Shared Mobility Intelligence Using Permissioned Blockchains for Smart Cities

Suggesting tourists/residents about the pollution-free locations and controlling the number of passengers in a shareable vehicle have become crucial tasks to smart city officials as they plummet health issues such as asthma or COVID-19. Recently, city authorities, transport logistic designers, and policymakers have tasked researchers/entrepreneurs to innovate in shared mobility systems. This paper proposes a Blockchain-Enabled Shared Mobility (BESM) architecture that allocates seats to residents/tourists in a shareable vehicle based on air quality and COVID-19 information of traveling locations. BESM involves smart city authorities, vehicle owners, hospital authorities, and residents using permissioned-blockchains to collaboratively decide on allocating travel seats. Experiments were carried out at the IoT Cloud research laboratory to manifest the allocation of seats. For instance, BESM excluded in allocating seats to asthma patients and limited the number of travelers in the cities where COVID-19 cases or pollution levels were higher in numbers using BESM. The pollution levels of cities were monitored using air quality monitoring sensors or predicted using a few prediction algorithms such as Random Forests (RF), Linear Regression (LR), Quantile Regression (QR), Ridge Regression (RR), Lasso Regression (LaR), ElasticNet Regression (ER), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Recursive Partitioning (RP). In succinct, the article unfolded the primordial importance of the proposed BESM architecture for promoting efficient shared mobility aspects in smart cities.