Achieving a Decentralized and Secure Cab Sharing System Using Blockchain Technology

Abstract

The cab-sharing system provides a platform for drivers and riders with shared trip services, providing significant benefits, such as decreasing traffic congestion, reducing travel costs, and limiting energy consumption, which improve the business of transportation. However, existing cab-sharing systems mainly depend on the centralized authority to provide many services, increasing privacy concerns and facing the single point of failure issue. Also, these systems expose drivers’ or riders’ locations and personal information that increase security issues, and charge high fees for services due to the involvement of third-party providers. Therefore, this paper proposes a decentralized and secure cab-sharing system to provide ride-sharing services using blockchain technology without any trusted third party. The proposed system uses the blockchain structure to preserve the driver’s or rider’s information, such as personal details, travel price, pickup or drop-off locations, departure or arrival date, and time. Furthermore, it implements the reputation feature to rate drivers and riders based on their travel history or behaviors without any centralized authority that allows users to select them based on their past experiences on the system. The proposed architecture is deployed using the Ethereum platform and functionality is designed using smart contracts. The performance evaluation and experimental results show that the proposed system requires low computational overheads and provides an efficient cab-sharing platform.