Securing oil port logistics: A blockchain framework for efficient and trustworthy trade documents

The oil port logistics involves multiple parties including oil tanker owners, port authorities, customs, oil suppliers, and shipping companies. These parties need to exchange a significant amount of data and documentation related to cargo, such as bills of lading, customs declarations, and cargo manifests. This huge amount of data and documentation provides ample opportunities for data manipulation and corruption. Moreover, physical documentation is slow and prone to errors and manipulation. This data can be securely stored and shared between different parties in a tamper-proof and transparent manner using blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized technology that employs secure hashing and consensus algorithms that can detect any data modification. Hence, this work proposes a blockchain-enabled immutable, and efficient framework for trade documentation in oil port logistics. The proposed framework provides timely processing of oil trade documents and ensures immutability while increasing trust among the trade entities. In addition, this work implements a private blockchain for the execution of smart contracts, which can ensure that all parties involved in the logistics process comply with pre-agreed rules and regulations. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in terms of transparency, immutability, network latency, throughput, and resource utilization.