Uma API Baseada em Blockchain Para Garantia da Interoperabilidade e Transparência de Dados Nos Processos de Registro e Inspeção de Barragens Hídricas

Abstract

The rupture of water dams leads to social, economic, and environmental catastrophes. To mitigate this threat, the Brazilian National Dam Safety Policy was designed to regulate safety actions, including requirements for dam registration, technical inspection, and accountability. However, even with the continuous effort to guarantee the safety of water dams, there are critical issues regarding data interoperability and transparency concerning dam registration and inspection processes. In regions of Brazil, part of this data is still collected on paper forms and reports are available as spreadsheets, for example. Faced with such peculiarities, blockchain technology has proved especially relevant due to its property of recording digital events in an immutable, transparent, and resilient way. Supported by a multimethod strategy based on Design Science Research to explore a sociotechnical perspective, this work aims to overcome the challenges of interoperability and transparency of data in the context of registration and inspection of water dams in Brazil through the development of a blockchain-based Application Programming Interface (API). Regarding the evaluation, a computational experiment was carried out focusing on performance analysis covering different scenarios. Average results of elapsed time, throughput, and latency time metrics showed the viability of the artifact in terms of computational performance, obtaining a feasible behavior. As contribuition, it is discsussed a novel blockchain-based API for water dam registration and inspection in line with Brazilian legislation. This API drives to a rich opportunity for advancing knowledge at the intersection between Information Systems and Dam Management fields from a sociotechnical point of view, which is quite scarce in the literature.