Highlights What are the main findings? To solve the challenges of targeted energy flexibility and hunting safety cases, we have provided here the novel concept of trustworthy communities with experimental solutions. The conceptual solutions rely on a hierarchical model consisting of shared trust infrastructure, security control channel, verifiable credentials, and hierarchical identity management, on top of which smart contracts-based communities can be established. An evaluation of the trustworthy communities' solutions was carried out in the energy flexibility case, where energy flexibility resources of one simulated and two real buildings were aggregated by a flexibility aggregation platform for trading in an energy flexibility marketplace. Respectively, the provided solutions were evaluated in the hunting safety case, where hunting safety smart phone application of a hunter and smart watch of person exchanged presence and location information for preventing hunting accidents. What is the implication of the main finding? The evaluations indicate that conceptual solutions for trustworthy communities fulfil their purpose and contribute towards making energy flexibility trading and hunting safety possible and trustworthy enough for participants. This means that the provided solutions were applicable in two different cases from different application domains. The validation showed that the provided community solutions worked in a real-time manner with the physical assets in a functional sense. However, performance and scalability aspects were not considered, and thus they require further research and enhanced test set-ups. In addition, further studies related to community applications, verifiable credentials with wallets, sharing values and incentives, authorized trust networks, dynamic trust situations, time-sensitive behavior, autonomous operations with smart contracts, and security assessments and applicability are needed.Highlights What are the main findings? To solve the challenges of targeted energy flexibility and hunting safety cases, we have provided here the novel concept of trustworthy communities with experimental solutions. The conceptual solutions rely on a hierarchical model consisting of shared trust infrastructure, security control channel, verifiable credentials, and hierarchical identity management, on top of which smart contracts-based communities can be established. An evaluation of the trustworthy communities' solutions was carried out in the energy flexibility case, where energy flexibility resources of one simulated and two real buildings were aggregated by a flexibility aggregation platform for trading in an energy flexibility marketplace. Respectively, the provided solutions were evaluated in the hunting safety case, where hunting safety smart phone application of a hunter and smart watch of person exchanged presence and location information for preventing hunting accidents. What is the implication of the main finding? The evaluations indicate that conceptual solutions for trustworthy communities fulfil their purpose and contribute towards making energy flexibility trading and hunting safety possible and trustworthy enough for participants. This means that the provided solutions were applicable in two different cases from different application domains. The validation showed that the provided community solutions worked in a real-time manner with the physical assets in a functional sense. However, performance and scalability aspects were not considered, and thus they require further research and enhanced test set-ups. In addition, further studies related to community applications, verifiable credentials with wallets, sharing values and incentives, authorized trust networks, dynamic trust situations, time-sensitive behavior, autonomous operations with smart contracts, and security assessments and applicability are needed.Abstract The aim of this research has been to enable the management of trustworthy relationships between stakeholders, service providers, and physical assets, which are required in critical energy and mobility cyber-physical systems (CPS) applications. The achieved novel contribution is the concept of trustworthy communities with respective experimental solutions, which are developed by relying on verifiable credentials, smart contracts, trust over IP, and an Ethereum-based distributed ledger. The provided trustworthy community solutions are validated by executing them in two practical use cases, which are called energy flexibility and hunting safety. The energy flexibility case validation considered the execution of the solutions with one simulated and two real buildings with the energy flexibility aggregation platform, which was able to trade the flexibilities in an energy flexibility marketplace. The provided solutions were executed with a hunting safety smartphone application for a hunter and the smartwatch of a person moving around in the forest. The evaluations indicate that conceptual solutions for trustworthy communities fulfill the purpose and contribute toward making energy flexibility trading and hunting safety possible and trustworthy enough for participants. A trustworthy community solution is required to make value sharing and usage of critical energy resources and their flexibilities feasible and secure enough for their owners as part of the energy flexibility community. Sharing the presence and location in mobile conditions requires a trustworthy community solution because of security and privacy reasons, but it can also save lives in real-life elk hunting cases. During the evaluations, the need for further studies related to performance, scalability, community applications, verifiable credentials with wallets, sharing of values and incentives, authorized trust networks, dynamic trust situations, time-sensitive behavior, autonomous operations with smart contracts through security assessment, and applicability have been detected.
