A Blockchain-IoT Platform for the Smart Pallet Pooling Management

Abstract

Pallet management as a backbone of logistics and supply chain activities is essential to supply chain parties, while a number of regulations, standards and operational constraints are considered in daily operations. In recent years, pallet pooling has been unconventionally advocated to manage pallets in a closed-loop system to enhance the sustainability and operational effectiveness, but pitfalls in terms of service reliability, quality compliance and pallet limitation when using a single service provider may occur. Therefore, this study incorporates a decentralisation mechanism into the pallet management to formulate a technological eco-system for pallet pooling, namely Pallet as a Service (PalletaaS), raised by the foundation of consortium blockchain and Internet of things (IoT). Consortium blockchain is regarded as the blockchain 3.0 to facilitate more industrial applications, except cryptocurrency, and the synergy of integrating a consortium blockchain and IoT is thus investigated. The corresponding layered architecture is proposed to structure the system deployment in the industry, in which the location-inventory-routing problem for pallet pooling is formulated. To demonstrate the values of this study, a case analysis to illustrate the human–computer interaction and pallet pooling operations is conducted. Overall, this study standardises the decentralised pallet management in the closed-loop mechanism, resulting in a constructive impact to sustainable development in the logistics industry.

Blockchain Technology for Supply Chain Management: A Comprehensive Review

“…Finally, 12% of the publications related to SCM and BCT are under the business/management/accounting field, followed by 5% under the environmental sciences area and 1% under agricultural and biological sciences. There are strong ties between BCT and IoT, and that is aligned with the recent research pointing out the future era of (BIoT) [37,38]…”

“…They found that the suggested system positively impacts the overall quality of the pooling, increases end-user trust and satisfaction level, facilitates traceability, and minimizes errors. Moreover, this integration leverages cyber security by minimizing system vulnerabilities [38].…”

IoT Security Challenges: Cloud and Blockchain, Postquantum Cryptography, and Evolutionary Techniques

“…• Solution based on peer-to-peer decentralized technology, typically a blockchain solution. There are many recent examples, including [61][62][63][64][65][66], and the number of solutions is growing quickly. Decentralization removes the requirement of trusting the cloud provider.…”

Deep Learning-Based Intelligent Forklift Cargo Accurate Transfer System

“…The operation of an intelligent forklift is quite straightforward; typically, it inserts and picks up pallets at one preset area before travelling to another to dump them off, accomplishing a full pallet transfer procedure. However, implementing such a straightforward approach presents numerous specific difficulties: Existing methods are more costly for determining whether a pallet is available at a certain location, while the recognition rate is low and also susceptible to interference by environmental factors [ 4 ]. When the intelligent forklift inserts the pallet, there are problems of high implementation cost [ 5 ], low algorithm robustness and insufficient accuracy for the calculation of the relative position between the pallet and the forklift.…”

“…Existing methods are more costly for determining whether a pallet is available at a certain location, while the recognition rate is low and also susceptible to interference by environmental factors [ 4 ].…”