The Application of Blockchain Technologies for Rail Transit Customs Procedures
The 19th International Multi-Conference "Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication" (RelStat '19): Abstracts 2020
Ainis Stūrmanis, Justīna Hudenko, Māris Jurušs

The railways had the lowest proportion of container China-Europe transportation at only 0.9% in 2016 [6]. Project RETRACK suggests that costs, time, flexibility, reliability, quality, and sustainability of rail transportation are among the key fac-tors that may shift international transportation to rail [10]. The customs and other state authorities have demonstrated the most notable resistance to the change of the existing procedures, despite the CREAM study having shown that customs have the lowest level of harmonization in rail production systems amongst almost all of the border crossing procedures on the way from Asia to Europe [6]. This paper examines transaction and misalignment costs that appear in cross border customs procedures with the aim to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of including the customs in a rail logistic blockchain. The critical path method has been applied to detect technological possibilities to reduce transit time on the Latvia-Russia cross bordering stations. The created transaction and misalignment costs have been compared with the transaction and misalignment costs that exist in a blockchain. We have concluded that the usage of blockchain technology in customs can improve cross bordering processes by reducing the total processing time of a train by up to 5.5 hours for each border-crossing station with comparable transaction and misalignment costs. This infor-mation suggests that customs should follow the technological changes taking place in the most important transit corridors. Nevertheless, cyber risks and rigidi-ty of the system does not allow to change customs procedures on demand.


Keywords
Blockchain, Cross bordering, Customs procedures
Hyperlink
http://www.tsi.lv/sites/default/files/editor/relstat-2019_abstracts_ed_with_index_final.pdf#page=54

Stūrmanis, A., Hudenko, J., Jurušs, M. The Application of Blockchain Technologies for Rail Transit Customs Procedures. In: The 19th International Multi-Conference "Reliability and Statistics in Transportation and Communication" (RelStat '19): Abstracts, Latvia, Riga, 16-19 October, 2019. Riga: Transport and Telecommunication Institute, 2019, pp.46-46. ISBN 978-9984-818-94-8.

Publication language
English (en)
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