Digitally transferable ownership of mobility-as-a-service systems using blockchain and smart contracts

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) has promised to integrate multiple service providers to deliver a multimodal mobility service to commuters through a seamless digital platform. An efficient digital network architecture is imperative to achieve secure and reliable interactions among the involved parties. From the service provider’s perspective, by defining the mobility ownership for customers, MaaScan bring a personalized transport system to complement or even fully replace the concept of private vehicle ownership. This paper paves the initial steps to develop a distributed architecture to realize a MaaS digital network using blockchain technology. Therefore, a comprehensive blockchain-enabled MaaS platform with related industries is illustrated in this paper. To do so, first, we define crypto-tickets as means of ownership of the service and devise a straightforward smart contract to be executed in the blockchain network, which allows the customers to exchange the service ownership in a privacy-preserved manner. Then, we evaluate our blockchain-based ownership scheme’s efficacy against the traditional membership plans using a simplified simulation instance in MATLAB. Finally, we discuss the blockchain potentials in personalizing the ownership of the service, congestion management, and data trading between various stakeholder of a comprehensive MaaS platform.