A Light-weight Privacy Protection Mechanism for Auto-ID Enabled Logistics Track and Trace Data Sharing Over Business Subcontracting Relationships

Abstract

Subcontracting is a common practice in modernlogistics industry for delivering goods from a consigner to aconsignee. Visibility and security are critical concerns of the involved prime logistics enterprise and its subcontractors insharing logistics track and trace data, which appear fundamentally contracting to each other. Both role-based dataaccessing and sharing mechanism used in traditional databas e management applications and security control solutions based on EPC global infrastructure are not able to efficiently handle these issues together. In this work, a light-weight privacy protection mechanism is introduced for these enterprises with subcontracting relationships to share logistics track and trace data captured with Auto-ID systems equipped with RFID readers, sensors, or global positioning devices. The mechanism consists of a set of protocols designed for the involved stakeholders to register and cancel subcontracting relationship,to set up and clear outsourced logistics job, to upload, update and clear the job data, to track the job execution progress and trace the job execution history. A method for implementing the mechanism is also proposed in this paper, including major use cases, data flow diagrams, and a high-level architecture of a subtracting relationship based track and trace management prototype system.