SS2:Blockchain-Facilitated Cooperative Work in Design         

·   Organizers

Wenbing Zhao, Cleveland State University, USA - w.zhao1@csuohio.edu

·   Description/Abstract

Collaboration among multiple entities require coordination, resource sharing, and trust. Traditionally, one of the entities would assume the coordinator role. Unfortunately, this scheme heavily depends on the resources and trustworthiness of the coordinator. If the coordinator misbehaves and loses the trust of other participants, the collaboration will inevitably fail. The blockchain technology provides a practical solution for collaboration. First, the use of blockchain as the collaboration platform will remove any single point of failure. Second, if a large public blockchain such as the Ethereum is used, the blockchain platform would ensure data immutability and decentralized trust for all participants so that they don’t have to trust any particular member to assume the responsibility of the coordinator. The data immutability would protect the contributions made by a participant. Furthermore, the data immutability feature of the blockchain would force the participants to keep track of versions of the design, thereby, avoid the risk of losing the information due to loss of data or ransomware attacks. The use of smart contracts deployed on a large public blockchain such as Ethereum will facilitate trustworthy coordination between participants of a design team, including the assignment of tasks, the tracking of progress of the tasks, the resources contributed and allocated during the design project. This special session invites research contributions on all aspects of blockchain-facilitated cooperative work in design. Topics of interest include, but not limited to:

• Blockchain-based authentication for cooperative work in design
• Blockchain-based data logging for cooperative work in design
• Blockchain-based coordination for cooperative work in design
• Smart contracts for cooperative work in design
• Blockchain-based resource sharing for cooperative work in design
• Layer-2 blockchain design and implementation for cooperative work in design