIBC) module is deployed, which is functional at each fog node, to authorize and grant access to the AVs in every phase of parking (e.g., from the parking entrance to the parking slot to the parking exit). A proof-of-concept implementation was conducted, wherein the overall computed results, such as the average response time, efficiency, privacy, and security, were examined as highly efficient to enable a proven SAVP system. This study also examined an innovative pace, with careful considerations to combatting the existing SP-system challenges and, therefore, to building and managing future scalable SP systems.
Changes in the online car-hailing industry have brought new challenges to government governance. Effectively enhancing governance efficiency has become the focus of academic research. Based on the technical governance perspective, this paper introduces the consortium blockchain to construct an evolutionary game model between the online car-hailing platform and the government under blockchain technology. By solving the replicated dynamic equations and the Jacobian matrix, the influences of the change in initial conditions and decision parameters on the evolutionary stability results are revealed, and numerical experiments are carried out by using the Python programming language. This paper claims that the system presents three evolutionary stable results and a periodic stochastic state when the key parameters are located in different thresholds. The additional cost of the platform's negative regulation and the government's punishment intensity have a positive effect on the evolution of the system to the ideal state (active regulation, active governance). Platform technology R&D cost and government innovation input have a negative effect on the evolution of the system to the ideal state. Therefore, using blockchain to increase the additional cost of the platform's negative regulation, appropriately increasing the government's punishment intensity, reasonably controlling the government's innovation input to the platform, and reducing the technology R&D cost of the platform will help the system evolve into an ideal state. This paper provides useful references to implement effective governance and the innovative and healthy development of the online car-hailing industry.
Tushar S Menon, Aviral Srivastava, x Aditya, K R Radhika
Ridesharing is an effective method to resolve traffic congestion and also reduce pollution due to excess vehicles on-road. However, the centralized nature of the current ridesharing systems is not ideal for the user. The lack of transparency in the system as well as risk of data security is a big demerit for such a system. To keep the third-party involvement minimal, a trustless, decentralized peer-to-peer ridesharing DApp is being proposed using a private Ethereum blockchain. Credibility of ride sharing systems can be improved by implementing blockchain technology. Blockchains are decentralized databases where every single piece of information is stored on systems everywhere which can be retrieved and traced freely by anyone on the network. The system will no longer be trust-based but simply based on concrete proof that exists which is built into the ledger. In a blockchain-based system, a rider will anonymously post a ride request. A driver can accept the request and provide their id details and quote. The rider can choose if the transaction is fair and accept the quote and begin his ride. Various other concepts such as time-locked deposit and proof-of-elapsed distance have been introduced to ensure further security for driver and rider. The primary goal of such a system is to develop a reliable and transparent ride sharing system where users do not have to worry about their privacy.
Industrial applications often require federated cloud services from multiple providers to improve reliability and flexibility. Traditional selection methods through auctions usually involve a centralized auctioneer to coordinate the auction procedure. Blockchain and smart contracts provide a decentralized mechanism to automate the cloud auction process; however, existing solutions fail in the selection of the most suitable providers and the violation detection of the signed auction agreements, which are also known as service-level agreements (SLAs). To tackle these problems, we propose an integrated auction model using Bayesian game theory and blockchain techniques. The proposed model is enhanced with two Bayesian Nash Equilibriums (BNEs); the first BNE enables the selection of cost-effective providers to construct the federated cloud services, while the second BNE ensures consistent and trustworthy monitoring of federated SLAs. Moreover, a timed message submission (TMS) algorithm is proposed to protect the auction privacy during the message submission phase. This paper validates the equilibrium results of two BNEs and implements the proposed model on the Ethereum blockchain. The analytical and experimental results demonstrate the feasibility, trustworthiness, and cost-effectiveness of our model.