Temporal Blockchains for Intelligent Transportation and Autonomous Vehicles Management

Nowadays, blockchain technology is being used in several domains, and in particular for managing intelligent transportation systems and autonomous vehicles. However, since block timestamps, put by miners, are inaccurate (with about one hour of delay), they could not be useful for many real-time applications that require to deal with exact timing of events, like traffic laws enforcement and insurance accident investigation. Hence we propose to add new timestamps, put by data originators, with the meaning of valid time as defined in temporal databases and which can represent the accurate time of data recording within a transaction. Consequently, the new enhanced blockchain data model, named BiTchain, can be considered, from a temporal database perspective, as a bitemporal database. In order to let users and applications enjoy the potentialities of BiTchain, we also propose an expressive temporal query language, named BiTEQL and defined as a TSQL2-like temporal extension of the EQL blockchain query language.