Sharing energy storage (SES) is a novel business model in order to increase the profits and improve the utilization rate of idle energy storage facilities. On the other hand, blockchains can be competently applied in the transaction and operation of SES because of distributed network architecture, traceability and tamper proof. In this paper, a management model of SES based on proxy signatures in the blockchain environment is proposed. Many management models including the principal-agent model are analyzed for SES in terms of benefit, cost, resources, and so on. Moreover, a blockchain framework and a typical transaction process of SES is presented. Finally, a proxy signature mechanism based on the ElGamal algorithm is proposed in order to address the problem that the signature power of nodes cannot be transferred on blockchains. Simulation results show that the proposed proxy signature mechanism can achieve the delegation of digital signature power under the premise of security and reliability, which is suitable for the management model of SES on blockchains.
Marija Jović, Edvard Tijan, Dražen Žgaljić, Saša Aksentijević
In this paper, the authors perform a comprehensive literature review of the positive impacts of blockchain-based information exchange in the maritime transport sector, as well as the challenges and barriers for successful blockchain-based information exchange, considering all three aspects of the sustainability (economic, environmental, and social). The papers from relevant databases (Web of Science and Scopus) and selected studies have been used. The literature coverage was expanded by using backward snowball sampling. In total, 20 positive impacts and 20 challenges/barriers were singled out. Despite the identified barriers and challenges (such as the slow acceptance of blockchain technology in the maritime transport sector or the high implementation cost), blockchain technology possesses a definite potential to improve the information exchange between all involved stakeholders (for example, by improving the visibility across transport routes and by reducing the paper-based processes), positively affecting all three aspects of sustainability. The authors contribute to the existing research of the economic aspect of maritime transport sustainability by blockchain-based information exchange by expanding it and by researching the environmental and social aspects of sustainability.
Panagiota Katsikouli, Pietro Ferraro, Hugo Richardson, Hanson Cheng · 9 authors
The link between transport related emissions and human health is a major issue for municipalities worldwide and one of the main challenges to address in the context of Smart Cities. Specifically, Particulate Matter (PM) emissions from exhaust and non-exhaust sources are one of the main worrying contributors to air-pollution. In this paper, we challenge the notion that a ban on internal combustion engine vehicles will result in clean and safe air in our cities, since emissions from tyres and other non-exhaust sources are expected to increase in the near future. We support this claim through simple calculations, based on publicly available data from the city of Dublin, and we present a high level solution to this problem, in the form of a control mechanism and ride-sharing scheme to limit the number of vehicles and therefore maintain the amount of transport-related PM to safe levels. Thanks to the use of Distributed Ledger Technology our proposal is entirely distributed, fair and privacy preserving, which makes it ideal for application in the Smart City domain.
Recently, under the influence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the government is attempting a new field of revitalization of the power energy trading market in the energy industry. With the advent of prosumers that generate and consume electricity by themselves, the need to promote transparent transactions by establishing a safe and reasonable transaction platform for energy transactions has increased. With the development of blockchain technology, the research has been actively conducted, and interest in services incorporating blockchain is increasing in various fields, and various studies incorporating blockchain into the energy transaction field have been actively conducted. Along with the need for a transparent energy trading platform, the need for electric vehicle charging infrastructure and power load management, one of the core technologies of smart grid, is also increasing. Therefore, this study aims to build a V2G energy transaction system based on the consortium blockchain and develop an application for transaction activation. In addition, it intends to incorporate the blockchain system into real life and lay the foundation for commercialization of the blockchain system.
Bill Tomlinson, Jens Boberg, Jocelyn Cranefield, David Johnstone · 7 authors
Proponents of ‘Blockchain for Good’ – blockchain efforts seeking to enable benefits to humans and the environment – have suggested that the technology can support sustainability. However, while previous research has addressed aspects of the sustainability affordances of Blockchain for Good projects, the constraints that these projects impose have not faced equal consideration. Furthermore, the theoretical concepts of sustainability ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ implicit in these projects have not been made clear. In this exploratory study, we evaluate the sustainability of 28 Blockchain for Good projects that use cryptocurrencies or tradable tokens with regard to the UN sustainability goals. These projects span a range of goals, such as supply chain tracking, transparent charity, and fairer voting. Despite their admirable goals, we find that current Blockchain for Good projects are unlikely to contribute to a sustainable future due to technical limitations and a conceptual framing that favors the status quo rather than transformative change.
Public trash bins have problems with lack of security and incentive design. In Japan, only a few number of bins can be found because of those reasons. In order to solve this problem, a strong security-featured incentive system is required. This research aims at encouraging more people to provide public trash bins by offering the benefit such as privacy, security and incentive scheme. We propose a blockchain-based incentive system which consists of a smart trash bin, a smartwatch as a wearable payment device, and an incentive scheme using ethereum smart contract.
Blockchain technology has become one of the emerging technologies set to disrupt the maritime industry. Maritime companies are increasingly exploring to adopt blockchain to stay ahead of competition. However, studies on blockchain applications in the maritime sector have been scarce and most of them are confined to a specific sector like the maritime shipping sector. Therefore, this study is motivated to provide a thorough analysis of blockchain applications from the perspectives of different sectors in the industry. It also aims to develop a novel conceptual framework to provide a holistic view of blockchain adoption in the industry and guide future research. The implication analysis of blockchain adoption indicates that for industry organisations, a good understanding of blockchain and their own specific problems and requirements is key before adopting the technology. For government agencies, technical code for blockchain can be utilised to govern blockchain innovation with the same effects as legal code. Lastly, recommendations are provided to various maritime stakeholders to seize the emerging opportunities provided by blockchain and mitigate relevant risks.
Jianxiong Guo, Xingjian Ding, Weili Wu, Ding‐Zhu Du
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are becoming more and more popular in our daily life, which replaces traditional fuel vehicles to reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment. EVs need to be charged, but the number of charging piles in a Charging Station (CS) is limited and charging is usually more time-consuming than fueling. According to this scenario, we propose a secure and efficient charging scheduling system based on a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-blockchain and double auction mechanism. In a smart area, it attempts to assign EVs to the available CSs in the light of their submitted charging requests and status information. First, we design a lightweight charging scheduling framework that integrates DAG-blockchain and modern cryptography technology to ensure security and scalability during performing scheduling and completing tradings. In this process, a constrained multi-item double auction problem is formulated because of the limited charging resources in a CS, which motivates EVs and CSs in this area to participate in the market based on their preferences and statuses. Due to this constraint, our problem is more complicated and harder to achieve truthfulness as well as system efficiency compared to the existing double auction model. To adapt to it, we propose two algorithms, namely Truthful Mechanism for Charging (TMC) and Efficient Mechanism for Charging (EMC), to determine an assignment between EVs and CSs and pricing strategies. Then, both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations show the correctness and effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
Lichao Yang, Ming Li, Heli Zhang, Hong Ji · 6 authors
Blockchain, an emerging decentralized but trusted system, has been applied in many applications, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), supply chains, and smart grid. However, due to the large amount of computing and storage resources blockchain typically demands, its wide deployment is faced with the sustainability issue. To resolve this issue, a viable solution is to empower the IoT system with fog computing that can offload the computation-demanding tasks. Due to varieties of mining tasks and heterogeneous resource capabilities at fog nodes (FNs), it is not an easy task to schedule mining tasks and manages resource allocation among FNs of conflicting interests and independent IoT devices in a distributed manner. In this article, under the framework of matching theory, we design a distributed matching mechanism to maximize the social welfare of resource-restricted FNs while guaranteeing various mining requirements of FNs. Besides, we also provide formal proof regarding the convergence and computational complexity of a distributed matching algorithm (DMA). Finally, we verify that DMA not only improves the social welfare of FNs but also reduces the mining latency compared with the existing algorithms through extensive simulations.
Distributed ledger technologies are emerging as important tools that can positively impact almost all major industries and activities in our society. They are increasingly used in various supply (value) chain applications including financial, governance, regulations, health, logistics, and other industrial sectors. In this letter, we are presenting various ongoing work related to different distributed ledger technologies and their applications in postal sector. In particular, we will highlight some of the innovations in the inclusive financial services for the underbanked and unbanked populations using distributed ledger technologies.
This paper is the first part of the Proof of Meet (PoM) work. This part focuses on the need for the model and its system (roughly) rather than giving technical details. In the second part, full technical details and architecture of the model will be discussed. The model focuses on consensus-based sharing (meeting) economy model. The sharing (meeting) describes the relationship between what is already somewhere and what goes there. The consensus is built on active clients (where the client can be anything capable of a change of location) on a social activity (location and action). There are two parts of clients; the first who/which go somewhere for a purpose (C_1) and the second who/which are regularly somewhere for a purpose (C_2). C_1 is in the domain of at least two clients and C_2 is in at least one. To build a decentralised blockchain with no energy-consuming, the paper proposes a consensus system, PoM, on the top of Proof of Stake (PoS) and Blockchain-Based Proof of Location (BBPL). The sharing economy model is one of the applications of the proposed blockchain model. The blockchain system called HOX is available to use very large area distributed ledger systems from a dynamic transportation system to dynamic big data. HOX is an instance of PoM application. Consequently, the proposed model provides the opportunity to record taxes, earn a fair share of labour and use blockchain actively in daily life within the legal framework.
This paper explores a future perspective to foster the provision of balancing services to the electricity grid by distributed assets. One recent test case, initiated by the Dutch Transmission System Operator (TSO), was to operate an Electric Vehicle (EV) fleet on the automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve (aFRR) market, which entails fast and automated reserves. To achieve that in a decentralised, automated and transparent manner, the role of blockchain technology for this specific application is explored. We propose a novel configuration that can serve as a basis for deploying distributed assets for aFRR markets using blockchain or any alternative Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Automation can be achieved via the deployment of smart contracts, which also results in transparency in the system. The blockchain configurations are designed for three phases in the aFRR market, namely: (i) Operational planning and scheduling by a balancing service provider (i.e., formulation and submission of aFRR bid), (ii) Real-time operations (i.e., activation and measurements), and (iii) Verification and settlement (i.e., imbalance correction and financial settlement). The paper concludes that the scalability of distributed assets that can participate in the system, combined with the large transaction times and energy consumption of some consensus mechanisms, could put limitations on the proposed architecture. Future research should address benchmarking studies of other alternatives (e.g., DLTs, such as the ones based on directed acyclic graphs, and non-DLT solutions) with the proposed blockchain solution.
The deep penetration of electric vehicles (EVs) into the transportation section and the associated charging management has yielded a critical issue, namely, how to efficiently store the generated charging records. In this article, we investigate the cost-efficient charging-record storage scheme by exploiting blockchain (BC). Accounting for the operational cost due to the consensus process via the practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) protocol, we model the associated cost for storing the charging records via an ideal multiblockchain system and formulate a joint optimization of the storage selection (i.e., either storing the charging record locally or selecting one of the BCs for storing the charging record) and server-node allocation for each BC, with the objective of minimizing a systemwise cost. Despite the nature of the complicated mixed binary and integer programming problem, we exploit the decomposition structure and propose a layered algorithm (i.e., the bottom subproblem for determining the optimal storage selection and the top problem for finding the server-node allocation) to solve it. For the bottom subproblem, we exploit the nature of minimum weighted matching of the problem and propose a distributed auction-based algorithm for computing the optimal storage selection. With the optimal solution from the subproblem, we further propose an annealing-based algorithm to determine the server-node allocation for each BC. Numerical results are provided to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and the performance of our cost-efficient charging-record storage scheme via BC.
S. A. Jayalath, Chathura Rajapakse, Janaka Senanayake
Ticketing mechanism in a public transportation system is a major factor which defines the service quality of the system. Current online payment systems (credit/debit cards, PayPal, etc.) are not compatible with micropayments because transaction processing companies need a minimum transaction amount to make the transaction profitable for them. Therefore, an acceptable micro-transaction model is required in the micropayments domain. In blockchain systems, a third-party intermediary is not facilitating the transactions. Therefore, transaction fees decrease drastically. Using consortium blockchain concept, these fees can be further minimized when proof of work is also handled by a set of approved entities. In this study, an Ethereum based micro-transaction model is proposed to be implemented within the ticketing system in Sri Lankan public transport sector. Bus tickets are programmed as Ethereum smart contracts to handle the payment distribution. Consortium blockchain concept is used in the blockchain-based model where there are regulated bodies as nodes such as the national transport commission to handle the proof of work. Digital currency and Quick Response (QR) codes are incorporated to identify and complete the transaction process. The methodology of this development-oriented research can be described under three major phases. In the first phase, interviews were carried out with relevant stakeholders to identify the process of the current system and its limitations. Also, a broad and extensive study of literature was done parallel to this. During the second phase, identified issues, limitations and downfalls were addressed by designing a novel architecture. In the final phase a prototype is being developed to demonstrate the architecture, In the final phase a prototype is being developed to demonstrate the architecture, then prototype validation and testing were done with simulated data and several key use cases in the domain. The preliminary results of the prototype model show signs of considerable improvement in the service level of the public transport ticketing process and a significant reduction of transaction fees.
Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop a framework for a freight consolidation company to adopt blockchain for the shipping community. Our research critically examine the challenges faced by a global shipping company that offer freight consolidation businesses and explore the use of Blockchain technology to enhance the competitiveness and sustainability of freight booking operations. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study, ECU Worldwide, with focus on transforming their operations using blockchain technology for the freight booking industry. As the case is explorative in nature, the research aim to unearth the complex blockchain adoption phenomenon in the industry as the technology is very nascent at present. The research is primarily grounded on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) theory. Findings The research finds that blockchain technology supports solving many issues and inefficiencies of global shipping operations but there are some barriers that they need to overcome. The research provides a framework and recommendations for global company to consider when considering Blockchain technology for implementation. Our research finding shows that smart contracts can be set up at critical points along with the shipment route namely the storage, customs, carrier, transporters and consignee stage to ensure greater security and transparency. Research limitations/implications The research provides recommendations to key stakeholders involved in freight forwarding segment of logistics industry while adopting blockchain technology. Apart from the methodological limitation of the research, the research is limited to Singapore in terms of geographical coverage. Practical implications The drivers and barriers identified in the study can give practitioners insight of using blockchain for the industry. The proposed framework can assist companies in the shipping industry to prepare themselves to adopt blockchain for the community. Originality/value This case study is the first of its kind to examine the use of blockchain to explore the adoption in logistics Industry in Singapore and perhaps worldwide.
In urban rail transit systems, the intelligent driving system is gradually replacing manual driving for its high safety, punctuality, and stopping accuracy. With the development of big data analytics, the data-driven intelligent driving system becomes a research focus. Traditional datadriven intelligent driving systems suffer from inadequate data. Due to lacking effective incentives and trust, data from different urban rail operators cannot be shared directly. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses blockchain technology to realize sharing and collaborative training of intelligent driving models between operators. In this framework, we use blockchain-based distributed federated reinforcement learning methods to complete intelligent driving calculations. We use smart contracts to implement the management of the entire federal reinforcement learning. Operators use local historical data to participate in intelligent driving training based on Q-network by exchanging encrypted model parameters, and optimize the safety distance, energy consumption, and punctuality of urban rail transit systems. Simulation results show that our proposed distributed federated reinforcement learning method can significantly improve the intelligent driving system performance.
The autonomous industry has rapidly grown for self-driving cars. The main purpose of autonomous industry is trying to give all types of security, privacy, secured traffic information to the self-driving cars. Blockchain is another newly established secured technology. The main aim of this technology is to provide more secured, convenient online transactions. By using this new technology, the autonomous industry can easily provide more suitable, safe, efficient transportation to the passengers and secured traffic information to the vehicles. This information can easily gather by the roadside units or by the passing vehicles. Also, the economical transactions can be possible more efficiently since blockchain technology allows peer-to-peer communications between nodes, and it also eliminates the need of the third party. This chapter proposes a concept of how the autonomous industry can provide more adequate, proper, and safe transportation with the help of blockchain. It also examines for the possibility that autonomous vehicles can become the future of transportation.
Antonio Bucchiarone, Martina De Sanctis, Nelly Bencomo
The mobility of people is at the center of transportation planning and decision-making of the cities of the future. In order to accelerate the transition to zero-emissions and to maximize air quality benefits, smart cities are prioritizing walking, cycling, shared mobility services and public transport over the use of private cars. Extensive progress has been made in autonomous and electric cars. Autonomous Vehicles (AV) are increasingly capable of moving without full control of humans, automating some aspects of driving, such as steering or braking. For these reasons, cities are investing in the infrastructure and technology needed to support connected, multi-modal transit networks that include shared electric Autonomous Vehicles (AV). The relationship between traditional public transport and new mobility services is in the spotlight and need to be rethought. This article proposes an agent-based simulation framework that allows for the creation and simulation of mobility scenarios to investigate the impact of new mobility modes on a city daily life. It lets traffic planners explore the cooperative integration of AV using a decentralized control approach. A prototype has been implemented and validated with data of the city of Trento.
Due to poor traffic conditions and the high costs of traveling by private cars, ride sharing has become a popular means to trip. In view of the security threats and centralization existing in the current ride-sharing service, we propose a secure ride-sharing scheme based on a consortium blockchain, which can guarantee the security, confidentiality, and privacy of data interaction via attribute-based proxy re-encryption algorithm. First, the passenger presets the access structure and encrypts the data using attribute-based encryption. The ciphertext is then sent to the roadside unit (RSU), which broadcasts the carpooling request to the driver. After receiving the request, the driver sends the itinerary attribute to RSU, which performs carpool matching according to received ciphertext and itinerary attributes, then the ciphertext is re-encrypted and sent to the matched driver. Second, the master node uses an improved Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus to verify the carpool record, which is stored on the blockchain after the verification is successful. In case of disputes, block data can be utilized for traceability. Third, drivers and passengers use the credibility mechanism to score each other after ride sharing. In addition, trusted authority can reveal the real identity of malicious users. Finally, we conduct a security analysis and performance evaluation for our proposed scheme. The results manifest that our scheme not only meets the security and privacy requirements of ride-sharing services but also effectively resists potential security risks. Therefore, our scheme is feasible, efficient, and suitable for ride-sharing services.
Tasneem Darwish, Kamalrulnizam Abu Bakar, Gen Matsuda, Ahmed Aliyu · 13 authors
Blockchain provides a distributed digital ledger platform for not only cryptocurrencies but also many other distributed applications. Blockchain platforms work flow and performance are controlled by the used consensus algorithms. Although many studies evaluated cryptocurrency from the Shariah perspective, they focused only on the cryptocurrency concept and did not consider the underlying blockchain technology. However, designing a Shariah compliant application on top of a non Shariah compliant platform does not fulfil the requirements of Shariah. Therefore, it is necessary to use a Shariah compliant blockchain platform in order to produce Shariah compliant blockchain applications. To support the production of Shariah compliant blockchain applications, this study provides a comparative analysis of the most used consensus algorithms in blockchain platforms. In particular, the considered consensus algorithms are evaluated from a Shariah perspective. In conclusion, based on the conducted evaluation some of the widely used blockchain platforms (e.g. Bitcoin and Ethereum) are found to be not compliant with the Shariah rules due to using a consensus algorithm that is not Shariah compliant.
Gianmarco Baldini, José L. Hernández-Ramos, Gary Steri, Ricardo Neisse · 5 authors
In recent years, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) and blockchain have become disruptive technologies to support distributed and trusted sharing ecosystems in various domains. Among the potential scenarios that can leverage their benefits, cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) and autonomous vehicles (AV) represent a key trend of the next digital era to build a safer society. However, different aspects such as performance and practical issues, as well as conformance with current standards and legislation, may hinder the adoption of DLT in such scenarios. This article analyses the potential applications that could leverage DLTs features and the challenges to be overcome in the coming years to foster the adoption of DLTs in C-ITS and AV. Through this analysis, we additionally provide a set of potential research directions and ways forward to exploit the advantages of DLTs in C-ITS and AV in terms of decentralized trust and transparency.
As a green travel mode, bike sharing is developing rapidly across China. At present, charging deposits from users is the common operation mode adopted by shared bicycle enterprises. The large number of shared bicycle enterprises generates fierce market competition, and the eliminated enterprises always refuse to return user deposits. Even regular running enterprises still have trouble with the immediate return of deposits. This situation severely affects the reputation of shared bicycle enterprises, and concerns have been shared widely across the society. Meanwhile, there is a general expectation among users that their deposits could be refunded timely and a broad appeal for technical management to resolve this problem. This article uses blockchain technology to reform the current management mode for shared bicycle deposits and constructs a decentralized, user information and deposit visualized, and multidimensional supervised management system. The proposed management system makes the real-time flow direction supervision of user deposits to be realized. Furthermore, a smart contract of shared bicycle deposits with punishment mechanism is also designed. Finally, the differences between the proposed deposit management mode and the current deposit management mode are analyzed, and a simulation experiment is conducted. In the simulation experiment, the deposit theft rate of our deposit management system is 0%, which is far better than the two existing bike deposit management systems. The results show that the outstanding advantages of the proposed deposit management mode, which include improving deposit supervision and guaranteeing user deposit security, are also conducted. This article has made effective technical management exploration to reduce deposit management risks and improve deposit management institutions for shared bicycles. It has important practical reference value for accelerating the sustainable development of shared bicycle enterprises.
Kei Leo Brousmiche, Pascal Ménégazzi, Olivier Boudeville, Eric Fantino
The concept of peer-to-peer energy trading became popular with the increase of local energy production and use of renewable energies. Based on a sharing economy, this framework allows energy trading between households, bringing flexibility and decreasing the dependency on energy providers. In parallel, the increasing adoption of electric vehicles and the development of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology open new ways to store, transport and deliver renewable energy. V2G-enabled cars could contribute to the flexibility of peer-to-peer energy marketplaces. Our physical demonstrator illustrates the benefits of V2G-enabled vehicles in the context of local energy marketplaces in terms of economical gain, overall power balancing and consumed renewable energy rate. The demonstrator is composed of smart contracts implementing such marketplace running on a local Ethereum blockchain deployed on Raspberry Pis, autonomous agents simulating the energy consumption and production behavior of 4 households as well as their buying/selling behavior, and finally a V2G car whose behavior is controlled by a user through a tablet.