Blockchain Design Research Articles

Intelligent contract design based on block chain in logistics management

Although the logistics management has been improving, the information management is still stagnant. The renewal mechanism of logistics information is the basic requirement of logistics system, but it is more important to solve the trust problem of logistics information. It is good for improving the logistics management to design a verifiable information management mechanism which can help relevant participants establish trust relationships. This paper analyzes the development status of block chain technology, then a decentralized and self-verifiable system management program model is designed. Finally, the application is implemented based on the intelligent contract design of Ethereum block chain.

Consideration of Quality Attribute Tradeoffs of the Blockchain Pattern in the Software Development Process

The Blockchain (BC) design pattern has many variations and is a concept that is anticipated to lead many implementations in the years to come. The number of choices for a BC implementation continues to increase since new design and implementation patterns and applications are emerging. This increasing number of design patterns enables correspondingly increasing tradeoff opportunities at every evolutionary round of architecture elaboration. Key components of a BC include network nodes, blocks, and consensus methodologies. These components all possess critical characteristics that can be designed and implemented in a variety of different ways. A central thesis here is that the choice of the design methodologies has direct and varying impact with regard to resulting quality attributes such as performance, security, and availability. We describe the use of a tradeoff matrix during the initial design phase of a development cycle that identifies the quality attributes to be evaluated when designing software systems comprising a BC. We hypothesize that consideration of the quality attributes at this initial design stage via the use of the proposed tradeoff matrix enables designers to meet requirements more efficiently and accurately. This hypothesis is tested and the use of the tradeoff matrix is demonstrated by creating a consensus algorithm whose performance is evaluated through a simulation that compares the behaviour in a “bare-metal” versus a Cloud-based environment. This simulation approach drives the usage of one of the quality tradeoff parameters in achieving a more optimal solution.

From Fax to Blockchain: Sharing Health Information Democratically and Safely.

Information sharing in healthcare remains an unsolved problem despite a plethora of standards and architectures. Effective information sharing is difficult because of the heterogeneity of health information users and data sources, organisational, ethical and legislative constraints and the very demanding requirements of clinical practice. This paper argues that the key requirement of a viable sharing architecture is to support trust in the system and between stakeholders. It uses the concept of a "democratic" approach where citizens can control and verify the use and sharing of data about them and identify ways that some of the value extracted from the data could be assigned to the patient themselves. The reasons for the survival of obsolescent methods are used to inform the design of a proposed citizen-centric architecture using blockchain technology.

Applying Blockchain to the Australian Carbon Market

Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger system that establishes transparent contract processes and facilitates secure but trusted business transactions. Policy‐makers around the world are intrigued by the potential of this emerging technology to solve policy problems, including the challenges of the transition away from centralised, linear models of energy generation and consumption towards decentralised and distributed energy systems. Blockchain has also been promoted as a mechanism to transform carbon markets, yet the focus in this area to date has been on using blockchain to create new carbon market schemes. This paper addresses an important research gap by asking how blockchain could be applied to an existing carbon market. To answer this question, the study uses an established design process to develop an Australian carbon market blockchain design. The paper finds that this design could improve the efficiency, equity and effectiveness of the Australian carbon market. This paper makes an important research contribution to carbon market policy development by developing a blockchain design that could improve how an existing carbon market functions, and the findings presented here are relevant to government and industry stakeholders globally.

Intelligent design and implementation of blockchain and Internet of things–based traffic system

With the continuous development of Internet of things, all kinds of smart systems are quickly evolving to make our day-to-day life smoother and safer. Like many other sectors, transportation has entered a period of rapid change. Intelligent Traffic System is one of the fastest-growing fields within the smart systems, which is expected to increase road safety, mitigate traffic congestion, and enable fuel efficiency. The main functionalities of Intelligent Traffic System are as follows: (1) monitoring real-time traffic conditions in specific areas, (2) locating traffic emergencies (i.e. traffic accidents) in specific areas, and (3) dynamic monitoring and managing the continuous use in public transit services (i.e. change in car lanes) that may lead to changes in macro traffic conditions. This article will use the above-mentioned functionalities of the Intelligent Traffic System as underlying simulative scenarios, to design and to implement a smart transportation system based on Internet of things and blockchain—both share inherent distributed technology characteristics—combining both Internet of things sensor nodes and distributed ledger technology, to (1) record the changes in intelligent transportation systems and (2) set up a credit-token mechanism for paying the use and misuses in public transit services accordingly. The Intelligent Traffic System described in this article is intended to be used as experimental project only, given the terms and conditions as depicted in the simulated scenario. In real-life traffic scenarios, it may generate more complex system and data security issues, which will be elaborated and analyzed at the end of this article. Intelligent Traffic System is a comprehensive smart system; it can significantly change and reinvent the wheel for traffic conditions. Based on the system development as discussed in this article, there are still a lot of demands and challenges that need to be addressed in the future. Such topic scope will be explored in depth in our subsequent research.

Towards an Ontology-Driven Blockchain Design for Supply Chain Provenance

An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods -- e.g. tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods -- has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.

Some issues in blockchain for accounting and the supply chain, with an application of distributed databases to virtual organizations

SummaryThis paper reviews some recent blockchain‐based applications for information capture, distribution and preservation. As part of that review, this paper examines two key concerns with current blockchain designs for accounting and supply chain transactions: data independence and multiple semantic models for the same information distribution problem. Blockchain applications typically integrate database, application and presentation tiers all in the same ledger. This results in a general inability to query information in the ledger and other concerns. Further, since most applications appear to be private blockchain applications, there is a concern of agents needing to accommodate multiple blockchains depending on who their trading partners are and what they request. Finally, this paper uses a distributed database to design a ‘blockchain‐like’ system for virtual organizations.

Research Methodologies to Supportthe Development of Blockchain Standards

This paper dissects the research methodologies implemented by the Research Team for the Smart Contracts Working Group (TC-307/IT-041 Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies) in developing standards to inform best practice in the design and use of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. In doing so, it explores the origins of blockchain standardisation and outlines the high-level methodology for conducting and delivering research in this rapidly evolving space. Using three case studies, this paper shows how different tasks give rise to, and benefit from, specialised methodologies. These case studies also highlight a number of challenges and opportunities, and demonstrate how a flexible research approach can increase efficiency and generate findings that are likely to influence blockchain standardisation at a global level. Case Study 1 describes our research into the legal status of smart contracts and the challenge of delivering clear findings about unclear subject matter. Case Study 2, which involved examining the sufficiency of existing regulatory frameworks in the supply chain and trade facilitation context, illustrates how rigid formatting specifications can impact the content of findings. In contrast, Case Study 3 concerns a project to incorporate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals into new and existing Standards and shows how researchers’ knowledge can be harnessed as a valuable source of information in its own right. Finally, this paper extrapolates practical lessons for researchers who are interested in developing standards for emerging technologies, or simply undertaking much needed research into this area.

Regional Blockchain for Vehicular Networks to Prevent 51% Attacks

The next generation of vehicles will be autonomous, connected, electric, and intelligent with distinct requirements such as high mobility, low latency, real-time applications, seamless connectivity, and security. Blockchain can provide a good solution to the issue of secure message dissemination or secure information sharing in vehicular networks with a weak trust relationship among the nodes. In this paper, we investigate the design of a regional blockchain for VANETs, where the blockchain is shared among nodes in a geographically bounded area. We investigate how to design the regional blockchain while achieving a low 51% attack success probability. We derive a condition that guarantees a low 51% attack success probability in terms of the numbers of good nodes and malicious nodes, the message delivery time, and the puzzle computation time. The condition can provide a useful guideline for selection of several control parameters guaranteeing the stable operation of the blockchain. We run several simulations to show the validity of the condition and investigate the effects of various parameters on the 51% attack success probability. Our analysis and simulation results show that maintaining a low message delivery time for good nodes is very important in protecting the stability of the blockchain system.

Analysis of Blockchain Solutions for IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

The Internet of Things (IoT) aims at connecting things to the Internet in a peer-to-peer paradigm for data collecting and data sharing in our daily life. A blockchain is an immutable append-only ledger maintained by a peer-to-peer network, where the whole network needs to reach a consensus on the transactional data stored on the ledger. With the decentralization nature, the design of IoT and blockchain aligns with each other well. Blockchain has been integrated with the IoT to solve the existing IoT problems. Our research focuses on analyzing the solutions proposed in academia and the methodologies used to integrate blockchain with the IoT. Through conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) on peer-reviewed, published articles on blockchain-based solutions for IoT, we gather the knowledge on current technical approaches implemented to integrate blockchain into the IoT. Majority of the research in this space is either at a conceptual level or at a very early stage. However, we only found 35 published papers with the real implementation of blockchain in the IoT platforms. We elicit the challenges of the IoT that were being addressed, and the detailed design of the blockchain-based solutions from two perspectives, namely data management and thing management. The evaluation methods and metrics used by those works are also being recorded and analyzed. In addition to the analysis of the literature, we provide our insights on improving the existing solutions and research methodology based on our expertise and experience on the blockchain.

MedChain: A Design of Blockchain-Based System for Medical Records Access and Permissions Management

Although the blockchain technology was first introduced through Bitcoin, extending its usage to non-financial applications, such as managing electronic medical records, is an attractive mission for recent research to balance the needs for increasing data privacy and the regular interaction among patients and health providers. Various systems that adopts the blockchain in managing medical records have been proposed. However, there is a need for more work to better characterize, understand and evaluate the employment of blockchain technology in the healthcare industry. In this paper, a design of blockchain based system, namely MedChain, for managing medical records is proposed. MedChain is designed to improve the current systems as it provides interoperable, secure, and effective access for medical records by patients, health care providers, and other third parties, while keeping the patients' privacy. MedChain employs timed-based smart contracts for governing transactions and controlling accesses to electronic medical records. It adopts advanced encryption techniques for providing further security. This work proposes a new incentive mechanism that leverages the degree of health providers regarding their efforts on maintaining medical records and creating new blocks. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the MedChain performance, and results indicate the efficiency of our proposal in handling a large dataset at low latency.

Democratic Blockchain Design

Democracy requires rules that are designed to prevent the abuse of power and money. Blockchain technology is sometimes heralded as a solution to mitigate the problems associated with voting procedures, such as counting errors, fraud,or the improper use of money to influence the outcome of the collective choice procedure. In this article, I argue that the democratic potential of the blockchain hinges on the specific design of the rules governing the validation of blocks.In support of this argument, I shed light on the governance problems raised by standard protocols such as proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, and on-chain voting.

Blockchain Design for Supply Chain Management

Blockchain related research is still in its infancy, and is mostly focused on security and scalability. Very little of this research examines at its impact and design issues from management perspectives, especially from the perspective of Supply Chain Management (SCM). To investigate the impact of blockchain technology (BCT) on SCM and the inherent design issues, we consider a generic stochastic model, where a firm seeks to maximize the total expected discounted profit, by jointly managing (i) blockchain design, (ii) production and ordering decisions, and (iii) dynamic pricing and selling. We first show that the deployment of BCT can assist firms in reducing order quantities, lowering selling prices and reducing target-inventory levels. It is also shown that volatility of either supply or demand lowers the expected profit. The analysis is robust with some major extensions, such as lost-sales of demand and random capacity. Finally, our numerical study accumulates useful managerial insights. For example, subject to tech-savvy customer behavior, some types of goods (e.g., credence goods and experience goods) greatly benefit from the adoption of BCT, but it may not prove beneficial to leverage BCT for certain others (e.g., search goods). Considering the lifecycle of a typical good, it is recommended to adopt BCT as early as possible and to adopt it to a higher degree at an earlier stage.

Crypto Public Choice

This paper presents ‘crypto public choice’ which examines the economics of collective decision making in the functioning of blockchain protocols and among related communities of users. We introduce the blockchain community to public choice theory and show how it can be applied to the study of this technology. Public choice offers an extensive literature that can be applied to blockchain design, can interpret the actions of different types of blockchain users, and can explain governance problems and challenges in each of the blockchain protocols. Blockchains are institutional technologies which provide new ways in which to produce public goods including consensus over shared facts and the security of property rights. Collective decision making by users of blockchain protocols relates to consensus over the contents of a shared ledger, as well as the initial design and subsequent upgrading of these protocols.

ApproxBC: Blockchain Design Alternatives for Approximation-Tolerant Resource-Constrained Applications

Blockchains are known to provide verifiable tamper-resistant trails of accepted transactions. This guarantee comes at the considerable cost of storage and computational power, thereby restricting its application. Current research has focused on alternatives such as proof of reputation, proof of stake, and proof of elapsed-time to reduce the computational burden on the blockchain participants. Orthogonal to this effort, we focus on a specific set of applications that cannot commit much storage space and computational resources, but require only reasonable guarantees on the validity of transactions. To this end, we introduce blockchain design alternatives, collectively called ApproxBC, that can provide proof of transactions with provable confidence bounds. Consequently, ApproxBC can considerably reduce the computation and storage resources required, making them suitable for resource-constrained Internet of Things environments. We also showcase two approximation-tolerant applications that can leverage the quicker computation and smaller storage requirements.

Toward an ontology‐driven blockchain design for supply‐chain provenance

SummaryAn interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods (e.g., tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods) has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, interorganizational, often internationally spanning supply chains. Recent adoptions of the Internet of Things and blockchain technologies give promise at better supply‐chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain, as many favored use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies, as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.

Design of Outcome-based Education Blockchain

Design of Outcome-based Education Blockchain

Designing Privacy-Preserving Blockchain Based Accounting Information Systems

Blockchain is one of the most disruptive and promising emerging technologies, and it appears to have the potential for significantly affecting the accounting and auditing fields. Using blockchain technology, zero-knowledge proof and homomorphic encryption, this paper proposes a design of Blockchain based Accounting Information System and develops a prototype to demonstrate the functionality of the Blockchain based Accounting Information System in real-time accounting, continuous monitoring and continuous auditing as well as fraud detection. The computational performance of blockchain versus relational databases is evaluated and discussed. It is expected that blockchain would be a widely applicable infrastructure to support enterprise information systems and continuous auditing systems.

Polymer Design and Incorporation Methods for Polymeric Micelle Carrier System Containing Water-insoluble Anti-cancer Agent Camptothecin

A water-insoluble anti-cancer agent, camptothecin (CPT) was incorporated to a polymeric micelle carrier system forming from poly(ethylene glycol)–poly(aspartate) block copolymers. Incorporation efficiency and stability were analyzed in correlation with chemical structures of the inner core-forming hydrophobic blocks as well as with incorporation methods. Among three incorporation methods (dialysis, emulsion and evaporation methods), an evaporation method brought about much higher CPT yields with less aggregation than the other two methods. By the evaporation method, CPT was incorporated to polymeric micelles in considerably high yields and with high stability using block copolymers possessing high contents of benzyl and methylnaphtyl ester groups as hydrophobic moieties. This indicates importance of molecular design of the hydrophobic block chain to obtain targeting using polymeric micelle carriers as well as importance of the drug incorporation method.