Blockchain Papers

Tsan‐Ming Choi, Shu Guo, Na Liu, Xiutian Shi

No abstract is available for this record.

Vikas Hassija, Vinay Chamola, Sahil Garg, Dara Nanda Gopala Krishna · 6 authors

The Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) network is, where the battery-powered vehicles provide energy to the power grid, is highly emerging. A robust, scalable, and cost-optimal mechanism that can support the increasing number of transactions in a V2G network is required. Existing studies use traditional blockchain as to achieve this requirement. Blockchain-enabled V2G networks require a high computation power and are not suitable for micro-transactions due to the mining reward being higher than the transaction value itself. Moreover, the transaction throughput in the generic blockchain is too low to support the increasing number of frequent transactions in V2G networks. To address these challenges, in this paper, a lightweight blockchain-based protocol called Directed Acyclic Graph-based V2G network (DV2G) is proposed. Here blockchain refers to any Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and not just the bitcoin chain of blocks. A tangle data structure is used to record the transactions in the network in a secure and scalable manner. A game theory model is used to perform negotiation between the grid and vehicles at an optimized cost. The proposed model does not require the heavy computation associated to the addition of the transactions to the data structure and does not require any fees to post the transaction. The proposed model is shown to be highly scalable and supports the micro-transactions required in V2G networks.

Bing Wang, Weiyang Liu, Min Wang, Wangping Shen

To promote coordinated development of electric vehicles (EVs) and power grid under open power selling, a bidding mechanism using blockchain smart contract technology was proposed. By demand respone management (DRM) on and off the blockchain, based on different driving characteristics of EV subgroups, various charging–discharging demands and constraints were fully considered between EV user subgroups and agent. Purchase–sale transaction relationship and unit commitment plan were fully considered between the EV agent and power dispatching center under economic dispatching. Aiming at the lowest power purchase cost of EV users, the highest profit of EV agent and the lowest cost of power economic dispatching, smart contract models with optimal benefits were established among the three. The smart contract models were solved by combining the internal and external optimization relationship of particle swarm and genetic algorithms. The charging–discharging price was optimized by DRM to realize the reasonable allocation of charging–discharging resources of EVs. An example analysis shows that this bidding mechanism can achieve peak–cutting and valley–filling for power load. At the same time, it can effectively protect the benefits of EV users, agent, and power dispatching center. This result can provide a reference for the application of smart contract in bidding of EVs to the power grid.

Vittorio Astarita, Vincenzo Pasquale Giofrè, Giuseppe Guido, Alessandro Vitale

This paper intends to present some ideas for the implementation of cooperative ITS systems based on the Blockchain Technology (BT) concept. Blockchain technology has been recently introduced and, in this paper, we discuss a system that is based on a dedicated blockchain, able to involve both drivers and city administrations in the adoption of promising and innovative technologies that will create cooperation among connected vehicles. The proposed blockchain-based system can allow city administrators to reward drivers when they are willing to share travel data. The system manages in a special way the creation of new coins which are assigned to drivers and institutions participating actively in the system. Moreover, the system allows keeping a complete track of all transactions and interactions between drivers and city management on a completely open and shared platform. The main idea is to combine connected vehicles with BT to promote Cooperative ITS use and a better use of infrastructures.

Zhitian Tu, Kun Zhu, Changyan Yi, Ran Wang

No abstract is available for this record.

Amitrajit Sarkar, Sayan Kumar Ray

In this conceptual research paper, we propose a user-oriented pricing and charging system to handle the inductive electric vehicle (EV) charging process in shared spaces such as office, public parking, housing societies, wireless charging bays by busy roadside or at busy intersections. For the payment mechanism of the proposed charging system to work, we propose here the Economy of Things (EoT) paradigm with a distributed ledger technology approach, for example, blockchain. A mobile app is proposed to handle the user authentication method to initiate the charging process, where sensors in EVs are used for measuring energy consumption, and based on a microcontroller, establish data communication with the mobile app. Our proposed EV charging system, where EVs can self-negotiate with charging stations, brings together energy, smart contract and mobility to create an EoT solution representing a major step forward for the smart connected world.

Jingjing Chen, Yi Ruan, Lingling Guo, Huijuan Lu

The vehicle information in used-car transactions is always asymmetric and disputes always happen in China. In order to reduce such disputes caused by the lack of transparency in a transaction, Blockchain technology is adopted to construct a trust mechanism for vehicle information storage and sharing in a transparent manner. In this work, a Blockchain-based vehicle history storing and tracking service, named BCVehis, is proposed. BCVehis allows vehicle owners, vehicle authority, mechanic workshops, insurance brokers and other related individuals/organizations to upload vehicle historical records via simple manners (i.e. mobile app or application programming interfaces). The system provides trustworthy vehicle history to used-car dealers, potential buyers, and other business-related parties. The design rationale and functional implementation of the BCVehis are introduced, and the increased deal volume in a local used-car dealer X is presented, which integrated BCVehis to its online dealing system.

Sijie Chen, Jian Ping, Zheng Yan, Wei Wei

No abstract is available for this record.

Godwin C. Okwuibe, Zeguang Li, Thomas Brenner, Ole Langniß

The increase in development of electric vehicle(EV) will have a strong impact on the power distribution grid if adequate care is not taken on the high power demand required for charging EV. Consequently, there is need to create a platform to enable charging point operators to effectively manage the EV user’s charging requests and ensure that there charging needs are satisfied while not exceeding the distribution grid capacity. If this is not done, there is no doubt that in few a years, EV owners will be faced with the problems of unavailability of charging stations and congestion in grid sequel to simultaneous charging of many EV’s. This work proposes a smart EV charging infrastructure based on a blockchain platform. With the charging demand (kWh) and maximum duration of the charging event provided by the EV user, the EV load flexibility is determined and utilized through smart charging to achieve a stable grid. EV owners and charging stations are linked through the platform thereby reducing the actors in EV charging ecosystem from six to four. Flexibility (power and time) in charging of EV is traded within the blockchain platform. By this, additional investors will be attracted into the business of EV charging station and through flexible offers, EV loads are shifted from the peak load hours. Consequently, the simulations shows that the acceptance rate of EV users increased by more than 50% when our smart charging system was adopted compared to the normal charging scenario.

Rupali Hande, Tarasha Agarwal, Ranjeet Monde, N. Sai Sirisha · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Adugna Gebrie Jember, Wenhe Xu, Chao Pan, Xiongwen Zhao · 5 authors

With the development and expansion of smart grid systems, vehicle-to-grid (V2G) has become a new type of energy interaction based on Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEVs). By leveraging the charging/discharging capabilities of EVs, V2G can be implemented in smart grid to enable intelligent energy transactions and reduce the unbalance of supply and demand. However, the implementation of interaction between the existing V2G technology and IoEVs faces the problems of high-complexity energy transaction management, insufficient computing capability, poor scalability, and lack of incentive mechanisms. The three-tier bi-directional energy transaction management strategies based on game and contract theory have been proposed. Firstly, the optimal pricing and EV discharging strategy is obtained based on the non-cooperative Stackelberg game and the energy-price equilibrium. Secondly, in order to optimize the utility of EAG, the information asymmetry incentive mechanism based on contract theory is proposed. This mechanism can effectively stimulate EVs to contribute to V2G energy transaction and further improve social benefits considering the energy transmission loss and battery life cycle degradation. To reduce the communication as well as processing latency and improve the efficiency of energy transaction management, edge computing has been incorporated. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme significantly outperforms other existing schemes under various scenarios.

Toqeer Ali Syed, Muhammad Shoaib Siddique, Adnan Nadeem, Ali Alzahrani · 6 authors

Transactions related to vehicles include manufacturing, buying, selling, paying insurance(takaful), obtaining regular inspection, leasing a vehicle from banks, getting in an accident, engaging in a traffic violation, calculating price predictions and renting a vehicle. Many people perform transactions related to vehicles in their daily life; transportation authorities also perform vehicle transactions as part of managing vehicle fleets. But tracking these transactions is a challenging task. There are countrywide solutions that uses centralized systems. However, these solutions have problems with trust management, transparency, and access control. Therefore, we believe there is still room for integrated automation of various vehicle-related transactions. In this paper, we present a blockchain-based framework for vehicle tracking that incorporates the mentioned features. Moreover, blockchain is customized to enable usage control for additional transactions, such as inspection, renting and islamic insurance. The usage control model is integrated with IoT devices to continuously monitor the vehicles for certain conditions and remotely revoke access if needed. The complete transaction set is recorded over an immutable ledger that provides trust, transparency and a complete history of record. In this paper, we also presents a prototype implementation of a permissioned blockchain, which will be made available under the GNUv3 General Public License. Performance analysis is performed on the newly proposed framework implementation over the permissioned blockchain to measure its adoption and suitability.

Quazi Mamun, M. Arif Khan

The Blockchain empowers IoT ecosystems more secure and transparent. AS a result, integrating these two technologies can have a significant impact across multiple industries. In this paper, a sample use case related to safe-work has been discussed. A group mutual exclusion (GME) protocol has been proposed for the consensus operation of different authorities/stakeholder to update the distributed ledger of the hybrid system. The protocol utilises a single token to enable various processes of different stakeholders to enter into a common session to reach the consensus among themselves. In other words, we have introduced a novel consensus protocol-proof of presence. The protocol offers a crucial characteristic-the concurrency, throughput, and waiting time can be tailored by adjusting the period for which a session is declared. The protocol also ensures no starvation in the system. Furthermore, this algorithm works out for the Extended Group Mutual Exclusion problem as well.

Troy Felver, Christopher Salatiello

No abstract is available for this record.

Robin Westerlund

Background: Due to the rising popularity of autonomous unmanned vehicles, and the lack of well-defined rules to follow, a solution is needed when the physical space is crowded to a point where it becomes a hazard. Partitioning space discretely is currently done in some cases, allowing vehicles to reserve partitions to operate within. This idea is expanded upon to ultimately propose a blockchain-based solution to the inefficiency of safety margins. Objectives: The main objective was to explore whether a blockchain-based system can be used by vehicles to automatically reserve the volumes of space they need for a limited time. The solution to congestion becomes a method for vehicles to communicate between each other to exchange the remainder of their reservations once they are no longer needed, even while disconnected from the main blockchain network, in exchange for the same currency used to reserve the volumes. Methods: An Ethereum private blockchain network is set up, and a smart contract is developed and deployed onto this blockchain. An emulation program used the smart contract functions to reserve and exchange volumes to evaluate the functionality, several isolated tests evaluated the network performance, and aspects that could not be tested were theoretically analyzed. Results: The system functions as intended, although a level of trust is required during exchanges. There is no risk of two vehicles reserving the same volume at the same time. The results indicate that some performance aspects will be affected by an increasing number of users, although the entire effect can be placed on synchronization time if the network parameters are adjusted. This likely affects the overall efficiency but not as much as it would with the original parameters. Conclusions: The proposed solution is viable to use, although further development is necessary before it is ready for release. The necessity currently is not evident, although projections suggest that this solution, or a similar one, will be necessary in the future.

Xinyang Deng, Tianhan Gao

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is considered as an important part of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Depending on the interconnection between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), VANETs can provide a variety of application services for drivers and passengers. Due to the necessary service cost, many applications have to face the problem of how to charge vehicle for the services. This paper, which relies on blockchain technology, takes park toll management system and electronic toll collection system (ETC) as scenarios. Two payment schemes, V-R transaction and V-Rs transaction, are then proposed. The security and performance analysis show that the proposed schemes are efficient and robust.

Amari N. Lewis, Amelia Regan

No abstract is available for this record.

Andreas Richardson, Jiahua Xu

Blockchain has the potential to accelerate the deployment of emissions trading systems (ETS) worldwide and improve upon the efficiency of existing systems. In this paper, we present a model for a permissioned blockchain implementation based on the successful European Union (EU) ETS and discuss its potential advantages over existing technology. We propose an ETS model that is both backwards compatible and future-proof, characterised by interconnectedness, transparency, tamper-resistance and high liquidity. Further, we identify key challenges to implementation of a blockchain ETS, as well as areas of future work required to enable a fully-decentralised blockchain ETS.

Jian Ping, Zheng Yan, Sijie Chen, Liangzhong Yao · 5 authors

The increasing electric vehicle (EV) penetration in a distribution network triggers the need for EV charging coordination. This paper firstly proposes a hierarchical EV charging coordination model and an algorithm based on Lagrangian relaxation. A barrier to the implementation of the coordination algorithm is that there usually does not exist a reliable coordinator of charging stations. This paper shows that an unreliable coordinator may collude with some charging stations and behave dishonestly by disobeying the coordination algorithm. Thus, the collusion coalition can gain more profits while lowering the profits of others and the total social welfare. To provide reliable coordination of charging stations, a novel blockchain-based coordination platform via Ethereum is established, including a coordination structure and a smart contract. A mathematical analysis is given to show that the proposed platform can mitigate the collusion behaviors in the coordination. Simulation results show the consequence of collusion and how blockchain can prevent the collusion.

Noureddine Lasla, Maryam Al-Ammari, Mohamed Abdallah, Mohamed Younis

This paper presents a novel blockchain-based energy trading architecture for electric vehicles (EVs) within smart cities. By allowing local renewable energy providers to supply public charging stations, EV drivers can gain access to affordable energy and optimally plan for their charging operations. For this purpose, we present a smart-contract based trading platform that runs on top of a private Ethereum network. Contrary to existing solutions, we rely on the legacy billing and metering of the existing utility company in order to avoid making major changes to the existing infrastructure. The trading logic, including the auction mechanism, used to exchange energy can be defined in a smart-contract and applied within the platform. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of some existing auction mechanisms and the underlying private Ethereum network in supporting the corresponding energy trading transaction load. We develop a virtualization-based simulator for Ethereum and measure both the transaction throughput and latency under different network and workload scenarios. The obtained results have shown that the current Ethereum implementation can support charging requests from EVs during peak hours in very crowded cities, such as Singapore.

Dongseung Kwon, Park Jong Dae

No abstract is available for this record.

Qiu-Yue Han, Yang Yang, Zhiyuan Ma, Jiangfeng Li · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

D.S. Popović, C. Avis, M. Byrne, Chong-Soo Cheung · 10 authors

Abstract Insurance industry practitioners have deep knowledge of their industry, but there is a lack of a simple-to-understand, practical blueprint on applying distributed ledger technology solutions, including blockchain. This paper provides a practical guide for actuaries, risk professionals, insurance companies and their Boards on blockchain, including an education piece to provide an understanding of the technology. Examples of real-world applications and use cases in insurance are provided to illustrate the capability of the technology. The current risks and challenges in adopting the technology are also considered. Finally, a checklist of issues to consider in adopting a blockchain solution for insurance business problems is provided.

Gilles Hilary

Although there are many versions of blockchain technology today, it was first introduced in 2008 as the technology supporting Bitcoin, the first successful virtual currency system. Yet in and of itself, Blockchain technology is much more than the underpinning for Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) and has found many applications beyond its initial purpose. The goal of this advanced primer is to review the current state of this technology and to discuss some of its advantages and drawbacks in settings beyond crypto-currencies.