Blockchain-Based Load Carrier Management in the Physical Internet

Although recent studies have shown that the concepts of the Physical Internet (PI) can sustainably improve logistics processes, this new paradigm has not yet become established in practice. Companies fear losing control over their business and resist disclosing internal data. Even if some see a long-term improvement in the PI, current practical tests fail because the potential benefits can only be leveraged with a sufficiently large number of participants. We are therefore convinced that the introduction of the PI can only take place in small steps, in which companies retain control over their business. The technical platform required to operate the PI must be set up in a kind of parallel operation and disseminated via incentives without interfering with critical process flows. Such an incentive could be provided, e.g., by a shareable accounting platform that documents the exchange of pallets, boxes, etc. and keeps balance lists in sync with any trading partner. Companies continue to control their processes themselves, but at the same time they enable the construction of a backbone for distributed data exchange with arbitrary partners – a first step towards the establishment of a PI platform. In this paper we show how such a load carrier management platform can look like, how manipulation can be prevented with the use of Blockchain and how human handling can be improved.