Location-Based Smart Contract for In-kind Aid Delivery

Abstract

Aid delivery in migration management, disaster recovery and also in emergency situations is a critical process where donors are willing to help those who are in need. Especially in emergency situations the in-kind aid delivery is the first action for many donors who want to directly help immediately to the people in affected region. Most of the time the collection and delivery of in-kind aid is carried out by charitable organizations. However, this raises questions about trust and transparency which may be the main blocking factor in increasing the number of donors. Blockchain technology may provide a means to fill this gap by its distributed ledger and public transactions. In addition, geospatial information technology, especially location-based services can be utilized to improve the transparency of aid delivery. Using location information in smart contracts may improve the transaction of in-kind aid delivery to its intended target location. In this thesis a location-based smart contract concept for in-kind aid delivery is developed and prototyped. The scenarios of actors and roles of organizations in the process of in-kind delivery is listed with a proof of concept smart contract implementation. Furthermore, future research directions and improvements opportunities are listed especially for proof of location concepts.