Blockchain and Knowledge Representation for Service-oriented Smart Mobility Platforms

The Smart Mobility vision calls for dynamic resource and service discovery to cope with the intrinsic topology volatility of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms without sacrificing the required business continuity and service flexibility. For an extended automation of collaboration within and across enterprise boundaries, trust management is equally important, granting security, reliability and scalability at the same time. To tackle the above challenges, this paper proposes the integration of a semantic-based service management layer in an IoT infrastructure grounded on the Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain. Every service in the outlined framework is annotated with reference to a domain ontology, so that smart contracts can exploit knowledge representation and non-standard reasoning for service registration, discovery, outcomes explanation and service selection. A case study on power management of Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) is proposed to clarify the benefits of the proposal. Early performance evaluation results support the feasibility and sustainability of the approach.