Unlocking the Potential of the Physical Internet: a Trust-enabling Decentralized Process Sharing Connector

The Physical Internet (PI) hinges on extensive collaboration across logistics stakeholders. Although the benefits have been confirmed by numerous studies and despite its potential for business success, there is a noticeable reluctance to adopt and implement concepts such as PI. We put forward that this hesitancy is in no small part attributed to trust. Therefore, we establish a trust framework that provides a better understanding of trust and its concerns in the context of PI. This paper aims to reason about trust in relation to architecture with commercial stakeholders. In our research, we introduce a novel, decentralized, connector-based architecture leveraging dataspaces and event-based data sharing. This architecture prioritizes data ownership and transparency, enabling universal process sharing while eliminating the need for fully centralized platforms. Surveys demonstrated that the proposed architecture, initially unfamiliar to some, ultimately fostered greater trust due to its federated nature. We conclude by advocating for a transparent design approach to expedite PI adoption and collaboration, highlighting the persistent challenges in this domain, and setting the stage for future research.