Blockchain Standard Accelerates Decarbonization, Circular Economy, and Track and Trace

Transportation GHG emissions account for nearly a third of global emissions. They are also expected to grow at a faster rate than any other sector, posing a major challenge in moving towards a low carbon economy. Blockchain has been highlighted as one of the emerging technologies to lessen carbon-intensive practices by organizations such as the United Nations, the European Commission, and the World Economic Forum.

MOBI and its members – among which stands the Politecnico di Torino through the Department of Control and Computer Engineering-DAUIN - released the Trusted Trip Standard for track and trace applications that unlock almost every decentralized use case imaginable for on-demand, personalized, usage-based mobility, including carbon tracking and pollution taxing. The standard aims to make transportation more sustainable, equitable, and accessible.

A trip is the journey of a roaming entity — such as a person, smartphone, vehicle, package, or EV battery — from one place to another. It is also the basic unit of information for monetizing mobility in a services economy for consumers, providers, and infrastructure owners. For a trip to be useful and trusted by all parties in the transaction, a roaming entity’s verified decentralized identity must be linked with its location in space and time throughout its journey, along with a minimum set of industry-accepted proofs for each use case. Blockchain acts as a trust anchor in a decentralized network, allowing third parties/entities in the network to verify ongoing and completed Trusted Trips. 

Why is decentralized identity important? As our lives are increasingly linked to apps, devices, and services, we are often subject to data breaches and privacy loss. A standards-based decentralized identity system can provide greater security, privacy, and control over personal and organizational data. 

MOBI Trusted Trip is the key primitive enabling smart mobility including track and trace up and down the supply chain. It will enable scaling, incentivizing, and monetization of a multitude of new and existing use cases in smart and low-carbon mobility. Current use cases being demonstrated by the MOBI community are: supply chain parts traceability for EV batteries, electric vehicle maintenance such as battery state of health (SOH), trusted carbon emissions tracking to verify emissions claims, usage-based fees such as tolling, insurance, and electric charging/sharing, curbside management, incentives and rewards for sustainable behavior, dealer floorplan audit to reduce the cost of vehicle ownership, future use cases being considered include verification of green energy sources and verification chain of custody of vehicle parts.

MOBI Trusted Trip standard was made possible by the contributions of these organizations: Accenture, AWS, BMW Group, Cara7, Car IQ, CEVT, CPChain, Deutscher Auto Dienst GmbH (DAD), Dana, DENSO, EU Commission, Ford, Global Battery Alliance (GBA), General Motors (GM), Hitachi America, Ltd., IOTA Foundation, IoTeX, ITOCHU, MEF Forum, Nara Institute, NuCypher, Politecnico di Torino, R3, Reply, Swedish Blockchain Association, Toyota Industries Corporation, University of Urbino, and USAA.

MOBI is a nonprofit alliance of many of the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers, suppliers, startups, governments, transit agencies, NGOs, insurers/financial institutions, toll road providers, smart city leaders, and technology companies working to accelerate adoption and promote standards in blockchain, distributed ledgers, and related technologies. MOBI and its members are creating simple blockchain-based standards to identify vehicles, people, businesses, and MOBI Trusted Trip in order to securely exchange and share data, and pay for mobility services, with the goal of making transportation more efficient, democratic, affordable, greener, safer, and less congested.

Press release provided by MOBI. Read more at dlt.mobi