# A Serious Gaming Approach for Crowdsensing in Urban Water Infrastructure with Blockchain Support
## 5 Proposed Solution
### Serious Gaming Platform  
The serious game is defined based on a set of roles assigned to players for the crowdsensing tasks as shown in Figure 10. Issue discovery is delegated to the Blue Team, which consists of crowdsourced opportunistic sensing and event (E) reporting. The reports are published on the map (FIND) and visible to the other players.  
The Yellow Team is designated for solving the reported issues (FIX) and consists of field experts that are available nearby. The reports can be either confirmed or invalidated by the Yellow Team, while the proof of validation is uploaded on the platform. Upon validation, the Blue Team member receives a reward for truthful reporting.  
The Red Team represents the public authorities, with trusted experts monitor and that validate (VALID) the reports. Upon solving an issue, the reward is assigned to the Yellow Team member. If the issue is evaluated as false reporting by the Red Team, both the corresponding rewards to the Yellow Team and the Blue Team are invalidated. In this sense, for the Blue Team, the Yellow Team can assign rewards for truthful reporting, while the Red Team can invalidate them based on expert reviews.  
The rewards have a direct influence on player reputation, while truthful reporting is enforced by the crowdsensing model.  
The SG platform is defined by a mobile application for crowdsensing in urban water infrastructure, based on the urban exploration platform developed with Leplace Global [119]. The players/citizens can report issues with regard to water utilities and place them on the World Map. Gamification is used to increase the level of participation and interaction with the environment, while responsive design and visual aspect provides for an attractive game environment with real-world implications. The main view is shown in Figure 11, with the location of issues and players according to the experimental setup used in this paper.  
Figure 9: Blockchain architecture.  
Figure 11: Watergame mobile application prototype.  
Figure 10: Serious game model.  
While there are different kinds of issues that can be found in urban water infrastructure, the map view reveals nearby issues as reported by the players: flooding, water supply (e.g., leaks or service interruptions), pollution and hazards (other circumstances). The player locations are shown on the map for experimental purposes, while in real-world applications, collecting real-time location data may be prohibited by privacy laws according to the use case.  
The crowdsensing model presented in Sections 4.1 and 5.1 can be used to define the allocation of tasks for each player and to provide the incentive mechanism. Reported issues are registered on the blockchain as described in Sections 4.2 and 5.2, for an increased level of trust for the stakeholders, through secure data storage and transparency.  
The proposed components fill the existing gaps in mobile crowdsensing applications by addressing the motivation, trust and coverage issues from three different perspectives. Therefore, the overall platform utility, i.e., coverage and sensing cost, is influenced by: (1) the crowdsensing model as the base for the in-game economy; (2) an attractive game design to increase the level of participation; (3) the perceived level of trust, ensured by the decentralized storage ledger.