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Top1. Introduction
In contemporary logistics and supply chain management, pallet pooling is a novel pallet management strategy to facilitate sustainability, cost-effectiveness, and better pallet quality. Extended from the concept of vendor-managed inventory (VMI) and sharing economy, the pallet pooling strategy is developed to manage the stock and quality of pallets on behalf of the pallet users. In contrast, the pallet pooling service providers (PPSP) are responsible for disseminating, collecting, and repairing the pallets to minimise the logistics operations' industrial wastes. End users in pallet pooling, including supply chain parties and logistics service providers, can order pallets from a shared pool managed by the pallet pooling company, where the pallets are in good condition, and arrive at the nominated facility just-in-time. In addition, the reverse logistics on pallets throughout the supply chain can be effectively managed to support the reuse and recycling of pallets and reduce corresponding industrial waste. Apart from merely ensuring the pallets are in good condition, some customs regulations, such as pest control, should be fulfilled, in which the pallets are required to be wholly heat-treated or fumigated. Since managing a bulk of pallets by the end-users effectively and sustainably is relatively complicated, the development of pallet pooling in the logistics network has become significant nowadays. Ultimately, the pallet users can get rid of managing the pallets by themselves, and resources on the pallet management can be released to the core business activities of the end-users. Although pallet pooling is regarded as a promising strategy in modern supply chains, effective identification, verification, and authentication of pallets are still under-exploration such that the trustworthiness from the end-users to pallet pooling is questionable. Due to the lack of a secure authentication protocol to manage pallet pools, the trust between end-users and pallet pooling system is difficult to establish, and the problems of fraudulent pallets and malicious nodes in the network are difficult to prevent. The effective implementation of the pallet pooling strategy should be built on secure and reliable data exchange and pallet authentication to eliminate the challenges above and system vulnerability. On the one hand, the access control of the IoT devices representing the pallets should be established to avoid the communication of unauthorised IoT nodes in the blockchain-based system. On the other hand, the pallet authenticity should be guaranteed to circulate the pallets through the identification and verification process between end-users. Consequently, pallet pooling companies are urged to formulate a secure pallet authentication system to create a trustworthy end-user ecosystem.
A typical authentication process using Internet of Things (IoT) requires that objects, including users and products, be identified and verified. As shown in Figure 1, the identification clarifies the identity (ID) information of objects accessed by other users. The verification builds the association between ID and product-specific features to avoid false and fake authentication. The identification and verification information is maintained for the authentication process, which refers to the validation of tag-based and location-based data and the product-specific features. For instance, end-users under the pallet pooling service systems should be able to authenticate their on-hand pallets based on the above identification and verification information. Therefore the pallet quality and specifications are ensured.
Figure 1.
Relationship between product identification, verification, and authentication