Reinforcing Service Level Agreements in Tourism Sector The Role of Blockchain and Mobile Computing

PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

“…We emulate the applications in use for both service providers and customers on Azure. 22 This platform comes with a builtin monitoring capability for Web services, which we found useful for stress testing and deploying concurrent emulations. As for data handling, PenChain utilizes cloud-based relational database services provided by Azure SQL that perform relational queries, searching and data synchronization.…”

“…As such, public blockchain networks are not suitable for launching the decentralized program for a business solution [160]. Businesses can collaborate with distributed ledger developers to launch their business-to-business and cross-industry applications 22 Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and web portal that lets software developers access and manage cloud resources and services including Web services and data analytics https://azure.microsoft.com using a private blockchain. In line with this approach, we chose Hyperledger Fabric for its modular architecture, which facilitates future scalability.…”

“…In our previous studies, we advocated for penalty-aware SLAs in the tourism sector [22], we investigated how digitizing dynamic SLAs makes the enforcement of the penalty rules programmable [23], we conceptualized the SLAs for data service provisioning in smart farming [24]. This article reports on our full-fledged work on the conception, construction, and validation of such a cross-domain platform for SLA-minded service lookup called PenChain.…”

“…Service-oriented computing and service provisioning are crosscutting concepts with highest relevance for all business domains [25], [26], [27], and, wherever services are provided, proper SLAs are a critical success factor. Similarly, in the last decade, blockchain technology has been successfully applied in countless projects from all kinds of domains, ranging from payment services [14], [28] over financial services [29], [30], insurances [31], [32], real estate [33], [34], manufacturing [35], [36], [37], agriculture [24], [38], [39], food production [40], [41], logistics [42], [43], healthcare [44], [45], tourism [22], [46], to e-government [7], [11], [47], [48], public administration [49], [50], [51], and e-court [52], [53], [54] -just to name a few. Therefore, we argue that PenChain is relevant to a maximally wide range of domains.…”

PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

“…In our previous studies, we made the case for penalty-aware SLAs in the tourism sector [22], we investigated how digitizing dynamic SLAs makes the enforcement of the penalty rules programmable [23], we conceptualized the SLAs for data service provisioning in smart farming [24]. This article reports on our full-fledged work on the conception, construction, and validation of such a cross-domain platform for SLA-minded service lookup called PenChain.…”