Blockchain based Smart Contracts in Automation of Shipping Ports

Shipping is an integral part of international trade which facilitates ninety percent of the world's goods and cargo movement transported by sea with over seventy percent as containerized cargo. Freight transport enables economic growth, provides access to markets, connects producers and consumers, determines trade competitiveness, supports effective integration into global supply chains, and contributes to social progress and inclusive development. Around the world, shipping documents are still prepared and processed mainly in old paper style. This result processes happening within shipping ports to be highly paper-dependent and time-consuming. As it involves multiple participants with opposing interests, shipping documents are easily vulnerable to paperwork manipulation. Blockchain technology provides a distributed, shared, and append-only ledger in which new records are added through consensus among participants invoked by smart contracts. This paper is the application of smart contracts in shipping port processes to digitize and automate paperwork filings. Smart contracts are written inspired by the shipping ports processes and deployed into Ganache private blockchain thus incorporating immutable nature, trust, decentralization and privacy of the blockchain into the entire shipment process. Automation will reduce the possible human errors and manipulation, also conserving time resources reducing cost, and improving speed.