The Future of Blockchain in Transport

Over the past several months I have had the pleasure of working with the University of Sheffield and the Transport Systems Catapult to explore the applicability of distributed ledger technology - more commonly known as blockchain - to Intelligent Mobility (IM). Intelligent Mobility is the application of modern information technology to solve the all too common challenges associated with getting goods or people from one place to another. In this blog post I will outline our project aims, the method we used and some of the key findings from our project.

Method & Findings

Our project consisted of three largely sequential tasks, as shown in Figure 1. 

We learnt that blockchain started to gain business interest in late 2014. The finance industry were the early adopters, with Supply Chain and Logistics sector following. The majority of blockchain projects are currently in prototype stage, and the technology is still some several years away from mainstream adoption. There is evidence that recent projects are increasingly consortium led for cross business network transformation. Blockchain application includes tracking (e.g., provenance, proof of origin), transfer (e.g., smart contracts) and payment (e.g., digital currency). Latency concerns remain, and standards and business network governance continue to challenge.

We found that whilst blockchain offers much potential to IM, the actual (public domain) projects are limited to the Freight / Logistics segment. We found a large number potential interesting use cases for blockchain in intelligent mobility ranging from supply chain transparency to vehicle-negotiated access. We categorised the top ten use cases according to the blockchain value add and the implementation project complexity.

We looked for information to allow us to estimate the blockchain in IM market size, but concluded that a meaningful market size was not openly available to allow us to make a reliable estimate.

We conducted semi-structured interviews with five UK based practitioners representing users and suppliers of blockchain technology in transport. A structured survey was circulated to over 200 contacts in the industry. We analysed the 40 responses to give us an initial glimpse of attitudes to, and experience with blockchain in IM.

Our Conclusions

In the near term much can come from observing the supply chain management blockchain related projects as they move from experimentation to production. Projects are starting to document business value from blockchain usage, which will be useful in calibrating new or potential projects in IM.

In the medium term, blockchain offers transformational potential across all segments by increasing passenger and end user trust and eliminating expensive bureaucracy and “cost on cost” back office processes. In this phase, the choice of blockchain first project is critical. Organisations must cut through the hype around the emerging technology and look to true, demonstrable blockchain business value. The most transformational benefit will be from use of blockchain to transform the entire business network, not just one organisation. The challenges to overcome in doing this are likely to be as much cultural as technical.

In the longer term, there is broad agreement that blockchain will transform IM. It has the potential to solve many of the security and novel business case challenges in the Connected & Autonomous Vehicle segment, address the passenger and integration needs to realise true Mobility as a Service and drive cost out of the Supply Chain / Logistics segment whilst increasing supply chain integrity.

Are you Decentralised Yet?

Our project findings were incorporated into a broader Transport Systems Catapult concept paper exploring how blockchain could disrupt the transport sector in the coming years. The full report can be found here.

 Thanks . . .

. . . to the University of Sheffield - Prof. Lenny Koh, Dr Achim Brucker, Dr Michel LeLerre, Karthik Suresh & Ashish Momaya and to Charles Carter from the Transport Systems Catapult for their excellent collaboration and teamwork on the project.