Smart and Secure Blockchain Structure to Track Vehicle Record-keeping in the Sultanate of Oman

In the country of Sultanate of Oman, the Royal Oman Police (ROP) is responsible for carrying out the Inspection, Registration/Renewal, Transfer of ownership, Licensing of a vehicle and the Investigation of traffic accidents. The traditional system used for storing this information does not guarantee whether any information has been tampered with or manipulated. Having a tamper-proof methodology like Blockchain to capture this important information in a distributed ledger register can enable all the participants in the Registration Chain (Supplier of the vehicle, Owner of the vehicle, various Government Agencies and public at large) to gain confidence, build trust and authenticate records that are maintained by the centralised agency. In this paper, a groundbreaking solution built on Hyperledger Besu, a permissioned Ethereum blockchain platform, is introduced that offers a revolutionary approach to vehicle registration and management. It ensures secure and immutable vehicle registration, utilizing IPFS for document storage and ERC-20 tokens to track vehicle history. This Ethereum-powered system facilitates transparent ownership transfers, comprehensive vehicle history tracking, streamlined insurance renewals, seamless vehicle inspections, real-time tracking, and blockchain-based verification, all contributing to heightened efficiency and trust in vehicle processes for the Omani government. By integrating blockchain technology, this solution addresses the challenges of data integrity, security, and transparency that have long plagued the vehicle registration and transfer processes in Oman. This paper highlights the potential of blockchain to revolutionize governmental services and improve the overall efficiency and trustworthiness of vehicle-related transactions, ultimately benefiting both the government and citizens alike

A Mobile and Web Platform for Crowdsourcing OBD-II Vehicle Data

On-Board Diagnostics 2 (OBD-II) protocol allows monitoring vehicle status parameters. Analyzing them is highly useful for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) research, applications and services. Unfortunately, large-scale OBD datasets are not publicly available due to the effort of producing them as well as due to competitiveness in the automotive sector. This paper proposes a framework to enable a worldwide crowdsourcing approach to the generation of OBD-II data, similarly to OpenStreetMap (OSM) for cartography. The proposal comprises: (i) an extension of the GPX data format for route logging, augmented with OBD-II parameters; (ii) a fork of an open source Android OBD-II data logger to store and upload route traces, and (iii) a Web platform extending the OSM codebase to support storage, search and editing of traces with embedded OBD data. A full platform prototype has been developed and early scalability tests have been carried out in various workloads to assess the sustainability of the proposal