Blockchain-Integrated Marine Logistics Applications for Secure Cargo Tracking and Intelligent Port Management

Abstract

Global maritime transport moves the substantial majority of world trade by volume, yet the industry's underlying documentation and coordination processes remain heavily dependent on fragmented, paper-based, and siloed digital systems that create persistent vulnerabilities to data tampering, cargo misdocumentation, and multi-party coordination failure across shippers, carriers, terminal operators, customs authorities, and freight forwarders. Blockchain technology, offering a distributed, cryptographically verifiable, and tamper-resistant ledger shared across mutually distrusting parties, has been proposed and piloted across the maritime sector as a mechanism for securing cargo tracking, automating multi-party documentation through smart contracts, and improving the operational intelligence of port community systems. This paper reviews blockchain-integrated marine logistics applications, synthesizing systematic literature review evidence on blockchain's role in supply chain and maritime transport management, smart-contract-based shipment and customs automation, and blockchain-enabled port community systems and single-window platforms. The review further examines the documented barriers to industry-wide blockchain adoption in the maritime sector, including interoperability, stakeholder trust, and commercial viability, situating these barriers within the widely discussed case of the Maersk-IBM TradeLens platform, which despite substantial industry participation was discontinued in 2023 due to insufficient commercial viability. A comparative methodology is described using bibliometric and systematic-review-derived classification of blockchain maritime applications by function (cargo tracking, documentation automation, port community integration), alongside barrier-analysis frameworks drawn from the Technology-Organization-Environment model. Reported findings indicate that blockchain pilots consistently demonstrate technical feasibility for reducing document-processing time and improving traceability, but that industry-wide adoption remains constrained less by technical limitation than by the network-effect problem inherent to any shared ledger requiring broad, simultaneous stakeholder participation to deliver value. The paper concludes by identifying persistent challenges in blockchain-IoT integration for real-time cargo condition monitoring, interoperability between competing platforms, and the governance structures required for durable, industry-wide adoption in intelligent port management.