Track & Trust combines a set of modern Web3, communication, and satellite technologies and aims to address significant unsolved challenges of today’s supply chains. Combining various communication systems creates a network for the supply chain even in the most remote areas of the world.

Any kind of shipment information from such areas is highly valuable for all actors along the supply chain, such as logistic firms, their clients, the end consumer, and the operating teams on the ground. One of the current challenges is the accessibility of information in fast-changing and remote areas – an issue the Track & Trust team seeks to facilitate. While other supply chain systems deterministically produce output information by requiring a specific input, Track & Trust does not rely on standardized initial input, minimizing hurdles in gaining knowledge. Our probabilistic approach, in contrast, allows maximum flexibility. Any kind of slightest interaction with the shipment, even if it is only the scanning of a T&T QR code with a smartphone, leads to the submission of a status update. And it doesn’t matter whether logistical staff or anyone else has carried out this scan or someone not related to it.

Additionally, users are free to report on the status of the shipment or their own circumstances, meaning they can communicate through a text field and provide any extra information on the shipment on their terms, e.g. “flooded route. Took a different route, delivery delayed by two hours”. It is ultimately at the discretion of the logistics operators to multiply the effectiveness of their tracking tools to decide how and what data they use.

Leveraging Data to Drive Process Innovation

Data from the operational area is the actual raw material – logisticians can use them to complement or expand their services in a new way. This leaves room for extensions in the future, for example, on a basis of such a broad database, AI models could be trained to ultimately make predictions about the shrinkage of deliveries, stock levels, and route recommendations. Doing so creates added value for logistic companies’ customers and new competitive advantages for the company itself. Thereby, while increasing efficiency and transparency, Track & Trust holds the potential to change the logistics industry. Lastly, we feel grateful that by investing in this project, the European Space Agency underscores the overall potential of our tracking tool.

As things are beginning to take shape, stay tuned for updates on Track & Trust as it is ready for deployment by 2023!

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The bushfires in Australia, the war in Libya or the Coronavirus outbreak in China. Our world is facing various challenges. However, besides the crises which are present in our daily news, over 200 million people in 81 countries are assessed for being in need of humanitarian assistance. A large percentage of these are concentrated in a small number of countries. For example in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Yemen, where millions of people are starving, have been displaced from their homes by war and suffer epidemic outbreaks of Ebola and Cholera took place. 

But how do life-saving supplies – like food, water, medicine, and shelter – reach the people in need? Here is where the humanitarian supply chain comes into play. In the GIF below we tried to illustrate one, in a simplified way, but as you will see these networks are complex.

Just to give you some characteristics on these networks: 

• They are composed of multiple stakeholders from NGOs, governments, and military to private corporations
• They operate over multiple countries/continents
• They are ad-hoc and work under high time pressure  
• They operate in the most demanding environments, like warzones, and after natural disasters 
• Its is very hard to forecast their demand since: 
  • Every crisis is unique 
  • A lack of historical data 

Further, if tracking of goods and shipments is done at all, it’s documented by organizations individually and manually. This makes the humanitarian supply chain vulnerable to human error and fraud.
All these characteristics result in tremendous costs. It is estimated that around 80 percent of the expenditures of aid agencies are in the area of supply chain management.

Luckily, we offer a unique solution that allows the tracking of shipments from the beginning to the very end of the supply chain, bring transparency, trust, and collaboration to the humanitarian supply chain. We call it Track & Trust. 

Our solution is made up of three key components: 

1. A user-friendly interface, proving the supply chain stakeholders an overview of the actual state and details of a shipment. 
2. A Private Ethereum Blockchain, which allows the immutable and tamper-resilient documentation of handover data and serves as a single point of truth. Noteworthy, data is managed and governed by the involved stakeholders themself, no external intermediary is needed. 
3. A hardware kit, composed of LoRa nodes and satellite communication technology, which allow the creation of an asynchronous mesh network, which enables to broadcast changes in custody of goods without being dependent on existing telecommunication infrastructure. 

Our goal is to minimize the cost related to human error and fraud of these life-saving supply chains to maximize the value which arrives at the people in need. 

Track & Trust was created to address the problems of the humanitarian supply chain. However, these supply chains are by far the only ones facing challenges like transparency and accountability in times of globalization. Just consider the supply chains of pharmaceutical, food or luxury products that are fighting against a multi-billion dollar counterfeit industry, demolishing profits and the trust of their customers. 

If you want to learn more about our Track & Trust system feel free to contact us or to read more on our company blog. 

“This project is funded by Block.IS (Blockchain Innovation Spaces) Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme Project No. 824509, under the funding framework of the European Commission.”

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Our goal is to maximize the value, which is arriving at the people in need by establishing transparency and collaboration between the responsible supply chain stakeholders. In part one of our blog post series, we described how we tested our Track and Trust System. For testing, we tracked a live shipment of 304 family tents from Pakistan to Dubai between the first four parties of DFID’s supply chain. In part two, we described the challenges, which occur when tracking the last-mile of the deliveries. In this post, we are going to go further down the rabbit hole and dive into the technology, which will enable us to overcome the Sisyphean task of last-mile supply chain tracking. 

The story starts after the implementing partner received the goods, loaded the trucks and the driver starts his way to the destination in the crisis area.
The environmental circumstances surrounding humanitarian missions are highly heterogeneous and can range from tropical islands after a hurricane to newly built refugee camps close to a war zone. However, the one thing they have in common is that within the first few weeks after the disaster took place telecommunication infrastructure mostly is not available.

Despite these difficulties, to provide stakeholders within the supply chain with an overview about the current status of the deliveries, we at Datarella are working to test the usability of a LoRa-based Mesh Network which transmits the transaction data offline until it’s finally able to be posted to the blockchain via a satellite uplink. We’re partnering with our friends at Orora Tech who know the ins and outs of the satellite technology quite well since their main business involves the manufacture of nanosatellites. 

Our solution consists of the following components:
1. A user interface implemented as a progressive web app with offline capability
2. A LoRa-based Mesh Network
3. A Globalstar satellite uplink
4. A private permissioned Ethereum Blockchain

Whenever a transfer of goods occurs, the involved parties, e.g. the truck driver and the consignee in a base camp, will use their mobile phones to prepare the necessary blockchain handoff transactions offline. Data about location, time and custody will then be saved within the progressive web app interface (including pre-signed Ethereum transactions when possible).

Then, to transmit this data without having an internet connection, we are planning to use a LoRa-based mesh network.

A LoRa network can be described by its two main characteristics. 

1. As the name indicates, it allows long-range transmissions with a reach of approximately 12km in rural areas.
2. It operates at low power consumption. 

Further, the term “mesh network” describes a network composed of nodes, which connect in a direct, dynamically and non-hierarchical manner. Therefore, these networks are also referred to as “self-healing” since nodes can organize and configure themselves, which allows the network to persist even if some nodes are not available.
For creating a Pymesh LoRa Mesh, we are planning to use  LoPy4, a 4-network (WiFi, BLE, LoRa, and Sigfox) and MicroPython combination controller. Further, we are considering to either equip some of them with Pytrack carrier boards, for very accurate GNSS Glonass GPS. An alternative method of geolocation is to feed in GPS data from the mobile phones of the drivers. 

The network is implemented using OpenThread, an IPv6-based networking protocol. The reasons why we decided for this network type are its following features: 

• Simplicity — Simple installation, start-up, and operation
• Security — All devices in a Thread network are authenticated and all communications are encrypted
• Reliability — Self-healing mesh networking, with no single point of failure, and spread-spectrum techniques to provide immunity to interference
• Efficiency — Low-power Thread devices can sleep and operate on battery power for years (Dependent on how often they wake to transmit)

To create the Pymesh network, we are planning to install LoPy4s on the trucks, which are used to deliver the humanitarian goods to their destination. As soon a truck gets within the reach of another network node, it will transmit the offline transaction to the next router. The transaction will travel through the network node by node in this manner. Here you see a prototype 

Since the reach of the LoRa routers is limited to approximately 12km we are also playing with the idea to install an air-based router, using a fixed-wing drone or a weather balloon, which would extend the reach up to 500km. 

So far so good. Now the transaction data will be transmitted from truck to truck until it reaches a border router, which is connected to a satellite network. So far we have tested an uplink for a very basic JSON RPC transaction over a Globalstar simplex transmitter and successfully sent two data packets to the Globalstar constellation. Each contained a portion of the data needed to make an Ethereum transaction.

After the transaction data is sent via short bursts to the Globalstar constellation it will be received from a ground station, which is connected to the internet and executes the signed transaction in a live blockchain.

Together all of these components should enable a humanitarian agency to roll out tracking for their assets and provide transparency across their entire supply chain despite the total absence of telecommunications infrastructure in the last mile environment. All of this will be backed by a blockchain ledger providing the stakeholders in the humanitarian supply chain a single source of truth regarding custody all the way up until the final aid delivery.

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Each humanitarian mission has its own specific challenges. Often, the conditions of roads are uncertain, and the telecommunication infrastructure is destroyed or unavailable. One of the biggest problems is keeping track of the chain of custody after the consignee receives goods from customs in-country.

Documentation about the current ownership and transactions of goods is mostly done manually, which makes it vulnerable to human error or fraud. As a consequence, high transaction and transportation costs occur since the implementing parties have a hard time finding out if the goods arrived properly at their destination.

To solve the problem of last-mile tracking within the humanitarian supply chain, we at Datarella applied for and received a kickstarter project grant from the European Space Agency. We are building out a series of prototypes to prove that our technical approach works while also engaging with our partners in humanitarian aid operations to test our assumptions.

As a solution, we propose our Track and Trust System combining bleeding edge blockchain and IoT technology to close the documentation gap in the last mile.

Hereby, we need to tackle two main challenges: 

1. The solution needs to document transactions of goods and their location in the blockchain without being directly connected to the internet. 
2. No expensive, eye-catching or complicated hardware can be installed in the trucks, which are delivering the goods since it might be stolen, endanger the driver or might be too complex used easily by drivers.

To solve the problem of offline data transmission, Datarella is working together with Orora Technologies to test the usability of a LoRa-Based Mesh Network. With the help of this low-cost, self-healing network data will be transmitted to the satellite base station. From there it will be uploaded using efficient Short Burst Data transmissions to the Globalstar satellite constellation. 

Finally, all transactions will be saved into a private permissioned Ethereum blockchain to create a transparent and tamper-resistant register of transactions, which will serve the stakeholders as a single source of truth.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be describing our work to solve last mile delivery issues by augmenting the existing Track & Trust system with various offline capabilities.

We’ll be writing a series of blog posts outlining the work so far and what’s coming up soon.  Stay tuned!

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A question we have in each of our blockchain projects is that of the user-friendliness of having a decentralised architecture. In fact, it’s not only us having that problem but, according to a survey of 160 DApp projects in 2018 by the good people at Fluence Network, 75% of all mentioned new user onboarding as a major hurdle for adoption of blockchain. Additionally, the second biggest pain points for Dapp developers was “Bad UX of crypto”. In the following post I would like to show how we solved the largest of the issues with UX in blockchain, the key management.

For a couple of months, we have been building a Proof-of-Technology as part of the Frontier Technology Livestreaming (FTL) programme of the UK Department for International Development (DFID). The technology to be “proven” in this case is blockchain, specifically within the setting of humanitarian supply chain management — here’s a link to a medium post for more on the topic.

We’ve been advancing according to plan, successfully finishing our first sprint and working hard to finish the second. This will be the final sprint before we enter the live test phase, where we will field-test the system with a real life humanitarian logistics supply chain. The “real life”-test in this case will mean tracking a regular shipment of goods to a disaster-stricken area, using the application we are building. In this post, I’d like to share some of our experiences in trying to make blockchain as user-friendly and safe as possible, two goals normally seen as diametrically opposed.

Firstly, the most basic user-experience (UX) consideration when implementing a permissioned (more on what this means: here) blockchain solution is: if and through what medium does the user interact with the blockchain system? One can imagine solutions ranging from a completely “authoritative” system where the end-user is happily ignorant of any blockchain activities going on in the background, much like few internet users are aware of exactly how passwords are checked when logging in to a service, to products where each user is trusted (and in some cases required) to set up and run their own node, manage keys, interact through API calls and verify all activities. We attempt to find some middle-ground by reasoning about what our users are actually likely to use and appreciate in a system.

In our case, the users range from technologically savvy, well-connected DFID professionals with up-to-date hardware down to logistics service provider personnel with limited connectivity and first generation android smart phones. Since we are working in a PoT, with a relatively limited scope and time frame, we decided to make some assumptions on the user constraints. Roughly, we assume all of our users:

• Speak and read English
• Have a device (mobile or not) with an updated browser installed
• Have a working Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth to serve a React-based web application (React is one of the most common web programming frameworks for UI’s)

These assumptions allow us to target a very wide audience, and to extend functionality in the future to cover, for example, off-line use cases.

We do this by building a progressive web application — meaning that it is reliable, fast and flexible enough to be used on mobile or desktop — with a simple login procedure to separate user types from each other. The application is hosted on our cloud provider which connects to a database as well as our — wait for it — blockchain!

This means that a logistics planner in the offices of DFID can access the web application by opening a standard browser typing in the address of the application in the URL window and can then login using his or her personal username and password. Similarly, a user on the “ground” can accept an order for his or her leg of the shipment by logging in to the application over a browser on a mobile device.

After having established the point of access for the users to the blockchain, we needed to determine which actions a user should be required or allowed to take with respect to the blockchain system. Our aim was to empower the users to have as much control of the most critical parts in the supply chain as possible. This was partly to ensure trust in the system — the purpose of having a blockchain is to remove a single point-of-control of the data — and partly to communicate clearly to the user exactly what information comes onto the blockchain.

We’re working with an Ethereum-based system, which allows for smart contracts. This means that we could encode large parts of the business logic, such as in the chain, if we would like to. But, the more functionality which is on-chain, the more users have to interact with the blockchain. The interactions which affect the complexity on-chain are operations where the user needs to add new information. More interactions lead to more signing of messages or transactions to the chain. More signing means more usage of the key pair of the user, which is mostly quite awkward and non-intuitive for users.

This is why we opted for a solution where the user still has full possession of the private key, and no one else can manipulate signed information posted to the blockchain by them. By helping the user generate a new key pair upon registration and then allowing them to store it locally on their device, we hope to give as much responsibility to the user as they would like, while still keeping security risks to a minimum.

So, when does the user have to sign transactions?

So, when does the user have to sign transactions? Exactly then, when custodianship is changed. The absolutely critical information, which must not be corrupted, is thereby secured the most. Custodianship change contains two steps: first, it needs to be handed over by the current custodian, and secondly, it has to be accepted by the custodian-to-be. Before both those transactions have been signed, custodianship still lies with the previous user. We try to make the “signing” as non-invasive as possible, by applying known procedures like “Username and password” plus a special key-file which needs to be provided by the user. It’s shown in a simplified form below:

The risk of such a system of user-controled keys is that the user loses the private key, but in our case, since we are working within a permissioned setting, there is a mitigation. Access to the platform is dependent on verifying the real identity of each user. Therefore, in the case of a lost key, the user has to re-register, but the information isn’t lost. The user will then have to re-verify the identity to regain access to the account, where a new key-pair can be generated.

In a future solution, there should not be a central authority to reset a password without the identity checks having been verified, but for the PoT it is acceptable.

We’ve now seen some of the challenges of usability we’ve been facing in building a humanitarian supply chain blockchain-solution within FTL. Usability and accessibility is an immense problem for blockchain in general. It strives to empower people but it is at risk of confusing and alienating people with complicated key management procedures and lacking interfaces. At Datarella, we don’t see the point in building technology that the end user can’t understand properly or feels uncomfortable using. Especially when the users are strapped for time, trying to help others in dire need, we have a responsibility to create technology which does not obstruct but enables our users.

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The project is supported by the DFID innovation and future technologies programme, Frontier Technology Livestreaming. They source ways of improving how DFID works across the world using new technologies from DFID staff. Naturally, blockchain is one of those technologies, and supply chain operations is a very applicable area for this technology for three main reasons:

1. Transparency – Humanitarian supply chains could benefit from having the right tools to achieve increased transparency in a secure manner. More transparency could also facilitate collaboration across organisations.

2. Efficiency – If the operatives working at organisations in DFID and similar organisations (e.g. USAID, the UN World Food Programme, etc.) could rely more on the quality of data, they could focus on other matters. This could contribute to decreased “shrinkage” and thus improved efficiency as more goods are delivered to those in need.

3. Collaboration – Having a shared database of goods, shipments and importantly accountability, where many can write and read, but not change the history, is an ideal setup for collaboration. This could enable the creation of standards for data models and improved service to both those funding (mostly tax payers) and those on the receiving end.

With these prerequisites in mind, we are looking forward to the coming phases and sprints of the pilot where we will implement a live blockchain solution, hopefully of great use to many people, especially those in need of immediate and unconditional aid.

The project consists of building a blockchain-based system to track a shipment of plastic sheeting shelter kits (try to say that ten times in a row) from an offshore warehouse, by multiple logistics service providers to a country where they are needed. There they have to be cleared through customs, meaning that a consignee will need to assume responsibility for the shipment. This will also be tracked using a smart contract. Thereafter, a so-called implementing partner will start transporting and deploying the kits within the country.

If you have experience or are interested in learning more about this project and blockchain in humanitarian supply chains, feel free to @ @mountbranch or @datarella on twitter! Also, here’s a link to a Medium post by FTL themselves about the initial phase of the project!

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