Literature Review on the application of Blockchain Technology in Maritime Supply Chain Systems

Abstract

BlockChain (BC) is a specially designed autonomous, distributed data storage. Autonomy means the removal of external authority of absolute trust and performing BC maintenance by all participants using the consensus protocol procedure. Distribution refers to the fact that each participant has a copy of the whole database to prevent data loss and misuse. Participants communicate by sending/receiving messages. BC is characterized by the following properties: immutability, traceability, consistency, decentralization, pseudo-anonymity, and security. Recently, the smart contracts have been introduced in BC. They can be signed for a short-term period to define and control requirements and service quality of different decentralized applications. All these properties yield the increase of BC technology applications, among which we emphasize the maritime supply chain systems (MSCSs). MSCSs are important mode of transportation and trading industries due to the large capacity of vessels, relatively clean transportation, and low costs. On the other hand, the main issues of MSCSs involve long service cycles, complex structures, complicated documentation, product traceability, gathering information from multiple sources, and trust issues between trading parties. BC technology seems to be very promising tool for resolving these issues and contributing to the development of more reliable and efficient MSCSs. As the theoretical considerations related to the application of BC technology in MSCSs started in 2017, while the practical applications could be seldom found in the relevant literature, we intent to contribute to this topic within the Montenegro-Serbia Project "Development of innovative AI based solution for a Blockchain technology in Maritime Supply chain" (ABMarSupply) from the SMART4ALL Horizon 2020 project: Bilateral Knowledge Transfer Experiment. The first step is a comprehensive survey of the existing literature that is a focus of this talk.