Master Thesis · Trinity College Dublin · 2023
A distributed ledger protocol for supply chain coordination
A critical review of blockchain in supply chain management, followed by a simplified DLT protocol designed specifically for the coordination needs of cross-organisational supply chains.
- Author
- Alexander Paul
- Year
- 2023
- Institution
- Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin
- Programme
- MSc — Entrepreneurship Dissertation (BU7420)
- Supervisor
- Seamus Crosbie
- Status
- Public abstract · full text under NDA
Research question
Distributed ledger technologies promise tamper-proof, shared visibility across complex supply chains. Reviews of the literature, however, repeatedly find that empirical evidence for the claimed benefits is thin: most published work is early-stage proof-of-concept rather than production deployment, and the barriers — interoperability, data quality, energy cost, scalability, regulatory uncertainty — remain unresolved. This thesis asks: can a distributed ledger make supply chains tamper-proof and ensure the accuracy of evidence in transactions, while preserving the competitive privacy needs of participating firms?
Approach
The work is structured around a Popper-style falsification frame. A thematic literature review covering both seminal and recent research (food traceability, pharmaceutical recalls, luxury goods authentication, manufacturing telemetry, and carbon traceability) establishes what has actually been shown — separating the genuine mechanism-level benefits from the often-overstated systemic ones. Cosine-similarity tooling was built to map the corpus and identify true gaps.
On the construction side, a simplified DLT protocol is proposed, prototyped in Rust, and the relevant safety properties expressed and machine-checked in the Isabelle/HOL proof assistant. A Hyperledger Fabric test network in Go provides the comparative integration baseline.
Contribution
- A literature-grounded position on what blockchain can and cannot do for supply chain coordination, distinguishing demonstrated effects from speculative ones.
- The design of a deliberately stripped-down DLT protocol focused on event integrity and competitive-confidentiality preservation, rather than smart-contract generality.
- A working Rust prototype, formally verified along the protocol's core invariants in Isabelle/HOL.
- An honest articulation of remaining barriers — data-quality dependence, oracle problems, and the absence of common standards — and the implications for industry adoption.
Why it matters
This thesis is one of the two academic foundations of aleph-n, 7R+'s long-term research direction in dynamic procurement and supply-chain coordination. It defines what the protocol layer needs to do — and, importantly, what it should refuse to claim.
The full thesis contains internal commercial information of 7R+ GmbH and is held under NDA. Specific sections are available to qualified counterparties on request.