An Industrial Blockchain-Based Multi-Criteria Decision Framework for Global Freight Management in Agricultural Supply Chains

Dilupa Nakandala, Yung Po Tsang (), Henry Lau and Carman Ka Man Lee
Additional contact information
Dilupa Nakandala: School of Business, Western Sydney University, Sydney 2750, Australia
Yung Po Tsang: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong
Henry Lau: School of Business, Western Sydney University, Sydney 2750, Australia
Carman Ka Man Lee: Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong

Mathematics, 2022, vol. 10, issue 19, 1-23

Abstract: In view of increasing supply chain disruption events, for example the China–United States trade war, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Russia–Ukraine war, the complexity and dynamicity of global freight management keeps increasing. To build a resilient and sustainable supply chain, industrial practitioners are eager to systematically revamp the freight management decision process related to the selection of carriers, shipping lanes, and third-party logistics service providers. Therefore, this study aims at strengthening decision-making capabilities for global freight management, in which an industrial blockchain-based global freight decision framework (IB-GFDF) is proposed to incorporate consortium blockchain technology with the Bayesian best-worst method. Through the blockchain technology, pairwise comparisons can be conducted over the international freight network in a decentralized and immutable manner, and thus, a secure and commonly agreed-on pairwise comparison dataset is acquired. Subsequently, the pairwise comparison dataset with multi-stakeholder opinions is analyzed using the Bayesian best-worst method in order to prioritize the selection decision criteria related to carriers, shipping lanes, and 3PL service providers for global freight management. To verify the methodological feasibility, a case study of an Australian agricultural supply chain firm was conducted to support the development end-to-end (E2E) supply chain solutions originated from Australia. It was found that port infrastructure, ports of call and communication effectiveness were the major criteria for the selection decision, which can be emphasized in future global freight collaboration. In addition, an immutable and append-only record of pairwise comparisons can be established to support the visibility of time-varying stakeholders’ preferences.

Keywords: global freight management; agricultural supply chain; consortium blockchain; best-worst method; decision framework (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/10/19/3550/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7390/10/19/3550/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jmathe:v:10:y:2022:i:19:p:3550-:d:928773

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematics is currently edited by Ms. Emma He

More articles in Mathematics from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().