Alexander Braun, Niklas Haeusle, Stephan Karpischek
The rise of blockchain technology and other technological accelerators enables a fully automated decentralized autonomous risk transfer. In this chapter, we explain the functionality and operating principles of this new method of risk transfer. We provide an overview of the corresponding institutional arrangement and its challenges. We identify two main challenges, namely ensuring the quality of the product and gaining a critical network size. A feasible solution for these problems is the usage of system-specific tokens, which are used as a form of digital collateralization. In a short case study, we scrutinize how these theoretical concepts can be translated into practice and show the potential of the idea. While flight delay risk is already handled through decentralized autonomous risk transfer, the biggest benefits can be realized by decentralizing crop and hurricane insurance, including a seamless transfer of the risk to capital markets.
The supply chain of shipping logistics services is an important branch of logistics service supply chain. To ensure the effective operation of the supply chain and to solve problems such as asymmetric information, difficult data quality assurance, and uncontrollable transportation in shipping logistics services, blockchain technology are proposed to reduce information interaction problems. In view of the factors of information sharing and customers’ sensitivity to information quality, a tripartite evolutionary game model with the shipping company, the port and the freight forwarder as the research objects was established, and the cooperative decision making of node companies was discussed before and after the application of blockchain technology. Theoretical derivation and data analysis show that ports and freight forwarder in the supply chain of shipping logistics services dominated by shipping companies are less affected by information sharing and customers’ sensitivity to information quality. With the increase in the application of blockchain technology, when customers have lower expectations for information quality, shipping companies are more willing to cooperate actively. The willingness to cooperate actively between ports and shipping companies is increasing faster than when blockchain technology is not used. Therefore, shipping companies should encourage the active use of blockchain technology to reduce the degree of information sharing between ports and freight forwarder and the influences of customer expectations on shipping companies.
In vehicular fog computing (VFC), the resource transactions in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) have become a novel resource management scheme that can improve system resource utilization and the quality of vehicle services. In this paper, in order to improve the security and fairness of resource transactions, we design a blockchain-based resource management scheme for VFC. First, we propose the concept of resource coin (RC) and develop a blockchain-based secure computing reource trading mechanism in terms of RC. As a node of the blockchain network, the roadside unit (RSU) participates in verifying the legitimacy of transactions and the creation of new blocks. Next, we propose a resource management scheme based on contract theory, encouraging parked vehicles to contribute computing resource so that RSU could complete proof of work (PoW) quickly, improve the success probability of block creation and get RC rewards. We use the gradient descent method to solve the computing resource utilization that can maximize the RC revenue of RSUs and vehicles during the block creation. Finally, the performance of this model is validated in simulation result and analysis.
Blockchain was once hailed as an important direction of the fourth industrial revolution with its decentralization concept. The logistics industry is the largest application scenario of blockchain after finance. This paper designed the emergency logistics support system which is based on blockschain collaboration. And this system is constructed from material supply and demand management, material scheduling management, etc. In this system, smart contracts are automatically executed throughout the process and highly reliable, providing a shared but non-tamperable distributed logistics database to ensure the real-time query logistics information. Under the joint maintenance of all parties, every logistics transfer is recorded on the blockchain. This will not only improve the efficiency of emergency logistics management in emergencies, but also help enhance transparency. At the same time, the timeliness and adaptability of material allocation have been fully guaranteed.
Muhammad Firdaus, Sandi Rahmadika, Kyung-Hyune Rhee
The emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) aims to facilitate the next generation of intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications by combining smart vehicles and the internet to improve traffic safety and efficiency. On the other hand, mobile edge computing (MEC) technology provides enormous storage resources with powerful computing on the edge networks. Hence, the idea of IoV edge computing (IoVEC) networks has grown to be an assuring paradigm with various opportunities to advance massive data storage, data sharing, and computing processing close to vehicles. However, the participant's vehicle may be unwilling to share their data since the data-sharing system still relies on a centralized server approach with the potential risk of data leakage and privacy security. In addition, vehicles have difficulty evaluating the credibility of the messages they received because of untrusted environments. To address these challenges, we propose consortium blockchain and smart contracts to accomplish a decentralized trusted data sharing management system in IoVEC. This system allows vehicles to validate the credibility of messages from their neighboring by generating a reputation rating. Moreover, the incentive mechanism is utilized to trigger the vehicles to store and share their data honestly; thus, they will obtain certain rewards from the system. Simulation results substantially display an efficient network performance along with forming an appropriate incentive model to reach a decentralized trusted data sharing management of IoVEC networks.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) aims to perceive, compute, and process environmental data in a collaborative manner. Previous works focus on data sharing between vehicles, but a large amount of data will lead to redundant transmission and network congestion. In addition, security and privacy issues prevent these nodes from participating in the sharing process. Knowledge is extracted from data through machine learning (ML) and shared in the form of small-scale well-trained model parameters, which improves collaborative learning more effectively and relieves network pressure. While traditional ML algorithms are not suitable for distributed IoV with local characteristics. Based on this, this paper first divides the vehicles into multiple regions and proposes a Regional Federated Learning (RFL) framework, in which all regions maintain their own learning models, i.e. knowledge. We design a reputation mechanism to measure the reliability of vehicles participating in RFL. To address the security challenges brought by the untrusted centralized trading market, we propose a blockchain-enhanced knowledge trading framework, in which an authorized market agency coordinates the trading quickly. We model the optimal pricing mechanism as a non-cooperative game, taking into account the competition among all knowledge providers. Numerical simulation shows that the proposed reputation mechanism improves the accuracy of knowledge up to 18%, and the optimal knowledge pricing mechanism effectively increases the utility of market.
Current developments in information technology and increased inclination towards smart cities have led to the initiation of a plethora of features by technology-oriented companies (i.e., car manufacturers) to improve users’ privacy and comfort. The invention of smart vehicle technology paved the way for the excessive use of machine-to-machine technologies. Moreover, third-party sharing of financial services are also introduced that support machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. These monetary systems’ prime focus is on improving reliability and security; however, they overlook aspects like behaviors and users’ need. For instance, people often hand over their bank cards or share their credentials with their colleagues to withdraw money on their behalf. Such behaviors may originate issues about privacy and security that can have severe losses for the card owner. This paper presents a novel blockchain-based strategy for payment of fueling of smart cars without any human interaction while maintaining transparency, privacy, and trust. The proposed system is capable of data sharing among the users of the system while securing sensitive information. Moreover, we also provide a blockchain-based secure privacy-preserving strategy for payment of fueling among the fuel seller and buyer without human intervention. Furthermore, we have also analytically evaluated several experiments to determine the proposed blockchain platform’s usability and efficiency. Lastly, we harness Hyperledger Caliper to assess the proposed system’s performance in terms of transaction latency, transactions per second, and resource consumption.
Our paper focuses on the economic perspective of the Blockchain technology in economics and business in general and in agricultural business in particular.The field of the study is the European agri-food supply chain and related government politics (CAP, F2F, Green Deal) focused on the Czech Republic.Analysis of the agribusiness is conducted on an evaluating the existing data from the FADN CZ database and Eurostat database.Blockchain technology is evaluated through fundamental analysis of the context.Findings from this investigation were used in enhanced SWOT-analysis in the context of technological foresight.This method examines both the existing situation, external factors and forces, as well as possible changes in the future.Our results confirmed that Blockchain technology has big opportunities in agricultural business and agri-food supply chain in the digital economy.The group of issues that could be solved with Blockchain includes food traceability, support of new business models and direct sales models, rebalance the power in the food chain, etc.The key problem of the Czech agricultural business is inefficiency and low innovative activities.However, existing state support and positive trends show perspectives in this area.Although the Blockchain could bring benefits, there is a research gap related to financing the Blockchain implementation and cooperation between businesses and the authorities.
We build a multi-period pricing model between a blockchain-technology-supported platform and a traditional platform, where the blockchain-technology-supported platform provides a higher value for customers. Customers are influenced by network effect, that is, they value a platform more if the platform has more users. As either platform can adopt static pricing or dynamic pricing, four scenarios may occur. By deriving the equilibrium of each scenario, we reveal the 'Matthew effect' caused by network effect, that platform advantage (from adopting blockchain technology) or disadvantage (from not adopting blockchain technology) accumulates as time goes by. Thus, platforms are advised to adopt the blockchain technology antecedent to the competitors. Network effect, which amplifies the benefit of initial users, may intensify price competition and harm both platforms. By comparing the four scenarios, we derive the equilibrium pricing strategies: when network effect is weak, one platform adopts static pricing and the other adopts dynamic pricing; when network effect is medium, the blockchain-technology-supported platform adopts static pricing and the traditional platform adopts dynamic pricing; and when network effect is strong, both platforms adopt dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing is more desirable for the traditional platform relative to the blockchain-technology-supported platform.
Pietro Ferraro, Lianna Zhao, Christopher King, Robert Shorten
This paper describes the use of Distributed Ledger Technologies as a mean to enforce social contracts and to orchestrate the behaviour of agents in a smart city environment. Specifically, we present a scheme to price personalised risk in sharing economy applications. We provide proofs for the convergence of the proposed stochastic system and we validate our approach through the use of extensive Monte Carlo simulations.
Jae Song, Eung Seon Kang, Hyeon Woo Shin, Ju Wook Jang
We implement a peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading system between prosumers and consumers using a smart contract on Ethereum blockchain. The smart contract resides on a blockchain shared by participants and hence guarantees exact execution of trade and keeps immutable transaction records. It removes high cost and overheads needed against hacking or tampering in traditional server-based P2P energy trade systems. The salient features of our implementation include: 1. Dynamic pricing for automatic balancing of total supply and total demand within a microgrid, 2. prevention of double sale, 3. automatic and autonomous operation, 4. experiment on a testbed (Node.js and web3.js API to access Ethereum Virtual Machine on Raspberry Pis with MATLAB interface), and 5. simulation via personas (virtual consumers and prosumers generated from benchmark). Detailed description of our implementation is provided along with state diagrams and core procedures.
With the fast development of the electric vehicle (EV) technology, EVs are expected to be the mainstream in future. The large number of EVs facilitate development of the emerging vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which realizes two-way electricity flows between EVs and the power grid. How to achieve fairness and privacy for EVs during electricity/service exchanges remains a challenging problem for V2G. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving fair exchange schemeV2GExfor V2G based on the blockchain. V2GEx is composed of an extended blockchain that supports zero-knowledge funds, a fair exchange smart contract based on the hashchain micropayment mechanism, and a privacy-preserving protocol for V2G. We further propose a simpler and more efficient scheme called Uni-V2GEx, which preserves privacy for only one party. We also provide a rigorous security proof under the universal composability (UC) model to prove V2GEx's security. To evaluate its efficiency, we implement V2GEx and conduct comprehensive experiments to test its performance in terms of computation cost and processing delay. The experiment results show that V2GEx is highly efficient in that verification of V2GEx transactions costs only 20 ms and the average transaction processing latency is around 6 seconds in a 200-node blockchain network.
Cong T. Nguyen, Dinh Thai Hoang, Diep N. Nguyen, Yong Xiao · 7 authors
In this article, we propose FedChain, a novel framework for federated-blockchain systems, to enable effective transferring of tokens between different blockchain networks. Particularly, we first introduce a federated-blockchain system together with a cross-chain transfer protocol to facilitate the secure and decentralized transfer of tokens between chains. We then develop a novel PoS-based consensus mechanism for FedChain, which can satisfy strict security requirements, prevent various blockchain-specific attacks, and achieve a more desirable performance compared to those of other existing consensus mechanisms. Moreover, a Stackelberg game model is developed to examine and address the problem of centralization in the FedChain system. Furthermore, the game model can enhance the security and performance of FedChain. By analyzing interactions between the stakeholders and chain operators, we can prove the uniqueness of the Stackelberg equilibrium and find the exact formula for this equilibrium. These results are especially important for the stakeholders to determine their best investment strategies and for the chain operators to design the optimal policy to maximize their benefits and security protection for FedChain. Simulations results then clearly show that the FedChain framework can help stakeholders to maximize their profits and the chain operators to design appropriate parameters to enhance FedChain's security and performance.
Passing through a rural area with a limited network infrastructure may disrupt fog computing support for vehicles. As a result, some applications on vehicles may turn off and bother the performance of the vehicular systems. In order to escape from this kind of situation, vehicular fog computing is discussed in recent times as an alternative of fog computing support while passing through a blank spot of network infrastructure. However, it is not feasible to establish a trusted vehicular fog computing service among vehicles without mutual trust. To deal with this situation, this paper proposes a method called Bidding-Price-based Transaction (BPT) for vehicular fog computing service in rural areas. This method is composed of bidding-price-based mutual trust establishment between client vehicle and server vehicle and also payoff assignment based on transaction evaluation. By applying this method, trusted fog computing service transactions between two vehicles can be achieved without the direct assistance of any trusted third party as a validating entity. The simulation results and feasibility analysis then validate the performance of the BPT scheme in rural areas. Based on feasibility analysis, we claim that the BPT scheme can be realized by adjusting vehicle speed and transmission range with respect to the size of offloaded data.
Dominic Pirker, Thomas Fischer, H. Witschnig, Christian Steger
Transportation of people and goods is important and crucial in the context of smart cities. The trend in regard of people's mobility is moving from privately owned vehicles towards shared mobility. This trend is even stronger in urban areas, where space for parking is limited, and the mobility is supported by the public transport system, which lowers the need for private vehicles. Several challenges and barriers of currently available solutions retard a massive growth of this mobility option, such as the trust problem, data monopolism, or intermediary costs. Decentralizing mobility management is a promising approach to solve the current problems of the mobility market, allowing to move towards a more usable internet of mobility and smart transportation. Leveraging blockchain technology allows to cut intermediary costs, by utilizing smart contracts. Important in this ecosystem is the proof of identity of participants in the blockchain network. To proof the possession of the claimed identity, the private key corresponding to the wallet address is utilized, and therefore essential to protect. In this paper, a blockchain-based shared mobility platform is proposed and a proof-of-concept is shown. First, current problems and state-of-the-art systems are analyzed. Then, a decentralized concept is built based on ERC-721 tokens, implemented in a smart contract, and augmented with a Hardware Security Module (HSM) to protect the confidential key material. Finally, the system is evaluated and compared against state-of-the-art solutions.
Healthcare is one of the most important sector where security is a major concern in Internet of Things integrated healthcare. The future generation vehicles are enabled with features of autonomous driving and accurate decision making. We can use such features in emergency vehicle routing with the help of Blockchain technology for collecting trustworthy road network information. In this work, we design and develop an emergency vehicle routing solution where each vehicle connects to the Ethereum Blockchain integrated with Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM). Blockchain enables secure information sharing among vehicles and the OSRM provides shortest trustworthy routes. The proposed approach reduces transit delay of the emergency vehicles while providing emergency healthcare services. Furthermore, the efficacy of the proposed approach has been shown through experimentation by implementing a smart contract in Blockchain based trust-worthy vehicle route generation.
A sharded blockchain with the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol has advantages in increasing throughput and reducing energy consumption, enabling the resource-limited participants to manage transactions and in a decentralized way and obtain rewards at a lower cost, e.g., Internet-of-Things (IoT) users. However, the latest PoS (e.g., Casper) requires a steep security deposit, which is the key to provide more robust security guarantees than Proof of Work, but not practical for the owners of heterogeneous IoT devices. This article considers any individual and institute who owns the IoT devices as the potential participant and focuses on designing the proper security deposits in a practical scenario with hidden information and hidden action. To bridge blockchain and the IoT users, we study the problem of balancing the security incentive and the economic incentive under two cases: 1) stake oriented and 2) effort oriented. We propose two joint models under the contract theory framework to efficiently address the problems: 1) joint adverse selection and moral hazard and 2) joint adverse selection and tournament. Both optimal contracts can provide a maximized profit for blockchain. The optimal rewards and security deposits for different types of participants can be determined accordingly. Simulations indicate that the proposed models can overcome asymmetric information and offer feasible contracts. Moreover, it demonstrates that both joint models can provide an economic incentive for the participants without reducing security incentives for the sharded blockchain.
Blockchain technology has been used in finance, health care, supply chain, and transport, with the main goals of improving security and eliminating the need for a third party to manage transactions in the system. In blockchain, smart contracts are used to facilitate negotiation between stakeholders. The sharing economy movement has gained popularity in recent years in various sectors including transport. Ride-sharing has become an important component of sustainable transportation by increasing vehicle utilisation and reducing the number of vehicles on the road. Current ride-sharing systems are centralised with an intermediary maintaining users' data and managing transactions between drivers and passengers. This paper proposes the use of blockchain and in particular smart contracts, to develop decentralised ride-sharing systems. The benefits of having a distributed approach to maintaining users' data and managing transactions between users include more automation, more transparency, better data privacy, and possibly more trust between users.
The purpose of the paper is to determine and examine, to what extent blockchain scenarios for the shipping industry have practical explication from maritime ports’ perspective and how these are sync with ports’ long-term development strategies, particularly in Denmark. The present study involved qualitative interviews with representatives of the biggest maritime ports of Denmark, varied by location, volumes, operations and cargo type. Data saturation is achieved through several rounds of in-depth semi-structured interviews. Results showed uncertainties in the long-term investment strategy of the considered ports. While focused on land expansion and operation development, the port authorities lack inner-port coordination with related enterprises, which consequently affects overall efficiency. While the development strategy appears to be identical among the port authorities, it varies significantly within specific blockchain scenarios and port’s strategy regarding short-term port optimization. Besides, the role of port authority was debated. Authorities are willing to be more involved in supply chain operations as a consultancy rather than just a controlling party, yet are burden by the state restrictions. Unlike generally-discussed blockchain compatibility studies, the current research contributes by revealing core business uncertainties within port area development and communication. Moreover, the case could serve as a representation of small- to middle-size ports in the EU.
The real estate market in many African countries reflects inefficiency, indiscipline, suspicion, and fraudulent activity. Beyond the direct personal and financial costs, the friction of the existing property transfer process prevents assets from being utilized and valued at their maximum utility. The frustrations and lack of trust affect most real estate markets across Africa, including Ghana, where we will focus the investigation and examples in this paper. Remarkably, the existing Ethereum blockchain platform and smart contract capabilities can be used to bring efficiency, accuracy, trust, and value to the property transfer and registration process without a significant investment in new infrastructure.