Blockchain and smart contracts for insurance: Is the technology mature enough?

Blockchain is receiving increasing attention from academy and industry, since it is considered a breakthrough technology that could bring huge benefits to many different sectors. In 2017, Gartner positioned blockchain close to the peak of inflated expectations, acknowledging the enthusiasm for this technology that is now largely discussed by media. In this scenario, the risk to adopt it in the wake of enthusiasm, without objectively judging its actual added value is rather high. Insurance is one the sectors that, among others, started to carefully investigate the possibilities of blockchain. For this specific sector, however, the hype cycle shows that the technology is still in the innovation trigger phase, meaning that the spectrum of possible applications has not been fully explored yet. Insurers, as with many other companies not necessarily active only in the financial sector, are currently requested to make a hard decision, that is, whether to adopt blockchain or not, and they will only know if they were right in 3â\u80\u935 years. The objective of this paper is to support actors involved in this decision process by illustrating what a blockchain is, analyzing its advantages and disadvantages, as well as discussing several use cases taken from the insurance sector, which could easily be extended to other domains

A Study of Blockchain Framework–Hyperledger Fabric and Implementation as Educational Network

Blockchain, the foundation for Bitcoin, has gained lots of attention recently. Blockchain works as a distributed ledger technology that allows information exchange to take place in a distributed way, and ledger is immutable. Blockchain database removes the necessity of the centralized system; therefore, applications based on Blockchain are getting high in number. This paper covers an discuss in detail of blockchain technology, and its consensus algorithms along with workflow, how trust has will be upon a system having no centralized system. This paper also studies various frameworks being built upon the blockchain systems and how they are helpful in solving many organizational issues and Developing of an application on an existing blockchain framework which is an access based system, has information regarding academic records, certifications and eligibility requirement examination records belong to a person, who can share with any organization, eliminating the need of physical documents

Joint optimisation of drone routing and battery wear for sustainable supply chain development: a mixed-integer programming model based on blockchain-enabled fleet sharing

Alongside the rise of ‘last-mile’ delivery in contemporary urban logistics, drones have demonstrate commercial potential, given their outstanding triple-bottom-line performance. However, as a lithium-ion battery-powered device, drones’ social and environmental merits can be overturned by battery recycling and disposal. To maintain economic performance, yet minimise environmental negatives, fleet sharing is widely applied in the transportation field, with the aim of creating synergies within industry and increasing overall fleet use. However, if a sharing platform’s transparency is doubted, the sharing ability of the platform will be discounted. Known for its transparent and secure merits, blockchain technology provides new opportunities to improve existing sharing solutions. In particular, the decentralised structure and data encryption algorithm offered by blockchain allow every participant equal access to shared resources without undermining security issues. Therefore, this study explores the implementation of a blockchain-enabled fleet sharing solution to optimise drone operations, with consideration of battery wear and disposal effects. Unlike classical vehicle routing with fleet sharing problems, this research is more challenging, with multiple objectives (i.e., shortest path and fewest charging times), and considers different levels of sharing abilities. In this study, we propose a mixed-integer programming model to formulate the intended problem and solve the problem with a tailored branch-and-price algorithm. Through extensive experiments, the computational performance of our proposed solution is first articulated, and then the effectiveness of using blockchain to improve overall optimisation is reflected, and a series of critical influential factors with managerial significance are demonstrated

Blockchain-Empowered Fair Computational Resource Sharing System in the D2D Network

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is becoming an increasingly important technology in future networks with the climbing demand for local services. For instance, resource sharing in the D2D network features ubiquitous availability, flexibility, low latency and low cost. However, these features also bring along challenges when building a satisfactory resource sharing system in the D2D network. Specifically, user mobility is one of the top concerns for designing a cooperative D2D computational resource sharing system since mutual communication may not be stably available due to user mobility. A previous endeavour has demonstrated and proven how connectivity can be incorporated into cooperative task scheduling among users in the D2D network to effectively lower average task execution time. There are doubts about whether this type of task scheduling scheme, though effective, presents fairness among users. In other words, it can be unfair for users who contribute many computational resources while receiving little when in need. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based credit system that can be incorporated into the connectivity-aware task scheduling scheme to enforce fairness among users in the D2D network. Users’ computational task cooperation will be recorded on the public blockchain ledger in the system as transactions, and each user’s credit balance can be easily accessible from the ledger. A supernode at the base station is responsible for scheduling cooperative computational tasks based on user mobility and user credit balance. We investigated the performance of the credit system, and simulation results showed that with a minor sacrifice of average task execution time, the level of fairness can obtain a major enhancement.Applied Science, Faculty ofElectrical and Computer Engineering, Department ofReviewedFacult