PEBERS: Practical Ethereum Blockchain based Efficient Ride Hailing Service
Sowmya Kudva, Renat Norderhaug, Shahriar Badsha, Shamik Sengupta, A. S. M. Kayes
Abstract
Although the current ride hailing services have revolutionized the transportation industry in today's world, they are extremely centralized. Central authority has all the control and maintains data about the users. Such platforms raise concerns about the service policies and data reliability. In case the central server faces data tampering or ransomware attacks, all the records of data is either lost or compromised. Blockchain has gained exceptional recognition while addressing aforementioned issues because of its decentralized data auditability, anonymity and immutability. Research on blockchain technology explores the possibility of implementing decentralized application in ride hailing service. Blockchain based ride hailing architecture gives us the opportunity to deviate from centralized platforms to decentralized ones. In this paper we propose our system PEBERS: Practical Ethereum Blockchain based Efficient Ride Hailing Service, in which we demonstrate how decentralized system based on consortium blockchain can be developed to keep track of ride data. In this context we explore smart contracts to build and deploy functionalities such as create ride, auto deposit transfer, cancel and complete ride methods of our decentralized ride hailing application. Our experiments show the driver smart contracts proposed in our system consume less Gas and hence prove that its an efficient system than many other existing systems with respect to the expenses of passengers and profitability of drivers. This is an effort towards providing smarter transportation for a society moving towards smart city concept.