BLOCKCHAIN FOR WASTE MANAGEMENT IN SMART CITIES

Computer Engineering

The combination of new topics and emerging technologies allows researchers to define new processes and models. The new requirements consider the definition of modular and scalable approaches to society and the environment. Smart City is an important topic to focus on. The use of emerging technologies allows smart cities to develop new processes to improve services offered by different actors, industries, or governments. Smart cities were born to improve the quality of life of citizens. To reach this goal, various approaches have been proposed, but they lack a common interface to allow each stakeholder to communicate easily and quickly. This paper presents an architecture proposal to overcome the real limitations of smart cities: it uses blockchain technology as a distributed database to allow everyone to join the network and feel part of the community. Blockchain can improve process development for smart cities. Scalability is thanks to the context-aware approach: applications do not need to know about the back-end implementation, they only need to adapt to the interface. With blockchain, it is possible to collect data anonymously to perform some statistical analysis, to ensure security in the city, and to access public records to ensure the origin of products and energy.

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