Location Information Verification for Reliable Resource Collaboration in Sharing Economy

In recent years, businesses related with the sharing economy are growing, but there can be situations where profits are unevenly distributed among users, or platforms are discontinued due to the decisions of the companies providing the platforms. Therefore, building a decentralized, reliable, and sustainble sharing economy management system on the blockchain which is constructed using the computational resources of the platform's stakeholders of the business is attracting attention. However, the management system built on the blockchain can guarantee the integrity of data after registered to the platform but cannot guarantee the integrity of data before the registration. Therefore, this study proposes a method to guarantee the integrity of the data throughout its lifecycle. Assuming a logistics system as an application example of the sharing economy, the location information of transporters is the target of the integrity verification. The proposed method verifies the reality of time changes of location information registered to the blockchain and the reliability of location information for a specific location. To verify that the transporter is passing the specific point, the system exchanges information that can be obtained only at that point and time by using acoustic communication only when the IoT device installed at that point and the transporter's device are in the vicinity. Furthermore, we prototype the system and clarify whether it can be verified that a transporter is correcly passing the specific point or not.