Cyber-physical systems (CPS) facilitate the incorporation of humans, objects, and computing systems in their physical environment. These systems operate in real-time and are used to enable the systems and devices to self-organize and reconfigure to respond to their changing environments. They help to realize data-intensive interconnected platforms that allow data streams to run continuously on an autonomous basis. CPSs in the context of tourism and travel are considered important elements for developing efficient and effective smart tourism services. This research explores various facets of CPSs and proposes a blockchain-based framework to offer a smart tourism ecosystem, catering to the dynamic preferences and needs of the tourists. The key idea is to use a novel blockchain-based data security mechanism, which uses a set of policies to enforce data security for smart tourism services.
Top1. Introduction
Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) refer to the integration of physical and digital components that work together in real-time to monitor and control physical processes (Kalluri et al., 2021). In recent years, CPS have gained a lot of attention for their potential to revolutionize various industries, including the tourism and travel industry. The tourism and travel industry is a rapidly growing sector, with billions of people traveling domestically and internationally each year. With the integration of CPS, this industry is poised to experience significant improvements in terms of efficiency, customer experience, and cost reduction. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big Data has resulted in increased productivity and the appearance of new business models. The development of new cyber-physical systems that can be used in various industries is also helping to realize the potential of Industry 4.0 (Navickas et al., 2017).
The tourism and travel industry has a large number of physical processes, which includes activities such as guiding, transport, entertainment, shopping, and accommodations (Paraskevas 2022). Many of these processes depend on a large number of human components such as taxi drivers, tour guides, hotel receptionists, and travel agents. The integration of such human components into a digital system will help automate the aforementioned physical processes thereby significantly reducing human errors, increasing efficiency, and reducing costs (Pishdad-Bozorgi et al., 2020).
The future of the tourism and travel industry will greatly rely on the technological advances in the area of CPS. CPSs are being integrated as standard components in manufacturing and service activities. A recent McKinsey report identifies over $15 trillion in economic benefits that will be created as CPS are adopted by industry. In the context of the tourism industry, they hold significant promise for improving the customer experience by improving the safety and efficiency of processes and improving the reliability of services (Smirnov et al., 2017b). This is particularly important in the travel industry where a single incident could result in multiple millions of dollars of economic losses.
As the tourism and travel industry continues to embrace new technologies, their cyber ecosystems are becoming more vulnerable to security threats. These include the vast amount of data they store and the financial transactions they perform. Several prominent organizations in the travel and tourism industry have made headlines in the past couple of years for failing to address the increasing number of security threats (Palmer, 2017).
Recent studies provide insights on the nature of attacks targeting the hospitality industry and advocate the need to invest more efforts in the development of specific solutions. The most common attacks targeting hospitality include malware (Kishore et al., 2020), phishing (Hasbini,2016), denial of service (Cheema et al., 2022), and web-based application attacks (Singh et al., 2019). In addition to the above, cognitive hacking is another threat that the hospitality industry is highly vulnerable. It is a form of an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) which exploits the human factor to achieve goals on a computer network. The term refers to automated tools that target human behavior, in an effort to exploit an individual’s habits and predictability.
Despite the various security standards and solutions that have been proposed to improve the security of smart applications in the hospitality industry, the existing solutions are still not ideal. These include having a single point of failure or high communication and computation costs. Most of the security solutions currently available focus only on a few aspects of the security architecture and fail to address various factors such as network latency, scalability, and data storage (Subasinghe et al., 2020). Blockchain technology can provide better security solutions that overcome these problems and address the requirements of smart applications within the hospitality industry (Morkunas et al., 2019).