Abstract
In the global trucking industry, vertical collaboration between shippers and carriers is attained by intermediaries, called brokers. Brokers organize carriers for a shipper in accordance with its quality and price requirements, and support carriers to collaborate horizontally by sharing a large distribution order from a shipper. Brokers also act as trustees, preventing the passing of private information of any party to the others. Despite these benefits, intermediaries in the trucking industry are involved in several sustainability problems, including high costs, high levels of carbon emissions, high percentages of empty miles, low-capacity utilizations, and driver shortages. Several studies have acknowledged the importance of improving collaboration to address these problems. Obviously, the major concern of brokers is not collaboration, but rather to optimize their own gains. This paper investigates the potential of blockchain technology to improve collaboration in the trucking industry, by eliminating brokers while preserving their responsibilities as organizers and trustees. This paper extends the transportation control tower concept from the logistics literature, and presents a system architecture for its implementation through smart contracts on a blockchain network. In the proposed system, the scalability and privacy of trucking operations are ensured through integration with privacy-preserving off-chain computation and storage solutions (running outside of the blockchain). The potential of this design artifact for fostering collaboration in the trucking industry was evaluated by both blockchain technology experts and trucking industry professionals.
Highlights
Despite its significant contributions to the economic growth and social welfare of all nations around the world, the global trucking industry suffers from many problems, mainly due to the heavily fragmented nature of the industry, as well as the poor level of collaboration among its involved parties.Traditionally, trucking operations between shippers and carriers have been orchestrated by freight brokers acting as organizers and trustees in the industry
The proposed design artifact is evaluated based on the expert opinions of blockchain technology experts and trucking industry professionals
The proposed design artifact itself is our contribution to the knowledge base, because to our best knowledge, it is the first blockchain application designed for enabling collaborative business models in the logistics industry
Summary
Trucking operations between shippers and carriers have been orchestrated by freight brokers acting as organizers and trustees in the industry. Brokers act as trustees, preventing the passing of private information of any party to the others. Considering the fragmented structure of the carrier market, with its high degree of competition, brokers currently play an important role in bringing shippers and carriers together in the industry. This business model, centralized around freight brokers, limits collaboration opportunities among shippers and carriers and further aggravates the problems in the trucking industry
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
