Enabling Trust in Cross-Organisational Data Sharing for EMU Maintenance: A Double-Blockchain Solution

With the trend for smart maintenance for the electric multiple unit (EMU), there is a critical need for cross-organisational data sharing amongst multiple stakeholders. Traditional centralised solutions may not ensure sufficient trust for data sharing. In the maintenance field, blockchain technology has been introduced to improve security and privacy. However, the current blockchain solutions for data sharing are solely based on public chain or consortium chain, which may have the limitation of low transaction processing rate. Moreover, multiple levels of decentralisation are required in cross-organisational data sharing. For the purpose of providing multiple types of ledger's governance and a performance improvement, this paper presents a method for developing EMU maintenance data sharing solution based on double blockchain. The method is validated using a case study in Shanghai EMU depot. The proposed solution adopts practical byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) as the consensus mechanism. Interplanetary file system (IPFS) is introduced to reduce the payload of big data storage.