Online data trading has grown alongside the ever-increasing use of digital services. Industries are accruing the benefits of this data access to perform mission-critical tasks by analyzing available data for greater insight. Unsurprisingly, data trading has not focused on improved data seller protection with preferences and controls. The objective of this paper is to explore the enforcement of seller preferences within smart contracts using blockchain technology. Data trading is only possible when a buyer satisfies the conditions predefined by the seller. Geographic location, type or size of buyer's company are some examples of seller preferences. A preferences algorithm provides an automated contract between seller and buyer without the involvement of any broker or third party. Hybrid simulation (HS) methods are used to test and evaluate the viability of our novel data control approach.
Om Naik, Nimai Patel, Sabir Ali Baba, Harshal Dalvi
Ride-hailing applications like Uber and Ola have gained immense popularity in India and across the globe as convenient alternatives to traditional modes of travel such as private vehicles which can be unaffordable many times due to rising fuel prices and maintenance cost etc., buses and trains which are crowded; and taxis and auto rickshaws which can deny you service at the driver's whim. The advancement in internet technology and affordable smartphones have made it convenient to book a ride through our smartphones in just a few clicks. However, the service has also brought with it a slew of other challenges like unpredictable surge-pricing and high intermediary fees. The current research into decentralized systems for vehicles is accelerating rapidly. Even then, implementing a decentralized ride-hailing platform proves to be a difficult challenge due to the inherently centralized nature of traditional ride-hailing systems. Blockchain and other similar decentralized technologies are an attractive choice for this architecture due to their immutability, transparency and fault tolerance. If implemented successfully, decentralization using blockchain technology would remove roadblocks along the way such as intermediary fees and surge charges by third parties as it would offer more transparency. This paper proposes a framework for developing a decentralized ride-hailing architecture implemented on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and Ethereum blockchain platform.
Lucas Francisco, Rodrigo Bonacin, Ferrucio de Franco Rosa
A systematic literature review is presented to understand and analyze the state of the art in Blockchain-based solutions applied to the carbon trading context. The main contributions of the work are twofold: i) updated literature review, emphasizing the contributions of each selected work; ii) classification of the papers based on their main contributions and application domains as well as summarizing and discussing challenges and open research issues. Our results reveal the need for research focusing on understanding the use of advanced technology in complex scenarios of trade and management of carbon credits. This work is intended for researchers who aim to develop methods and techniques that make use of Blockchain technology in the realm of carbon trading.
In recent years, blockchain technology in synergy with smart contracts has opened new horizons within almost any field from entertainment to healthcare. However, in order to enable innovative usage scenarios, significant efforts are needed to adapt the existing systems and solutions, so the full potential of blockchain-based tools can be leveraged. In this paper, we propose a model-driven framework which provides automated persistence of domain-specific data within Ethereum blockchain platform, starting from Ecore model instances. Moreover, the corresponding Solidity smart contracts are generated relying on model-to-model and model-to-text transformations using Acceleo. The proposed approach is evaluated on persons-movies dataset inside the Ganache environment. According to the obtained results, our solution successfully automatized the persistence of the evaluated dataset.
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.
Blockchain is the driving technology behind the metaverse, which is a new and promising technology. Integration of metaverse with many sectors and implementations is possible. This integration has the potential to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the implementation due to the provided aspects of blockchain technology such as the ease of trusted data transactions, payment, and data privacy. The aim of this study is to present a framework where blockchain and metaverse co-operate for micromobility applications using one of the fuzzy decision making models. In this study, the aim is to propose three metaverse integration alternatives considering urban mobility and to prioritize these alternatives according to their advantages by using a fuzzy Dombi Bonferroni (DOBI) based multi-critera decision-making (MCDM) model. The alternatives are using blockchain in the metaverse for electric toll collection, using blockchain in the metaverse for public transportation fare collection, and using blockchain for micromobility and car sharing implementation. These alternatives are prioritized based on 9 different criteria, which are categorized under 4 main aspects, namely transportation, user, technology, and regulation.
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.
Pedro Bustamante, Marcela Gomez, Martin B. H. Weiss, Ilia Murtazashvili · 5 authors
The wireless crunch resulted in excess demand for the use of spectrum, and spectrum sharing is increasingly being proposed as a solution. To date, little research has considered how block-chain technologies can enable greater spectrum sharing. To address this gap, we develop a stylized model to show how blockchains can be leveraged to facilitate the exchange of access rights on a well-known band. To demonstrate proof of concept, we analyze available system design options, implement a small-scale test scenario, estimate the implementation and usage costs, and demonstrate how these technologies impact spectrum sharing prospects. Our exercise shows that blockchains can alleviate some of the perceived obstacles to greater sharing of spectrum.
Yunshu Liu, Shulin Ke, Zhixuan Fang, Man Hon Cheung · 6 authors
In current blockchain systems, the transaction fee is often not enough to cover the storage cost, jeopardizing blockchain sustainability in the long run. Such a storage sustainability issue is partially due to miners’ heterogeneous storage costs and users’ low-intensity fee competition. Motivated by these two observations, we propose a Fee and Transaction Expiration Time (FTET) mechanism to alleviate this issue. Specifically, we model the blockchain operation as a three-stage game. In Stage I, the system designer proposes the storage sustainability mechanism. In Stage II, each user decides whether to propose transactions and the corresponding transaction fees. In Stage III, each miner decides which transactions to include in the block. Although the analysis of the heterogeneous miner interaction is technically challenging, we fully solve it in closed-form motivated by how miners select transactions in practice. The equilibrium analysis reveals that high-storage-cost miners admit transactions with fees above a time-increasing threshold. Under the optimal FTET mechanism, the blockchain system can achieve the storage sustainability without any social welfare loss, comparing with the maximum achievable social welfare without the storage sustainability constraint. Moreover, the optimal FTET mechanism achieves a higher social welfare than the fee mechanism in current practice by selectively rejecting some transactions suffering high delays. Finally, we implement a blockchain prototype to compare the performance of the optimal FTET mechanism with the mining round time adjustment (MRTA) mechanism. The optimal FTET mechanism achieves higher social welfare (94.5% on average) and better storage sustainability. We find that more pending transactions may lead to lower transaction fees.
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.
Khaled Al‐Dabbas, Bernd Kaltenhäuser, H. Kornmayer, Klaus Bogenberger
Information technology is seen as the key to provide solutions for current and future challenges in the transportation and mobility ecosystem. Of those, the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is considered as an emerging paradigm to establish a token economy ecosystem without trusted third parties. Hereby, the mobility and transportation infrastructure resources and their usage are regarded as assets, which are transformed into tradabe tokens, managed via distributed ledgers. The access to the infrastructure is restricted and guaranteed to the token owners. The design and implementation of distributed ledgers depends on the requirements of the respective use cases, leading to a DLT-based IT infrastructure consisting of many different distributed ledger implementations. We derive a generic architecture for the future mobility token economy by adapting and applying a DLT design decision process to the mobility ecosystem, including six potential use cases.
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.
To enable secure and efficient dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) with guaranteed revenue and quality of service (QoS) in future wireless communications, we present a consortium blockchain based DSS framework, where the regulators supervise the whole process of DSS, and thus the revenue of each participant can be guaranteed. Each mobile network operator (MNO) on the chain can adaptively act as a spectrum provider or spectrum requestor based on their demand, and the spectrum resource allocation is recorded on the chain with a smart contract. The optimal spectrum pricing and buying strategies are solved based on a multi-leader multi-follower (MLMF) Stackelberg game model, and the equilibrium is solved with the proposed algorithm. We then build a prototype with Hyperledger Fabric consortium blockchain, and the average latency is evaluated. Simulations and prototype evaluations validate the feasibility of blockchain based DSS and show that the average latency increase with the participants, which provides useful insights for real applications.
The lack of centralized management causes problems in the system of distributed parking spaces, such as unsecured revenues, poor service quality and malicious valuation. Therefore, this paper proposes a parking sharing scheme based on non-fungible tokens. Firstly, we propose the calculation method of parking space renter reputation value, parking space provider reputation value and the reputation incentive algorithm of parking space sharing, which can ensure the service quality of distributed parking space share and prevent malicious evaluation and implement bidirectional constraints on parking space provider and renter. Secondly, we propose a parking space sharing model with non-fungible tokens as sharing credentials to map parking space assets to on-chain assets via non-fungible tokens and introduce timers based on hash time locks. We propose an intelligent parking rental contract based on improved hash lock to guarantee the revenue of parking space providers in a distributed environment. Finally, experiments based on Ethereum show that the scheme can realize shared parking space at a lower cost; the proposed incentive algorithm can effectively prevent parking space providers and renters from misbehaving.
Ahmed Idries, John Krogstie, Jayaprakash Rajasekharan
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have become a game changer in electrical services platformization and digitalization. Therefore, the need for DLTs in electrical energy services must be understood. We present a case study of a European Union (EU) project in the Norwegian city of Trondheim, where a DLT-driven energy marketplace was piloted. We contribute to the literature and field by presenting the factors, challenges, and issues affecting DLT implementation in electrical energy services, which can be helpful for further work in electrical energy services and platform ecosystems. For policy makers and practitioners, this paper presents DLT providers' reflections about their experience in an electrical energy services project in the smart city context. These insights could be useful to ease future adoption of DLTs and to provide a ground for future empirical investigations.
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.