Article Highlights
One of the major roadblocks to making MaaS a reality is that the public and private mobility providers that need to be part of any successful MaaS scheme may also be competitors. This can lead to a lack of trust among the parties and a reluctance on their part to share data. Blockchain can help enable business rules to be carried out with integrity, trust and transparency.
Distributed ledger with blockchain can record anonymized travel history and fares after the players reach consensus.
• Sony Corp.
It seems that city leaders and other officials around the world are pinning their hopes on mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) to help them reduce traffic congestion, slash greenhouse gas emissions and improve mobility for the masses.
One of the major roadblocks to making MaaS a reality is that the public and private mobility providers that need to be part of any successful MaaS scheme may also be competitors. This can lead to a lack of trust among the parties and a reluctance on their part to share data.
That is especially true for MaaS platforms that are normally centralized. Ideally, all public transit agencies, public transportation operators and private mobility providers, such as ride-hailing and scooter-rental services, should operate under the same rules of governance, with roughly equal rights and access to data. In short, they should be playing on a level playing field.
MaaS transactions can contain financially sensitive information and other private data. That is why MaaS schemes usually require complex arrangements among participants in the schemes before any data exchange can take place.
A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger with data arranged in blocks, which are chained together in an append-only mode. This open and distributed approach to managing data means that the MaaS scheme can automatically apply business rules to manage data for a group or consortium. That helps explain why blockchain applications are already revolutionizing many sectors, including secure sharing of medical data, tracking music royalties, real estate processing and supply chain logistics, to name a few.
In general, mobility providers want to collaborate with other providers as part of a MaaS scheme. But providers would not like to disclose their data to competitors.
Distributed ledger with blockchain can record anonymized travel history and fares after the players reach consensus.
Each player can confirm recorded anonymous travel history data and revenue sharing. But non-related competitors cannot see each other’s sensitive business data. The parties to a MaaS scheme can define business rules about who can access which data.
Protecting Sensitive Business Data in a MaaS Scheme
Blockchain, therefore, can help enable business rules to be carried out with integrity, trust and transparency. This, in turn, could help bring together the industry to enable further MaaS development.
While a distributed ledger architecture could provide a foundation for the type of open and decentralized infrastructure needed to solve some of the challenges highlighted above, many industry observers believe blockchain is unsuited for MaaS. They think it is too slow to handle the huge volume of transactions that needs to be rapidly processed as part of a MaaS scheme.
The doubts about the suitability of using blockchain technology for MaaS proved to be premature, however.
For example, we developed a blockchain common database for MaaS applications that can handle more than 7 million transactions per day to record and share anonymous travel histories and perform clearing and settlement of transactions for a range of mobility providers.
A Blockchain Challenge program by the Netherlands Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management confirmed last year that our blockchain common data base solution could meet their required specifications for sharing large-scale movement history and revenue allocation for MaaS.
All of this means that blockchain technology offers a high potential to establish trusted data management for an emerging MaaS ecosystem, including ensuring integrity and transparent sharing of data among the relevant parties. This will help to accelerate further development of MaaS in the market.
Takashi Togame is incubation manager for Sony Corp. and is one of the creators of Sony’s blockchain common database for MaaS applications.
