Agent-based model of sand supply governance employing blockchain technology

Abstract

Sand is a key ingredient for many industries, including concrete, glass, and electronics. Sand extraction is now exceeding fossil fuels and biomass. The absence of data on aggregates sand mining makes assessments difficult and has contributed to the lack of awareness about this issue. A sand governance business framework is developed applying the blockchain technology as the main goal of this study to regulate the sand extraction and trade. Blockchain technology provides a distributed concurrency monitoring system for the supply management. Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) as an effective bottom-up tool is applied to demonstrate the application of the model. The sand providers and users are modeled as a collection of autonomous decision-making entities called agents. The agents interact with each other, the regulators participate in making decisions on the basis of a set of rules that are defined within the blockchain network.