IoT and Blockchain Integration for Optimizing Smart City Public Transport: A Feasibility Case Study

Nowadays the Internet of Things (IoT) is experiencing an important development in a variety of fields, leading to the rise of new applications useful for everyday life. In order to overcome the limitations of this technology, the integration of the Blockchain with IoT applications is the subject of several studies. In this scenario, TurinTech, an Italian company where I projected this thesis, is evaluating the feasibility of possible implementations of the Blockchain and IoT technologies in the Smart Cities and Automotive domains. The main purpose of this thesis is to provide a description of a possible application involving IoT and Blockchain technologies. Specifically, the proposed project aims to extract data from public vehicles, such as buses, in order to analyze them through IoT systems and store the results in the Blockchain, thus monitoring the quality of the drives and the fuel consumption. The objective is to encourage drivers to drive more carefully in order to reduce fuel consumption and to offer a better service to citizens: through a reward system, drivers receive a reward proportional to the quality of their drives, by monitoring data such as speed, engine RPM and the load of the vehicle. Thus, the two technologies are analyzed, focusing on their respective limitations. IoT devices, such as sensors, process a huge volume of data, such as personal information, thus security, data integrity, and data privacy are essential aspects to be taken into account. Centralized databases could lead to weak solutions, due to the presence of a single server, such as the Single-Point-Of-Failure. A distributed or decentralized solution could be better in terms of failure tolerance, efficiency, and computing power. Blockchain can be a possible storage solution, able to guarantee high levels of security and data integrity. Thanks to the immutability of stored transactions, Blockchain allows the monitoring of historical data. Furthermore, costs related to a trusted third party are reduced. Despite Blockchain being born as a public system, several private platforms have been developed, in order to meet companies' requirements, such as the need to avoid sharing internal data with the external environment. To meet the company’s needs, the proposed project considers the use of a private Blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric. Despite its several advantages, Blockchain presents some limitations, for example, it cannot handle big data and a huge volume of real-time information. Due to these limitations, the integration of the Blockchain in IoT applications is still at an early stage. For this reason, in this thesis, a first version of the project is proposed; thus, it will be possible to improve it by analyzing more types of data and by defining a more complex reward algorithm, for example by considering traffic analysis information in order to obtain more accurate results. To conclude, the choice of using the Blockchain with respect to other storage solutions leads to some benefits such as the warranty of data integrity and immutability. Furthermore, high levels of security and transparency are assured. To assure better decentralization, a hybrid blockchain solution could be considered: data are stored in the private platform and only the hashes of the blocks are stored in a public system. In this case, additional costs related to the insertion of transactions in a public platform have to be considered, too.