Blockchain-enabled framework for cross-sector integration in smart cities facilitating risk assessment and interdependency analysis
Hosny Ahmed Abbas, I. El Sayed, Hamada Esmaiel, Bassem Abd-El-Atty · Blockchain Research and Applications · 2025
The Smart City (SC) paradigm has been proposed to address the problem of fast urbanization and the worldwide motivation toward the realization of a set of globally agreed-upon sustainable development goals. However, the actual implementation of SCs faces several significant challenges: (1) managing the complex structures of interdependency that arise from cross-sector integration is a major challenge; (2) ensuring that sensitive data shared within an SC are safe and private; and (3) the availability of real-time risk and interdependency analysis instead of traditional offline modeling and simulation methods against the propagation of run-time failures such as cascade and feedback effects. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of research that focuses on cyber cross-sector integration and its mentioned consequences. To fill these research gaps, we suggest a blockchain-based framework called SCADA-NET for integrating different sectors within SCs. This is an important part of making SCs reliable and sustainably long-lasting on the basis of well-known algorithms from the Complex Networks Theory (CNT). A preliminary prototype for SCADA-NET was developed, and the details of its design, implementation, performance evaluation, and future improvements are provided and discussed in this paper. A consortium blockchain allows people to share data in a safe and open way, and CNT models complicated CI networks. This study revealed that these two tools can work effectively together to make cross-sector integration into SCs easy and long-lasting. We also discuss future enhancements for SCADA-NET, including scalability and applicability in the context of urban metaverses.