In the maritime domain, supply chain logistics are known to be complex and inherently distributed, spanning across vessels, ports, handling agents, customs authorities, jurisdictions and languages. Typically, processing is done using paper trails which often rely on reputation and history of those involved. The major challenge in digitizing this is primarily one of trust. Identifying a trusted agent to record all movements is difficult if not impossible due to social, legal and geographical issues. Today, many of the solutions in use address this using duplication of processes and information in databases, and contention on the actual trail of events can be challenging to determine when different entities have conflicting information. Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) solutions address these trust issues by decentralising the ledger in such a manner that the execution of the system can be fully trusted without individual points of trust. Although there have been initial attempts at adopting such technologies for this domain, literature shows that the different closed commercial solutions have resulted in a fragmented landscape of solutions which only partly solves the challenge.
The technology being built through Smart Maritime acts a bridge across different solutions built in a decentralised and trustless manner using DLT. The toolset will allow for logistics process design working across existing blockchain logistics solutions, collecting together in a single decentralized app (DApp) monitoring of different logistics solutions across blockchain systems. This will ensure decentralised logistics trail auditing allowing technical, organizational and legal compliance perspectives which provides cross-DLT support, and tools that make use of open standards allowing for a one-world view of logistic trails across blockchains and systems.
Dr Joshua Ellul
Prof. Gordon Pace