Concurrency Conflict Modeling for Asynchronous Processing in Blockchain-Based Transactive Energy Systems

Blockchain is widely adopted for decentralized transaction management in systems like Transactive Energy (TE). Unfortunately, conventional blockchains with sequential models and restrictive participation rules do not meet energy sector requirements. High volumes of asynchronous-generated transactions impose severe concurrency challenges for blockchain. These difficulties worsen when participants process blocks concurrently, prompting branching and conflicting versions. This issue is often addressed by discarding blocks and reverting transactions, which is detrimental to TE systems. Preserving validated transactions is crucial to avoid disrupting physical asset exchanges and wasting computational resources. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new model for identifying transaction discrepancies in conflict blocks while maintaining validated transactions. The model enables collaborative block building by integrating multiple blockchain views, eliminating competition, leader selection, and transaction reversals or discards. Block and transaction generation conflicts are addressed by establishing logical-temporal dependencies and leveraging pairwise interactions to detect them toward accelerating consensus. Hence, the model promotes concurrency to enhance transaction processing and avoid resource waste. Simulations indicate traditional models limit network potential to below 5% as blockchain height increases because of single contributions. Conversely, the proposed model uses multiple nodes’ views to achieve up to 90% of the network’s processing capacity.