CramIS: a blockchain-based integrated system for cross-regional scheduling of agricultural machinery

Secure and efficient cross-regional scheduling is essential for realizing agricultural machinery sharing. Although some scheduling systems have been proposed, two crucial issues need to be addressed: 1) Centralized management . Most existing systems rely on a third party for scheduling calculations and cannot provide a transparent decision-making process, which causes distrust of scheduling results. 2) Scheduling coordination . Most existing systems do not consider the differences in scheduling objectives across regions and only provide limited functionality, which hinders their application in reality. To address the above issues, we propose CramIS, a blockchain-based integrated system for cross-regional scheduling of agricultural machinery. In CramIS, we develop a blockchain-sharding-based parallel intra-regional scheduling scheme, which provides a transparent decision-making process. Additionally, we design a flexible scheduling coordination mechanism, which coordinates scheduling objectives across regions through a coordination model with a dynamic weighting strategy. Moreover, to optimize storage performance and realize secure cross-regional data retrieval, we propose a hybrid storage method, along with creating a dataset accumulator to verify data integrity. Compared with existing blockchain-based integrated scheduling systems, CramIS combines parallel intra-regional scheduling, dynamic cross-regional coordination, and secure cross-regional data verification within one unified system. We integrate the above approaches and implement CramIS on Hyperledger Fabric. Experimental results show that CramIS improves agricultural machinery utilization through cross-regional scheduling, while improving system performance and reducing storage overhead by approximately 70%.