Improving the Reliability and Security of Global Cold Chain Logistics
logging will need to be done in these trusted
spaces.
for logistics when all parties within the cold
chain are assumed to be known to each
other.
Real-Time Tamper Detection
The majority of time in a good’s lifecycle is
spent between trusted spaces, notably
during transportation. During this time, the
custodian of the goods should provide real-
time monitoring of the good for both
environmental parameters but also for
tamper attempts. This can be done through
a combination of pressure, light and
vibration. Sensor readings should be logged
frequently and to a distributed ledger to
prevent retroactive manipulation of data. C ONCLUSIONS
Distributed Ledger for Trustworthiness Heterogeneous operating environments will
continue to pose challenges, but advances in
global cellular connectivity and distributed
ledger technologies provide logical solutions
to having real-time, tamper-proof asset
monitoring for pharmaceuticals moving
through cold chain logistics systems.
IoT provides new ways by which we can
monitor pharmaceutical assets such as
vaccines in an unbroken cold chain from
creation to administration. Further, new
capabilities in data acquisition and edge-
computing analytics capabilities now allow
us to predict failures and remediate
equipment before assets have been
damaged.
The great hope of blockchains and
distributed ledger technologies is to provide
an immutable log of transactions. These
transactions do not need to be financial but
instead can be sensor readings proving the
maintainance of the cold chain. Depending
on the privacy implications of the goods, it
may be necessary to use a private
distributed ledger versus a public distributed
ledger. The benefits of private distributed
ledgers are beyond the scope of this article,
but in short, there are energy/computation
benefits of using private distributed ledgers
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March 2019