Design and development of an intelligent transportation management system using blockchain and smart contracts

The automated toll-tax collection system (ATCS) is advantageous to facilitate traffic management at the toll plaza and to save fuel for vehicles. The most advanced application of the electronic toll collection (ETC) system is to collect the toll-tax amount (TA) at toll plazas of the national highways. The few existing TA collection systems suffer from data security, transparency, privacy, and data immutability as these are centralized systems. As the Blockchain is a decentralized, transparent, secure, and low-cost technology. However, this paper presents an intelligent transportation management system (I-TMS) using Blockchain. The proposed I-TMS shows the way of implementation of blockchain technology for vehicle data management in various applications of I-TMS. Herein, a framework of blockchain-enabled ATCS (BATCS) is provided as a blockchain-based I-TMS application to collect TAs without stopping vehicles while they pass the toll plaza. Smart contracts are used to authenticate vehicles’ data and to collect TAs automatically. An efficient algorithm is presented for data verification and TA collection in this paper. This research work provides a secure, transparent, and privacy-preserving framework in the field of the ETC system. The significant contributions of the BATCS compared with the RFID-based system are less fuel consumption and time-saving for a vehicle. The proposed framework can enhance data security and user privacy in the intelligent decentralized ETC system.