Manufacturers are facing unprecedented cost and risk pressures across all areas of their businesses, especially the supply chain from inputs to energy, labour & logistics. Recent shocks (Brexit, COVID19, Ukraine) have driven further increases that cannot be mitigated from operational improvements alone. Combined with the pressures from new environmental legislation, UK manufacturers operating on wafer thin margins need to find ways to reduce costs by enhancing collaboration across their supply chains. The Logistics Living Lab Flagship Project tackles the large-scale coordination and optimisation challenges facing the UK's critical on-shore manufacturing logistics by developing and demonstrating a potential shared future public good infrastructure leveraging advanced digital technologies for securing trust, coordination, and process optimisation. At the end of 2 years, this project will demonstrate the value of innovative thinking and advanced digital technologies to create a shared public infrastructure for managing delivery vehicle slot filling, routing, and tracking. The open digital solution delivered will enable logistics companies to collaborate where necessary, and still compete in new and more efficient ways, while enhancing UK manufacturing capability.

Benefits come from working together, but trust boundaries prevent individuals and organisations from dealing freely with each other, because of the high risk that interests are not aligned. In order to engage for social or economic gain, actors must cross these trust boundaries. Presently this requires trusted intermediaries: HSBC, eBay, AirBnB, or the government of the UK. Intermediation is viable only through network effects. As such, trust becomes a scarce resource– expensive to obtain and yet easy to abuse. Costs come down to verification, reporting, auditing, and external relations; all primarily manual tasks. Digitisation has changed business profoundly, from traditional industries such as banking to new sectors like IoT; however, trust is still a manual, human-intensive activity which comes at incredibly high costs. Industry experts estimate that banks alone spend up to 80% of their operational cost on trust-related tasks, e.g. post-transaction verification due to the lack of suitable transaction platforms. New decentralised blockchain technology has the potential to become the core of a new concept: a universal machine that commoditises trust. Under this grant, we will develop a deployable PoC of a trust-machine platform, based on our Proof-of-Authority (PoA) blockchain technology, which can be operated by a flexible plurality of self-chosen independent parties who are empowered to collaborate “trustlessly”. The Ethcore team have been at the forefront of technological development as part of the Ethereum project (in 2014 the second most successful crowdfunded campaign), which was notably mentioned most recently in the UK government report on blockchain technology as well as featured by the Economist. This grant will support the development of our PoA distributed ledger system – a foundational building block for next-generation secure multiparty transactional systems for financial institutions, government and enterprise.