A Trust Based Secure and Privacy Aware Framework for Efficient Taxi and Car Sharing System

This article describes how taxi service is an essential means of mobility in many cities. Recent findings show that average automobile owners utilize their vehicles for only 5% of its time in a day. Therefore, the advent of autonomous vehicles and car sharing will make it possible for owners to engage their vehicles as taxis when not in use by utilizing its 95% free time for income generation. Sensitive private information is required to be released during a taxi service delivery, which may bring certain security and privacy issues and challenges. This may hinder the prospect of using autonomous vehicles as a form of taxi. As a result of these, the authors propose a secure and privacy-preserving taxi service framework for car sharing, which ensures protection of car owner and passengers personal details, e.g. identity, location, destination, etc. The authors developed a decay-based trust model for a framework in order to monitor and improve the quality of service rendered to passengers by vehicles. The decay-based trust model was simulated on the framework. The simulation of the decay-based trust model shows that it is a perfect model for rewarding vehicles which render good quality of service and blacklisting vehicles with frequent poor service delivery.