Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (3) (remove)
Document Type
Language
- English (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3)
Keywords
- Blockchain (3) (remove)
RailChain
(2023)
The RailChain project designed, implemented, and experimentally evaluated a juridical recorder that is based on a distributed consensus protocol. That juridical blockchain recorder has been realized as distributed ledger on board the advanced TrainLab (ICE-TD 605 017) of Deutsche Bahn.
For the project, a consortium consisting of DB Systel, Siemens, Siemens Mobility, the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering, Technische Universität Braunschweig, TÜV Rheinland InterTraffic, and Spherity has been formed. These partners not only concentrated competencies in railway operation, computer science, regulation, and approval, but also combined experiences from industry, research from academia, and enthusiasm from startups.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) define distributed databases and express a digital protocol for transactions between business partners without the need for a trusted intermediary. The implementation of a blockchain with real-time requirements for the local network of a railway system (e.g., interlocking or train) allows to log data in the distributed system verifiably in real-time. For this, railway-specific assumptions can be leveraged to make modifications to standard blockchains protocols.
EULYNX and OCORA (Open CCS On-board Reference Architecture) are parts of a future European reference architecture for control command and signalling (CCS, Reference CCS Architecture – RCA). Both architectural concepts outline heterogeneous IT systems with components from multiple manufacturers. Such systems introduce novel challenges for the approved and safety-relevant CCS of railways which were considered neither for road-side nor for on-board systems so far. Logging implementations, such as the common juridical recorder on vehicles, can no longer be realized as a central component of a single manufacturer. All centralized approaches are in question.
The research project RailChain is funded by the mFUND program and gives practical evidence that distributed consensus protocols are a proper means to immutably (for legal purposes) store state information of many system components from multiple manufacturers. The results of RailChain have been published, prototypically implemented, and experimentally evaluated in large-scale field tests on the advanced TrainLab. At the same time, the project showed how RailChain can be integrated into the road-side and on-board architecture given by OCORA and EULYNX.
Logged data can now be analysed sooner and also their trustworthiness is being increased. This enables, e.g., auditable predictive maintenance, because it is ensured that data is authentic and unmodified at any point in time.
Public administrations confront fundamental challenges, including globalization, digitalization, and an eroding level of trust from society. By developing joint public service delivery with other stakeholders, public administrations can respond to these challenges. This increases the importance of inter-organizational governance—a development often referred to as New Public Governance, which to date has not been realized because public administrations focus on intra-organizational practices and follow the traditional “governmental chain.”
E-government initiatives, which can lead to high levels of interconnected public services, are currently perceived as insufficient to meet this goal. They are not designed holistically and merely affect the interactions of public and non-public stakeholders. A fundamental shift toward a joint public service delivery would require scrutiny of established processes, roles, and interactions between stakeholders.
Various scientists and practitioners within the public sector assume that the use of blockchain institutional technology could fundamentally change the relationship between public and non-public stakeholders. At first glance, inter-organizational, joint public service delivery could benefit from the use of blockchain. This dissertation aims to shed light on this widespread assumption. Hence, the objective of this dissertation is to substantiate the effect of blockchain on the relationship between public administrations and non-public stakeholders.
This objective is pursued by defining three major areas of interest. First, this dissertation strives to answer the question of whether or not blockchain is suited to enable New Public Governance and to identify instances where blockchain may not be the proper solution. The second area aims to understand empirically the status quo of existing blockchain implementations in the public sector and whether they comply with the major theoretical conclusions. The third area investigates the changing role of public administrations, as the blockchain ecosystem can significantly increase the number of stakeholders.
Corresponding research is conducted to provide insights into these areas, for example, combining theoretical concepts with empirical actualities, conducting interviews with subject matter experts and key stakeholders of leading blockchain implementations, and performing a comprehensive stakeholder analysis, followed by visualization of its results.
The results of this dissertation demonstrate that blockchain can support New Public Governance in many ways while having a minor impact on certain aspects (e.g., decentralized control), which account for this public service paradigm. Furthermore, the existing projects indicate changes to relationships between public administrations and non-public stakeholders, although not necessarily the fundamental shift proposed by New Public Governance. Lastly, the results suggest that power relations are shifting, including the decreasing influence of public administrations within the blockchain ecosystem. The results raise questions about the governance models and regulations required to support mature solutions and the further diffusion of blockchain for public service delivery.
Smart contracts promise to reform the legal domain by automating clerical and procedural work, and minimizing the risk of fraud and manipulation. Their core idea is to draft contract documents in a way which allows machines to process them, to grasp the operational and non-operational parts of the underlying legal agreements, and to use tamper-proof code execution alongside established judicial systems to enforce their terms. The implementation of smart contracts has been largely limited by the lack of an adequate technological foundation which does not place an undue amount of trust in any contract party or external entity. Only recently did the emergence of Decentralized Applications (DApps) change this: Stored and executed via transactions on novel distributed ledger and blockchain networks, powered by complex integrity and consensus protocols, DApps grant secure computation and immutable data storage while at the same time eliminating virtually all assumptions of trust.
However, research on how to effectively capture, deploy, and most of all enforce smart contracts with DApps in mind is still in its infancy. Starting from the initial expression of a smart contract's intent and logic, to the operation of concrete instances in practical environments, to the limits of automatic enforcement---many challenges remain to be solved before a widespread use and acceptance of smart contracts can be achieved.
This thesis proposes a model-driven smart contract management approach to tackle some of these issues. A metamodel and semantics of smart contracts are presented, containing concepts such as legal relations, autonomous and non-autonomous actions, and their interplay. Guided by the metamodel, the notion and a system architecture of a Smart Contract Management System (SCMS) is introduced, which facilitates smart contracts in all phases of their lifecycle. Relying on DApps in heterogeneous multi-chain environments, the SCMS approach is evaluated by a proof-of-concept implementation showing both its feasibility and its limitations.
Further, two specific enforceability issues are explored in detail: The performance of fully autonomous tamper-proof behavior with external off-chain dependencies and the evaluation of temporal constraints within DApps, both of which are essential for smart contracts but challenging to support in the restricted transaction-driven and closed environment of blockchain networks. Various strategies of implementing or emulating these capabilities, which are ultimately applicable to all kinds of DApp projects independent of smart contracts, are presented and evaluated.