Crowdsourcing and monetization as a strategy to reduce vehicular greenhouse gases emissions

This paper presents a strategy to estimate and control vehicular greenhouse emissions by combining crowdsourcing and monetization. We assume that vehicle manufacturers must accomplish emission limits and can demonstrate it by collecting carbon credits which consist of emissions estimates received directly from vehicles’ onboard computers. Manufacturers then can trade these credits in a blockchain-based monetization platform, feeding a self-sustainable strategy that motivates more drivers to participate in crowdsourcing. We discuss the practical aspects and challenges of implementing this strategy and also implement a prototype consisting of a smartphone app, a cloud-based system to compute emissions estimates, and a blockchain-based platform to perform monetization. Experiments performed in two different scenarios attest to our idea’s feasibility.