Browsing by Author "Li, Zhijie"

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    A Distributed Ledger for Supply Chain Physical Distribution Visibility
    (MDPI, 2017-11-02) Wu, Haoyan; Li, Zhijie; King, Brian; Ben Miled, Zina; Wassick, John; Tazelaar, Jeffrey; Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering and Technology
    Supply chains (SC) span many geographies, modes and industries and involve several phases where data flows in both directions from suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, to customers. This data flow is necessary to support critical business decisions that may impact product cost and market share. Current SC information systems are unable to provide validated, pseudo real-time shipment tracking during the distribution phase. This information is available from a single source, often the carrier, and is shared with other stakeholders on an as-needed basis. This paper introduces an independent, crowd-validated, online shipment tracking framework that complements current enterprise-based SC management solutions. The proposed framework consists of a set of private distributed ledgers and a single blockchain public ledger. Each private ledger allows the private sharing of custody events among the trading partners in a given shipment. Privacy is necessary, for example, when trading high-end products or chemical and pharmaceutical products. The second type of ledger is a blockchain public ledger. It consists of the hash code of each private event in addition to monitoring events. The latter provide an independently validated immutable record of the pseudo real-time geolocation status of the shipment from a large number of sources using commuters-sourcing.
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    A hybrid peer-to-peer framework for supply chain visibility
    (2017) Li, Zhijie; Ben Miled, Zina
    Current supply chain information systems are transaction-based and suffer from lack of real-time transparency. Furthermore, they are often centralized and therefore cannot adequately scale to include a large number of small and medium size companies. This thesis presents a hybrid peer-to-peer supply chain physical distribution framework (HP3D) that addresses these increasingly critical gaps in a global market. HP3D leverages the advantages of hybrid networks through flexible peers and a light-weight index server in order to share supply chain physical distribution information in pseudo real-time among stakeholders. The architecture of HP3D consists of a hierarchy of dynamic sub-networks that evolve based on market demands and digitize the transfer of goods between suppliers and customers. These sub-networks are created on demand, emulate the end-to-end movement of the shipment and terminate when the delivery of goods is completed. A variation of blockchain technology is also proposed in order to increase the security level of the proposed framework.