Trust in a multi-tenant, logistics, data sharing infrastructure: Opportunities for blockchain technology

In support of the trend towards ever more complex supply chain collaboration for the physical Internet, a trusted, multi-tenant (and interoperable) data sharing infrastructure has to be enabled. Trust is a condition sine qua non organizations may not be prepared to share potentially competitive sensitive information. As such, trust has to be an essential design aspect for any multi-tenant data sharing infrastructure for the data sharing stakeholders To overcome the challenges for trusted data sharing, various reference architectures for a trusted, multi-tenant, data sharing infrastructure are being developed. As such, the Industrial Data Space (IDS) initiative is currently gaining attention. It’s based on the architectural principles of keeping the data owner in control over his data and keeping data, data processing and data distribution at the source. Its reference architecture is strongly grounded on a role / stakeholder model for the intermediary trusted roles to enable peer-to-peer data sharing over a controlled and trusted connector infrastructure. The intermediary trusted roles may contain and process meta-data on the data sources, the data transactions and/or on the identities of the parties involved in the data sharing. This paper focuses on the role of blockchain technology for improving trust levels for such intermediary trusted roles.