Blockchain for checked baggage tracking at airports

Abstract

Due to the large number of checked pieces of baggage that are mishandled from check-in until its final destination, measures such as IATA (International Air Transport Association) Resolution 753/30.53 have been created in order to require a minimum set of tracking points along a baggage journey. Blockchain technology, which stands out for its potential in cybersecurity, is proposed in this project to be used as a database to record the tracking data of a luggage through the use of smart contracts of the Ethereum blockchain. For this reason, a smart contract has been developed in Remix IDE to be firstly deployed in the JavaScript VM environment and thus, to check its proper operation and to compute its price based on the gas used to record the data of each tracking point during a possible journey. Finally, the smart contract is deployed on a private blockchain created with Go Ethereum at five different scenarios, where each one has a distinct number of nodes (from 1 to 5 nodes), as means to see if its use is really optimal in this field.