A Transition Towards Decentralized Service Market: Blockchain-based Enablers, Challenges, and Solutions

Traditional service markets enable the efficient trading of a variety of services through a centralized platform, acting as an intermediary between service providers and customers. However, this centralization raises concerns about power abuse, corruption, and scalability. Decentralization of service markets addresses these issues by directly exchanging data between service providers, but it introduces trust challenges to distributed data sharing. This study explores the use of blockchain technology to establish trust and security in decentralized service markets, managing trade-offs between decentralization, scalability, and security. Focusing on applications in transportation, such as Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), and autonomous vehicles, this work investigates the potential of blockchain-based service markets to facilitate collaboration in various sectors.

The dissertation studies the core components of distributed ledger technologies: system design, deployment, and confidentiality. This work proposes a blockchain-based MaaS system design for the service market and discusses the potential usage of blockchain, along with associated challenges in distributed data sharing. Additionally, confidentiality in blockchain-based interactive systems is examined through zero-knowledge argument schemes, with a comparison of their advantages and disadvantages. The performance regarding decentralized autonomous operation based on blockchain technology is considered via various updating capacities. The deployment of a blockchain-based service market is analyzed using two types of blockchain platforms—permissioned and permissionless—to represent access requirements. A performance comparison and proposed technique framework for blockchain platform selection are also provided.