Development of a new artificial intelligence-supported approval mechanism in block chain: optimization-based approval mechanism (poO)

Blockchain systems are among the popular technologies that have emerged recently. As a decentralized system, blockchain technology has offered many solutions and caused many problems related to these solutions. One of the most important problems is that it performs very intensive hash calculations to create a new consensus block, reducing its efficiency depending on the time. In this study, a new model is proposed to avoid Proof of Work (PoW), which redirects the calculations made to create blocks to optimization algorithms. The proof mechanism proposed in this study is called Proof of Optimization (PoO). The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) was introduced into the system designed to solve optimization algorithms. Nodes are asked to solve the TSP at specific iterations and populations. As a result, nodes are asked to create blocks with the obtained fitness, density and time values. PoO and PoW consensus algorithms have been subjected to an experimental comparison in the system. Test results show that the block creation time of the PoO consensus model varies between 2 s for the least urban dataset solution and 60 s for the most urban dataset solution. The difficulty levels of the problems can be adjusted by changing the number of cities in the TSP evaluated in this study. In this way, the problem of creating blocks on the network can be made more difficult or easier at any time. As a result of experimental analysis, it was observed that the decentralization, which is the percentage of block creation among miners in the blockchain, reached a more stable value and the fairness index increased above 0.90 on average. When the obtained values were compared to PoW, it was observed that the block time was more stable and the decentralization of the blockchain was higher. In this way, highly equipped nodes in the blockchain system are prevented from dominating the network. Thus, low-equipped nodes have the right to create blocks in the blockchain.