Blockchain-Based Trusted Cross-organizational Deliveries of Sensor-Equipped Parcels

Abstract

Today’s cross-organizational deliveries of high value and perishable goods are difficult to monitor in a reliable and trustful way. Every logistics organization operates its own track and trace system, usually in an isolated manner and with most being incompatible to each other. In order to provide better end-to-end insights and to speed-up conflict management processes, we propose to let all involved parties mutually confirm cross-organizational handovers of a parcel and to log the event immutably within a common distributed ledger. Smart sensors within or attached to parcels will in addition act as independent oracles to monitor environmental variables with respect to parcel-specific service level agreements. Violations of service level agreements will be trustfully detected and logged by the smart sensors directly on the distributed ledger, without potentially compromising legacy systems being involved. The proposed concept will serve as the base for future implementations and opens up new ways to analyze and optimize inter-organizational logistics.