Date of Award
2023
Publication Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.Sc.
Department
Computer Science
Keywords
Blockchain, Crowdshipping, Last-Mile Delivery, Reputation, Threat Modelling
Supervisor
S.Saad
Supervisor
X.Yuan
Rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The fierce competition and rapidly growing eCommerce market are painful headaches for logistics companies. In 2021, Canada Post’s parcel volume peaked at 361 million units with a minimum charge of $10 per each. The Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) is the final leg of the supply chain that ends with the package at the customer’s doorstep. LMD involves moving small shipments to geographically dispersed locations with high expectations on service levels and precise time windows. Therefore, it is the most complex and costly logistics process, accounting for more than 50% of the overall supply chain cost. Innovations like Crowdshipping, such as Uber and Amazon Flex, help overcome this inefficiency and provide an outstanding delivery experience by enabling freelancers willing to deliver packages if they are around. However, apartfrom the centralized nature of the Crowdshipping platforms, retailers pay a fee for outsourcing the delivery process, which is rising. Besides, they lack transparency, and most of them, if not all, are platform monopolies in the making.
New technologies such as blockchain recently introduced an opportunity to improve logistics and LMD operations. Several papers in the literature suggested employing blockchain and other cryptographic techniques for parcel delivery. Hence,this thesis presents a blockchain-based free-intermediaries crowd-logistics model and investigates the challenges that could harbor adopting this solution, such as user trust, data safety, security of transactions, and tracking service quality. Our framework combines a security assessment that examines the possible vulnerabilities of the proposed design and suggestions for mitigation and protection. Besides, it encourages couriers to act honestly by using a decentralized reputation model for couriers’ ratings based on their past behavior. A security analysis of our proposed system hasbeen provided, and the complete code of the smart contract has been publicly made available on GitHub.
Recommended Citation
Alqaisi, Ala', "Trustworthy Decentralized Last Mile Delivery Framework Using Blockchain" (2023). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 8955.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/8955