Public Participation Consortium Blockchain for Smart City Governance

Abstract

Smart cities have become a trend with improved efficiency, resilience, and sustainability, providing citizens with high quality of life. With the increasing demand for a more participatory and bottom–up governance approach, citizens play an active role in the process of policy making, revolutionizing the management of smart cities. In the example of urban infrastructure maintenance, the public participation demand is more remarkable as the infrastructure condition is closely related to their daily life. Although blockchain has been widely explored to benefit data collection and processing in smart city governance, public engagement remains a challenge. In this article, we propose a novel public participation consortium blockchain system for infrastructure maintenance that is expected to encourage citizens to actively participate in the decision-making process and enable them to witness all administrative procedures in a real-time manner. To that aim, we introduced a hybrid blockchain architecture to involve a verifier group, which is randomly and dynamically selected from the public citizens, to verify the transaction. In particular, we devised a private-prior peer-prediction-based truthful verification mechanism to tackle the collusion attacks from public verifiers. Then, we specified a Stackelberg-game-based incentive mechanism for encouraging public participation. Finally, we conducted extensive simulations to reveal the properties and performances of our proposed blockchain system, which indicates its superiority over other variations.