Blockchain technology integration in vehicle dealer inventory management system

Presently the Volvo Group Trucks Operations (GTO) supply chain network is designed in such a way that there is no traceability at the individual spare part level. As industrial digitization has become a necessity, especially for the supply chain network, the Volvo group has taken the initiative to explore new technologies in order to align themselves with the modern digital age of business. In the past few years blockchain technology applications, especially in the supply chain sector, have seen an enormous interest both from the industrial sector and academic sector. Thus it was decided to explore Blockchain technology to design a proof-of-concept in the dealer inventory management which has contributed in defining the primary objective of this master thesis. The primary objective of this master thesis was the design of a proof-of-concept for integrating blockchain technology in the reverse logistics process at Volvo GTO, especially for the North European market. Along with the proof-of-concept, various challenges and opportunities for Volvo GTO as a service provider in the domain of Blockchain technology integration and Dealer inventory management are presented in this master thesis

Proof-of-Reputation Blockchain with Nakamoto Fallback

Reputation is a major component of trustworthy systems. However, the subjective nature of reputation, makes it tricky to base a system’s security on it. In this work, we describe how to leverage reputation to establish a highly scalable and efficient blockchain. Our treatment puts emphasis on reputation fairness as a key feature of reputation-based protocols. We devise a definition of reputation fairness that ensures fair participation while giving chances to newly joining parties to participate and potentially build reputation. We also describe a concrete lottery in the random oracle model which achieves this definition of fairness. Our treatment of reputation-fairness can be of independent interest. To avoid potential safety and/or liveness concerns stemming from the subjective and volatile nature of reputation, we propose a hybrid design that uses a Nakamoto-style ledger as a fallback. To our knowledge, our proposal is the first cryptographically secure design of a proof-of-reputation-based (in short PoR-based) blockchain that fortifies its PoR-based security by optimized Nakamoto-style consensus. This results in a ledger protocol which is provably secure if the reputation system is accurate, and preserves its basic safety properties even if it is not, as long as the fallback blockchain does not fail