The distributed ownership of on-demand mobility service

Abstract

Mobility as a service (MaaS) is an innovative and value-laden method to operate on-demand mobility services within the existing transport infrastructures. A big challenge for the transport system is that the transport infrastructure cannot be restructured as quickly as a digital platform like cloud computing infrastructure services, which is a constraint that limits the balance between mobility demand and supply in real-time. The ownership of mobility services needs to be redefined to establish legal binds between service vendors and commuters, further demonstrating the capacity to balance the demand and supply of mobility services in real-time. The ownership of a mobility service is defined as the commuter's right to use the mobility service provided by the service vendor under agreed terms and conditions. This is facilitated by MobiToken in this study. An eMarket-place is proposed for commuters, mobility service vendors and other stakeholders to exchange MobiToken, where the marketplace demonstrates the potential use of blockchain tools, methods and algorithms, where a specialised capability for reliably link stakeholders is proposed through a nonrevertible blockchain dataset. The bidden price of MobiToken reflects the demand for mobility services in the real world, where congestion charges are incorporated within the bidden price. The performance of the preliminary platform is evaluated with three testing scenarios, and the results of performance testing indicate the stability and reliability of the Raft consensus algorithm for the blockchain database.