Blockchain Based Smart Contract Framework for Demand to Supply Matching In Transport and Logistics

Abstract

Transport and logistics industry is one of the large markets in the world economy. This industry has multiple modes of operations such as local haulage, air freight. And ocean freight. The systems that are currently operational uses third party service providers to establish trust between stakeholders with paid compensations. It requires considerable amount of effort to manage these independent silos of systems with high cost. This dissertation concentrates on Proof of concept framework for the transport and logistics industry with goal of eliminating trusted third party services. The proposed framework is based on blockchain and driven by smart contracts. The framework uses data from existing monitoring systems in the transport and logistics industry to create a new way of performing transactions where human interaction is minimized. The proposed framework tries formulate transport contract agreement into a smart contract and execute it according to the data obtained from IoT networks (data oracles). A trust between two stakeholders can be established using a private blockchain and Smart contract protocol. The framework is capable of creating smart contracts between two parties for the given set of inputs and conditions. Smart contract protocol escrows the transport job fee as proof of stake. Data from data oracles are used identify state changes in Smart contract where it performs transactions when agreed conditions are met. Transport agreement violation penalties are embedded into the Smart contract where it resolves such incidents without bias to either stakeholder.