PackChain: Toward a Blockchain-based Management Platform for Last-mile Delivery

Abstract

In this paper, a blockchain-based management platform, PackChain, for last-mile delivery is proposed. The growing popularity of online shopping has put immense pressure on the supply-chain industry, especially on last-mile delivery. The available solutions suffer from high cost, and lack of transparency. Therefore, assuring traceability of users' actions has become a critical requirement to establish trust between parties. The proposed PackChain framework uses the Ethereum blockchain to offer a crowdsourcing platform for last-mile delivery with autonomous and transparent processes. PackChain provides all the core functions needed for the delivery framework to operate through smart contracts such as managing user information, accepting offers, verifying transactions, and handling payments. In addition, the framework relies on proofs of delivery as an arbitration mechanism between users to release or hold funds. The proposed framework is implemented using Solidity and Web3.js to interact between clients and carriers. The emulation results demonstrate the feasibility and cost-efficiency of the proposed solution11The full code of the smart contract and the related logic is also made publicly available on Github..