Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering for Dapp smart contracts in smart energy markets

Transmission and Distribution Systems Operators are facing the need for new market tools able to evaluate the potential of flexibility contracting, with smart and decentralized energy production, consumption, and exchange. The blockchain technology, has been proposed in platforms and projects for energy trading, given that BC platforms natively support not only decentralization but also transparency, privacy, smart grid management, token trading, pseudo-anonymity, and other desirable features of a smart and decentralized market. However, BC software projects are complex, may be large, and often exposed to critical failures. To reduce the chance of such failures and to improve the quality of the software development process, this paper introduces software development methodologies for blockchain applications specific to the decentralized energy market. By using Blockchain Oriented Software Engineering (BOSE) and Agile Block-Chain Dapp Engineering (ABCDE), a novel decentralized application based on an energy token is proposed, defined by a smart contract on the ERC721 standard, that can be refilled, resold, emptied, and traded even without any energy content. According to the ABCDE methodology, the system has been divided into two subsystems, the BC and the application levels, and determined the actors and the related use case diagrams.