A REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE FOR BLOCKCHAIN BASED LOGISTICS

Abstract

To grow the economy of Import/Export in any country, they must have visible, traceable and trustworthy Logistic Supply chain management. Unfortunately, logistics facing issues like fraud in transactions, transparency with end user in supply chains, lack of responsibility when it comes to losses and many more, which can adversely affect the reputation of a logistics organization or result in contractor’s/customers remorse. To target these problems, research has been working from long time; recently the logistics industry has just started to take notice of the Blockchain potential for their business that valuates to a multi-billion-dollar emerging industry on its own. Blockchain eliminate the requirement of third party trust mediation and provide smart contract based secured shared ledger, which is openly accessible among the participants of the system. Provenance and visualization will provide stakeholder level visibility, traceability and management of contract violation simplification of multi-party systems delivery etc. In this research, survey conducted from group of participants belongs to Logistics domain to cater the common problems they are facing in Logistics Supply chain. Also through literature review I have identify foundational components of a Blockchain based digital twin of logistics and transform them in to business process re-engineering patterns, showing the improved activities of Supply Chain logistics using Blockchain. Based on business process reengineering patterns and survey result, I have proposed the layered Reference architecture for Blockchain based Logistics. For Reference Architecture evaluation survey conducted to record user response regarding the optimization of logistics system using Blockchain and I have also execute the real life scenario of Carbon Logistics flow on the proposed Architecture and show how it will resolve their problems. Keeping in view of previous huge losses in Pakistani industrial sectors such as freight sector and by weighing the impact of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), this is the right time for Pakistan to take First Movers Advantage and organize activities to build indigenous expertise in the Blockchain based logistics.