Blockchain Applications to Improve Operation and Security of Transportation Systems: A Surveyâ€
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1 Typo in the affiliation of first author: Universit
2 The safety constrain asks AVs to have a responding time less than 0.1s. However, one main drawback of blockchain is the slower speed when more users appear on the network. How could those conflicting features get resolved?
3 To compute blockchain (basically the hash confliction), the CPU/GPU has a huge high energy consumption. The AVs rely on battery which is quite precious. Could the author justify the sacrifice on the energy consumption?
4 The implementation of blockchain is usually accompanied with high cost, which could be expensive than the AVs. Please include literatures on the estimation from economy side.
5 Blockchain is quite inefficient in terms of consuming computation resource, which is also precious in AVs that for image recognition/processing or other high priority tasks. Please justify how the inefficiency could be mitigated.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is very well written and clear.
The scope of the paper is too broad, addressing some issues that are not specific to autonomous vehicles only, such as smart cities, driver record maintenance and EV charging. That would not be the case is the paper was focused on connected vehicles.
Most of the topics addressed in the paper can be applied to connected legacy vehicles. The paper should be focused on the issues that are specific to connected and automated vehicles, e.g., cooperative maneuvering.
Despite being a survey paper, authors didn't adopt a formal systematic literature review methodology. The rationale for selecting the references is also missing. How can we know that the considered references are the most relevant? This seriously limits the impact of the paper.
The paper also fails to highlight future research directions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The current manuscript is a literature review about recent research on the application of blockchain technology. The writing is generally good, and the review had the following comments: 1. This is clearly a review article. Please revise the type of submission. 2. The reviewer considered this manuscript as a combination of two independent components. The first component is a review on blockchain. The second component is the application of blockchain on AV (also a review). It is not common to see two different reviews in the same manuscript. The reviewer suggested focusing on only one of the review topics. If the authors decide to focus on the review of application on AV, please also revise the abstract and title. 3. The citation format used in this manuscript is uncommon. Typically, only last names are used in the citation format, but the authors used both first and last names. 4. The caption of Fig. 14 is a little too crowded. Several other figures also have this problem.Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks for the respond of initial comments. Below is the follow-up comment from the reviewer:
1 To stay neutral without misleading the reader, it is suggested to include discussions of the current challenges and barriers with respective research progresses. Otherwise the survey is biased and conclusion may not be convincing.
Author Response
On behalf of our authorship team, I would like to relay our utmost gratitude toward the reviewers and the editorial team for their time, considerations, and insightful comments to improve the quality and accurate presentation of the work. We have carefully evaluated and revised the article based on the provided insights from the reviewers. In concordance with reviewers' comments, we
have applied and performed revisions as suggested.
To facilitate the revision process, we, here,
1. copied the reviewer's comments, questions, and recommendation with the purple font.
2. provided our response to the comment in black font.
3. highlighted the applied revision corresponding to the comment and, as well, reflected with blue color in the main text.
We, once again, thank you and the team for the insightful review and the chance to revise the manuscript. Our team looks forward to hearing back from you toward making the research available to the public knowledge via Electronics.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The revised version of the manuscript has not been significantly improved.
My initial remarks were not adequately addressed, thus I still propose a major revision.
Author Response
On behalf of our authorship team, I would like to relay our utmost gratitude toward the reviewers and the editorial team for their time, considerations, and insightful comments to improve the quality and accurate presentation of the work. We have carefully evaluated and revised the article based on the provided insights from the reviewers. In concordance with reviewers' comments, we
have applied and performed revisions as suggested.
To facilitate the revision process, we, here,
1. copied the reviewer's comments, questions, and recommendation with the purple font.
2. provided our response to the comment in black font.
3. highlighted the applied revision corresponding to the comment and, as well, reflected with blue color in the main text.
We, once again, thank you and the team for the insightful review and the chance to revise the manuscript. Our team looks forward to hearing back from you toward making the research available to the public knowledge via Electronics.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Thank you for providing a revised manuscript. Most problems in the previous version of the manuscript have been corrected.
Author Response
Thanks for showing your interest and comments. We are glad that we could respond to all of your comments.
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks for the revision. The reviewer would recommend this manuscript for publication.
Please check for any typo (such as first word in line 1009) before final submission.
Author Response
Thank you for the insightful review and the chance to revise the
manuscript. The typos have been checked again and fixed.
Reviewer 2 Report
I thank the authors for the additional effort of trying to accomodate my suggestions.
This new version of the paper addresses my initial remarks, although some of them were difficult to accommodate without a writing effort beyond a major revision, as in the case of adopting a formal systematic literature review methodology. Despite this, I consider the depth of the review as adequate, although I maintain my opinion that this fact limits the impact of the paper.
My comment #2 was not properly understood by the authors (perhaps it was my fault). When I said that most of the topics addressed in the paper could be applied to connected legacy vehicles and that the paper should be focused on the issues that are specific to connected and automated vehicles, I was suggesting to remove some sections that were not specific to CAVs. Authors opted instead to change the title of the paper and add a new section. This is OK for me, given the new title.
Please correct the typo in lines 1075 and 1076 (huge high):
"Another challenge with using Blockchain in CAVs application is the fact that it requires huge high energy consumption."
Author Response
Thank you for the insightful review and the chance to revise the
manuscript. The typos have been checked again and fixed.
