A Digital Chain-of-Custody Architecture for Freight Documents: Event-Driven Capture, Transformation, Delivery, and Retrieval

Authors

  • Prasanna Sundaravaradan

Keywords:

chain of custody; digital freight documents; event-driven architecture; proof of delivery; document capture; content hashing; claim-check pattern; role-based access control; retention policy; audit trail; distributed ledger; transportation logistics

Abstract

There are several systems in play for Bills of Lading, Proof of Delivery records, cargo documents, receipts, photos, trip signoffs, and exception reports before they reach operations teams and customers. These are all cycles in which documents can be delayed, duplicated without proper tracking, be modified without proper traceability, sent to the wrong recipient, or not be associated with the trip or driver for which they were created. In this paper, a digital chain-of-custody architecture for transportation documents is introduced which records each of the following independently auditable events: capture, metadata validation, content transfer, format conversion, archival, customer notification, retrieval and retention. It features content hashes, an immutable processing history, claim-check messaging, role-based access control, delivery receipts, and policy-governed retention, and contrasts with paper-and-e-mail workflows, electronic data interchange and blockchain-only custody schemes on parameters of tamper evidence, delivery reliability, format interoperability, access granularity, retrieval speed, and deployment simplicity. A method is proposed for evaluating representative capture-to-retrieval workflows that incorporates a series of metrics, including custody completeness, delivery latency, duplicate suppression, retrieval precision and recall, and recovery time. The architecture provides a design pattern that can be reused to build an auditable digital freight-document infrastructure that doesn't require consensus overhead like that of public blockchain designs, while still providing the fundamental tamper-evidence guarantee.  

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Published

31.05.2022

How to Cite

Prasanna Sundaravaradan. (2022). A Digital Chain-of-Custody Architecture for Freight Documents: Event-Driven Capture, Transformation, Delivery, and Retrieval . International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Applications in Engineering, 10(2), 408–416. Retrieved from https://www.ijisae.org/index.php/IJISAE/article/view/8574

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 2 (2022)

Section

Research Article

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