Over the past decade there has been a significant level of investment throughout Europe in the digitalisation of the rail network. This includes the installation of sensors on the infrastructure and vehicles, the deployment of next generation traffic management systems that allow real-time management of the system, and the provision of mobile applications for passengers and staff. Despite the wealth of new data provided by these systems, the railways are still struggling in their aspiration to be an information-led industry due to a lack of traceability of information usage, and the commercial barriers between stakeholders.
Blockchains are a disruptive technology that have the potential to accelerate the development of rail as the primary medium-distance carrier within the wider multi-modal transportation system. The B4CM project was established to identify key use cases for the technology within the railways, and deliver a blockchain-based testbed that would enable the benefits of the technology to be formally evaluated. The work would centre on the potential of the ledgers to enable a deeper understanding of data value chains, particularly in cross organisational contexts, such as remote condition monitoring, where there are well understood issues in fair attribution of costs and benefits.
B4CM had the following research and training objectives:
Objective 1: To identify and develop use cases that support the application of blockchain in the railway sector;
Objective 2: To develop an implementable blockchain framework for the attribution of data costs in systems crossing organisational boundaries;
Objective 3: To evaluate mechanisms for the incorporation of the developed blockchain framework into the financial processes of the European rail sector;
Objective 4: To develop a testbed, demonstrating the operation of the framework in the context of rail sector, enabling future developers to extend the tools produced based on a known working configuration;
Objective 5: To disseminate the findings of the project and the lessons learned to influence best practice in innovation and technology uptake in a key and evolving field within the European rail sector;
Objective 6: To support the development of a researcher in gaining a PhD and thus generating a skilled specialist valuable to the European rail sector.
Over the course of the project, the B4CM team demonstrated that it was possible to develop a blockchain based system to audit condition monitoring data transfers, and showed how, through a combination of off-chain storage on on-chain hashes, data could be accessed and verified by consumers without incurring the huge computational overhead that would be associated with directly storing the exchanged data on-chain. Awareness of the technology was also raised within the industry, and academic and technical publications authored by the team began to be reported in the context of other studies.
In the process of delivering B4CM it became clear that the SDKs available for distributed ledger technologies still required a very specialised programming skillset that was not yet widely available within the industry; as such, the B4CM team recommended that priority (in terms of industrial exploration of distributed ledger technologies) should be given to those areas of the business for which the technology was a more traditional fit, e.g. ticketing, enabling an easier developmental journey and more targeted allocation of the limited human resource available. Other studies by members of the B4CM team, e.g. the EU-funded STUB project, demonstrated that the route to implementation in those sections of the industry had greater potential to provide the “silver bullet” that would prove the business benefits and stimulate widespread adoption of distributed ledger technologies within rail.
In conclusion, the B4CM team recommended that:
• While the work had shown that distributed ledger technologies offered significant potential value to the rail sector, early adoption should focus on use cases that were more traditionally associated with the transfer of tokens, such as rail ticketing, in order to prove the business case and build staff capability within the industry;
• Once a sufficiently experienced staff base had been established within rail, initial industrial deployments of the technology around audit of data should shadow transactions being made on other data exchange platforms, such as the GB Rail Data Marketplace, providing firm evidence of the applicability of the technology in a way that would not impact on mission critical activities. Only once this had been demonstrated, and performance at representative scale proven, would it be appropriate to move forward with live operational systems.
