Automation in logistics port and freight transport with blockchain technology

Abstract

According to World Economic Forum the COVID-19 crisis exposed the vulnerabilities in global supply chains. One notable impact was in shipping rates, as transport ground to a halt and a worldwide backlog of containers built up in ports around the world. Another was a dramatic increase in the number of people shopping online as measures to safeguard public health meant that many were confined to their homes. Logistics service providers were forced to get creative and identify means of mitigating costs while maintaining the speed and quality of service. Within the commodity supply chain, there are many stakeholders, each with their own set of platforms and methods. Multiple versions of the same document can inundate end-users, especially if they need to enter one set of data in multiple places. These circumstances open up loopholes for fraudulent or malicious activity in the supply chain. Logistics suppliers are fragmenting their operations in response to this shift, spreading out their processes to minimize concentration risk and the disruption caused by events like geopolitical tension or a pandemic. Using a world production growth function the contribution of the Logistics Performance Index(LPI) components of 133 countries has been estimated for the period 2007-2018 through the econometric method of panel data with fixed effects. Blockchain Technology can guarantee transparency and quality, and automation where Smart Contracts can be written and often reused between different entities and a set of agreements that can automatically take effect after a period or condition is met. The content of the paper reflects the results of research conducted on the contribution of logistics port and freight transport with which we can solve inefficiencies in the ease of arranging international shipments at competitive prices with Blockchain to get Automation of whole supply chain with ports nodes.