On the Integration of Event-Based and Transaction-Based Architectures for Supply Chains

TLDR

Supply chain visibility is increasingly critical as network complexity has grown orders of magnitude, driving higher costs and reduced product availability. This paper seeks to improve affordability and pseudo real‑time visibility of truckload activities during distribution. The authors propose a digital thread that tracks shipment status in pseudo real‑time, built on a dynamic hybrid peer‑to‑peer network and a private/public blockchain that incorporates emerging sensor technologies.

Abstract

Affordable and reliable supply chain visibility is becoming increasingly important as the complexity of the network underlying supply chains is becoming orders of magnitudeshigher compared to a decade ago. Moreover, this increase in complexity is starting to reflect on the cost of goods and their availability to the consumers. This paper addresses two key issues in the distribution phase of the supply chain, namely, affordability and pseudo real-time visibility oftruckload activities. The proposed framework creates a digital thread that tracks the pseudo real-time status of the shipment making the physical distribution process completely transparent to the stakeholders. The architecture of the framework is based on a dynamic hybrid peer-to-peer network and a private/public blockchain data model that leverages emergent sensor technologies.