Search results for "Smart Contract"
showing 10 items of 29 documents
Leveraging Partnerships with Logistics Service Providers in Humanitarian Supply Chains by Blockchain-based Smart Contracts
2019
As humanitarian organizations are struggling to reach an increasing number of beneficiaries, humanitarian-business partnerships, such as the use of logistics service providers (LSPs), promise to improve effectivity and efficiency of humanitarian assistance. Blockchain-based smart contracts which ensure automation, transparency, and efficiency promise to facilitate partnerships, particularly if trust is low. In this paper, blockchain-based smart contracts are critically examined for their application to humanitarian supply chains (HSCs). We identify various adoption barriers which we categorize into organizational, technological, and environmental. As the use of blockchain-based smart contra…
A Smart Contract Based Recommender System
2019
Nowadays information available on the World Wide Web has reached unprecedented growth and it makes difficult for users to find the most relevant for them. In order to alleviate such issue, Recommender Systems (RSs) have been proposed to collect opinions and preferences about a set of items, process such preferences and build a personalized information access. While the most part of current RSs exploit centralized architecture to provide the service, in this manuscript we propose an alternative approach for building a general purpose RSs that provides to users with more transparent and decentralized rating strategy. Indeed, the proposed framework is built on top of a Distributed Ledger techn…
AgriChain: Blockchain Syntactic and Semantic Validation for Reducing Information Asymmetry In Agri-Food
2022
Information asymmetry affects the actors of all the segments of the agri-food supply chain and can arise many problems in the market along the production chain. Transactions of agri-food products are asymmetric because suppliers and buyers have different levels of knowledge on the provenance, value, quality, and freshness of food. Collusive relations among the agri-food chain actors, especially between controllers companies and controlled ones, can cause market failures as they influence customers’ purchase decisions and severe health accidents when food safety is compromised. This paper proposes using blockchain technology to combat information asymmetry and collusive relations. In additio…
Tracing battery usage for second life market with a blockchain-based framework
2021
This work describes the design of a platform based on a permissioned blockchain for sharing relevant information among the actors involved in grid service provision programs. The information collected by a proprietary monitoring on-board system accessing the central unit of the Electric Vehicle, EV, is then sent to a dropbox folder owned by the car owner and then written on a blockchain platform. The platform could be supplied from similar data from the grid operator collected on the grid during the provision of services. In this way data can be validated and used for tracing the health status of the EV's battery. The design of customized smart contract allows to acquire the profiles of bat…
Challenges and directions for Blockchain technology applied to Demand Response and Vehicle-to-Grid scenarios
2021
Abstract Nowadays, Blockchain is considered a consolidated technology supporting many different applications that integrate well with Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things, and supports the creation of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Within this wider framework, the energy blockchain applications are now deserving more and more attention, since blockchain architectures, on one hand, provide transparency and solve the information asymmetry problem, on the other, provide disintermediation. In this way, the dream of an energy market closer to end-users becomes a reality, although, still, the regulatory framework is not clear, especially for what concerns the tokenization o…
Using Blockchain in Digitalizing Enterprise Legacy Systems: An Experience Report
2021
Blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology (DLT) offer a secure, distributed, and tamper-proof way to store and exchange information. However, apart from standard cryptocurrency-based networks, innovations and process improvements based on the blockchain technology have mostly remained on the conceptualizing stage and have not yet reached mass adoption. There is a high demand for practical experiences from developing blockchain and DLT based systems in various domains outside FinTech. This work seeks to contribute to this gap by presenting real-world experiences from developing a proof of concept for automatizing conditional payments in social benefits and healthcare domains. W…
Agri-food Supply Chain Traceability for Fruit and Vegetable Cooperatives Using Blockchain Technology
2019
Blockchain se ha convertido en una tecnología disruptiva que tiene la capacidad de transformar la industria agroalimentaria, puesto que promete resolver muchos problemas relacionados con la falta de confianza en la trazabilidad y el producto que adquieren los consumidores. Sin embargo, las partes implicadas en la cadena de suministro de productos agroalimentarios son numerosas y están físicamente dispersas, lo que dificulta el manejo de datos e información. Como resultado, el proceso de producción no es transparente y la confianza es difícil de construir. Para ser más exitosas en la economía globalizada actual, las cooperativas deben focalizarse en ofrecer mayor transparencia. Este document…
Blockchain-based DR logic: a trade-off between system operator's and customer's needs
2020
This paper describes a way to include the end users of the electrical network in the Demand Response mechanism using the Blockchain technology and the Smart Contract concepts, thus developing a distributed system where customers can communicate directly with the system operator to provide their flexibility in a transparent, secure and traceable way.The historical data on energy consumption and production of the customers is recorded on the Blockchain, with the Smart Contract evaluating the baseline and the potential support that each customer can provide to fulfill the requested load adaptation communicated by the grid operator. The baseline and the optimal power reduction for a customer (e…
A new architecture for Smart Contracts definition in Demand Response Programs
2019
The present paper shows the possibility to use a smart contract for defining a distributed Demand Response mechanism. The use of the blockchain and smart contracts for the Demand Response mechanism allows the creation of an automatic system, where network users can communicate with the DSO to provide their flexibility. The blockchain ensures that the same information is shared among the users of the grid, while preserving user privacy. The DSO notifies the request to increase or reduce the load in a given period of the day using channels, a native abstraction of Hyperledger Fabric. The smart contract computes the support provided by each user to fulfill the requested load adaptation and aut…
Challenges and Opportunities using MultiChain for Real Estate
2019
The real estate market involves multiple untrusted actors with contrasting objectives. We propose REchain, a blockchain-based platform for real estate, which provides benefits to all actors in terms of transparency, trust, immutability, and traceability. REchain architecture handles real estate data through well-defined workflows that leverage the MultiChain platform. REchain changes the real estate market enabling direct transactions without intermediaries, and providing new mechanisms for negotiating the purchase conditions. This paper refutes the misleading idea of using blockchains for solving generic problems as blockchain platforms have peculiar features that make them suitable for sp…