Supply Chain Visibility Ledger

Abstract

Improved situational awareness, also known as Supply Chain Visibility, contributes to better decisions with the ability to synchronize processes and reduce costs. It requires data sharing of for instance positions, speed, direction, and estimated time of arrival and—departure at locations of vessels, trucks, barges, and trains. Any two collaborating stakeholders might already be sharing these process ‘milestones’ in the context of a commercial relation, using a platform. Reception of a milestone by a stakeholder may be a trigger to inform a customer of the progress of its order or can be used to synchronize physical processes. First, this research chapter specifies supply chain visibility in more detail and secondly provides arguments for applying distributed ledger technology. These arguments address on the one hand near real-time share milestones in supply and logistics chains with a broadcast mechanism based on subscriptions and on the other hand large scale distribution and implementation of software on a distributed ledger. The latter raises issues of governance, that will be briefly touched upon. Scientific contributions of this research chapter are in ‘state’ validation of real-world objects as a means of mining, ontology-based input validation, and interaction sequence specification by a business process choreography.