Project Smart IoT for Mobility - PHASE I & II

Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things

About the Project

PHASE I

The objective of the Smart IoT for Mobility project is to develop a first transdisciplinary approach towards a new economy, based mainly on the adoption of a virtual currency and smart contracts all being really adaptable to the rising generation of the Internet of Things (IoT).

We must imagine devices (computers, smartphones, embedded communicating architectures ...) that are all related to each other from near and far. Each participant in this network (a client) is identified by a unique address, assigned when joining the system, which will be used during a transaction. This model is decentralized since it does not have a central supervisory authority, unlike the traditional banking model.

The idea is to start from a legal context by trying to define as clearly as possible the exact terms of an intelligent contract, to simulate these contracts at the scale of IoT devices and thus to establish a specific computer language to these contracts, to deploy these contracts on a set of IoT devices, regardless of their hardware architecture, and finally to take a particular target architecture and simulate completely its operation in order to ensure that the set works properly before deployment. The nature and the objectives of these contracts will be determined at the start of this project but will be limited by the architectures' ability to achieve them.

PHASE II

In phase II, we would like to concretize this work with a thesis whose objective would be to define the hardware and software architecture (all the hardware layers, processor virtualization, operating systems, middleware, interpretation and smart contracts) and make it a version that would be brought to the Experimental Economies Laboratory (LEEN) for series of experiments that will be used to feed future versions.
The specificity of this multi-disciplinary project is that it involves 'Information and Communication Sciences and Technologies' (Electronics and Computer Sciences), on the one hand, and 'Social Sciences of Digital Systems' (Management, Economies, Law, Psychology and Ergonomics), on the other. In this project, it is argued that the technical conception and the design of smart contracts cannot be disconnected from their social uses and therefore their technological acceptance. Based on this working hypothesis, experimental methods developed by social scientists (mainly experimental economists and psychologists) are used 1) before the technical conception of the smart contract, to determine which variables could affect the acceptance of smart contracts and loT devices by users; 2) after a beta version of the deviee (hardware and software architecture), to test and improve its functionalities with a new series of experiments.