MSc Project Proposal 06.05.2020
| Name Surname | Student Number |
| Programme of Study | |
| Name of Supervisor |
Blockchain Peer to Peer Ride sharing
| Abstract |
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that allows digital assets to be transacted in a peer-to-peer decentralized network. Those transactions are verified and registered by every node of the network, thus creating a transparent and immutable sequence of registered events whose veracity is provided by a consensus protocol. By enabling smart contracts to be deployed into a blockchain platform.
Table of Contents
Methods 5
Intended contribution of the work 5
Benefits of the proposed work 5
Procedures and activities of the proposed work 6
Access to participants and clients 7
1. Introduction
The working principle is that a blockchain is a decentralized construct, which therefore does not require central control and regulation and even prevents centralized intervention. Nowadays, substantial efforts made by many organizations, from distinct economic sectors, which are using blockchain technology to develop very innovative applications (Lopes and Pereira 2019). In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based peer to peer ride sharing system that has the potential to solve the major limitations and issues associated,
Problem Statement
Most carpooling systems and radio cab facilities come with a middle man, the agency itself controlling transactions from both the riders and the drivers. This limits to the agencies as they play the major role in connecting riders to drivers.
Objectives
- Allow passengers to register
- Allow passenger to negotiate with driver the fare quote price.
- Allow for payment of passenger to driver without third party associates.
- Allow for verification of payment and the generations of reports.
2. State of the Art Review
Blockchain can be described as a distributed data structure that is replicated and shared among the members of a network, whose purpose is to record every transaction done. Each transaction is batched into time stamped blocks and each block is identified by its cryptographic hash. Each block stores the hash of the previous one, creating a link between the blocks or, as the name implies, a chain of blocks, thus generating a transparent and immutable history of records whose veracity is provided by a consensus protocol (Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016).
The consensus protocol is the mechanism that allows a decentralized network to arrive at an agreement about the state of the blockchain and forces all nodes to behave accordingly to the network principles. By using a consensus protocol the blockchain eliminates the need to trust or rely upon a centralized authority (Ouattara, Ahmat, Ouédraogo, Bissyandé and Sié 2018). The protocol rewards the community for properly maintaining the consensus, allowing greater recording and processing power in an incentive and typically competitive manner. The goal is to incentivize responsible and accurate record keeping, while reducing tampering.
A smart contract is like a program, which runs on the blockchain and has its correct execution enforced by the consensus protocol. A smart contract can encode any set of rules represented in its programming language.
Accordingly, good contracts can implement a wide range of applications, including financial tools and self-enforcing management(Christidis and Devetsikiotis 2016).The main objectives are to satisfy common contractual conditions, minimize both malicious and accidental events, and minimize the need for trusted intermediaries. Related economic goals include lowering fraud loss, arbitrations and enforcement costs. Typically, blockchain is a network composed of a set of nodes, named miners or validators, which are responsible for keeping trustworthy records of all transactions using a consensus algorithm in a trust-less environment.
3. Methods
The first proposed method is the Zero Knowledge Set Membership Proof, where A set membership proof enables a prover to prove, in a zero knowledge way, that a secret value lies in a given public set. Where the security guarantees are: Firstly is the soundness, no prover can convince an honest verifier if he/she did not compute the results correctly, secondly is the completeness, if the statement is true, the honest verifier (the one following the protocol properly) will be convinced of this fact by an honest prover, Thirdly is the zero knowledge, the proof distribution can be simulated without revealing any secret state,
Another method is the use of notations where the system architecture,the rider publishes a ride request contract to the blockchain, drivers sends their encrypted offers,a rider selects the best matched offer and publish a time-locked contract. Up on arrival, the driver sends a proof of arrival to pick-up and claim rider deposit.
4. Proposed Work
The peer to peer ride sharing consists of the following seven phases:intended contribution of the work, Benefits of the proposed work, the procedures and the activities of the proposed work, the evaluation of the project, resources needed, access to participants and clients and Ethical aspects.
4.1. Intended Contribution of the Work
The proposed project contributes in building a network that will provide safe, reliable transportation. We summarize the existing ride sharing systems in terms of architectures and desired functionalities, such as riders privacy, trust, payment fairness and transparency. The peer to peer ridesharing system is proposed using peer to peer communications.
4.2. Benefits of the Proposed Work
With the aim to remove intermediaries between rider and driver, The proposed work could mean more lucrative jobs in rural regions, where full-time employment is often hard to come by. Blockchain could also lend an unprecedented level of data security and driver vetting to the future of ride sharing.
4.3. Procedures and Activities of the Proposed Work
The table consists of the activities that are going to be involved in building the prototypes for the proposed work. It has the following objectives which are to allow passengers to register into the platform, Allow passenger to negotiate with driver, Allow for payment of passenger to driver without third party associates and allow the generations of reports.
| Objective | Activity | milestone |
| Allow passengers to register | Establish requirements needed and coding. | At sign up, passenger registers and adds their preferred payment details into the platform. |
| Allow passenger to negotiate with driver. | Create a chat box. | A ride is selected, and a fare quote from the Driver is given. |
| Allow for payment of passenger to driver without third party associates. | Create a payment system. | The platform manages this for the Rider, and the token-transaction is abstracted as a familiar Fiat-payment to the driver. |
| Allow the generations of reports. | Create report generators. | the platform provides means to view daily spending and transaction logs. |
4.4. Evaluation of the Project
- Prototype evaluation: anything executed in the blockchain environment is refereed as being on-chain, while anything that runs outside the blockchain is referred as off chain. Whereas the execution of the peer to peer ride sharing smart-contract and the related transactions are performed on-chain.We then evaluate the cost of the different off-chain and on-chain operations.
- Process evaluation: We evaluate the execution time of the off-chain operations on both the driver and rider side. The obtained results show that the execution time of the off-chain operations takes less than a second. The results demonstrate that the use of ZKSM is adequate for the ride sharing use-case as the additional execution time is within the acceptable application overhead.
Analysis, and experiments conducted to evaluate blockchain peer to peer ride sharing. The results indicate that platform is practical in terms of both on-chain and off-chain overheads. it shows the practicability to resolve two main objectives in the use-case of the decentralized ride sharing atop public blockchain.
4.5. Resources Needed
- Decentralized data storage is a very core requirement of a distributed system.
- Programming software to write the algorithms.
- Money needed will be required to carry out the interviews from three locations, where data will be collected from.
- Raspberry Pi 4 device with 1.6 GHz Processor and 3 GB RAM .
4.6. Access to Participants and Clients
The drivers and riders are not required to store a complete copy of the blockchain. They can run on top of light-weight nodes, which helps prevent an impersonation attack, in which a malicious rider tries to take a ride that was reserved by another rider, driver and rider must authenticate each other.
4.7. Ethical Aspects
In data collection straight forward means employed through interviews. The target audience are all aware of the research being conducted. And is politely asked to participate in the interview and no amount is asked from them as interview payment. On 8 of June 2020, I’m going to apply for ethical approval from the ethics committee of the School.
5. Work Plan and Schedule
The planned activities include: Prepare the Project proposal which will involve firstly Finding Project topic which involves, finding and reading literature in areas of interest, find potential topics and select the best topic, the second part is the initial literature review which involves find fifteen publications, select six publications, read selected Publications, summarise publications read, thirdly initial design solution/prototype then I start to write project proposal, then I Develop a Gantt chart and submit Project Proposal with the Gantt Chart. The preceding activities after the proposal include State of the art Literature review, Design of Prototype, Development of Prototype, Evaluation of Prototype, Write up Dissertation, Project management.
6. Conclusions
In this paper, It proposes to decentralize the carpooling system by incorporating it with blockchain technology. As opposed to the existing carpooling systems, peer to peer car sharing will remove the middle man who usually is the agencies that manage the transactions and communication. Also improving security and trustworthiness among drivers and riders.
7. Bibliography
- Guo, E. Meamari, and C.-C. Shen, “Blockchain-inspired event recording system for autonomous vehicles,” in Proc. of 1st IEEE International Conference on Hot Information-Centric Networking (HotICN), pp. 218–222, 2018.
Ridesharingmarketcap.[Online]Available:https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/17/1701096/0/en/218-Billion-Ride-Sharing-Market-Global-Forecast-to-2025.html
- Yuan and F.-Y. Wang, “Towards blockchain-based intelligent transportation systems,” in Proc. of the IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 2663–2668, Nov. 2016.
Kovan etherum test net. [Online]. Available: https://kovan. etherscan.io
- Yuan and F.-Y. Wang, “Towards blockchain-based intelligent transportation systems,” in Proc. of the IEEE 19th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, pp. 2660–2670, Nov. 2016.
- Li, L. Zhu, and X. Lin, “Efficient and privacy-preserving carpooling using blockchain-assisted vehicular fog computing,” IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 4570–4590, June 2019.
Yi, X., Paulet, R., and Bertino, E. 2014. Homomorphic Encryption and Applications, Springer International Publishing.
8. Appendixes
Gantt chart