A Blockchain-based Decision Support System for E-commerce Order Prediction

Abstract

The rapidly growing e-commerce sector has created new opportunities and challenges to the logistics industry. Nonetheless, the majority of Hong Kong logistics industry, especially small-and-medium (SMEs) firms, lack operational decision support to adequately handle the seasonal, fragmented, and fluctuating e-commerce orders. To grasp the opportunities of the e-commerce logistics business, logistics service providers (LSPs) should enhance their capability in information exchange and operational planning. With these improvements, the logistics industry would be better able to sustain and expand their e-commerce logistics business. In this paper, a Blockchain-based E-Commerce Analytics Model is developed to enhance digital supply chain integration. Firstly, timely operational decision support would be achieved as blockchain technology, after that, the ML algorithm would enable the logistics industry to manage data efficiently and to forecast dynamic e-commerce order demand. Subsequently, the proposed model allows LSPs to flexibly re-allocate the right number of resources in real time to deal with the hour-to-hour fluctuating arrival of orders in distribution centers. Additionally, the proposed model enables logistics practitioners to predict the sales performance related to e-commerce.