Revolutionizing food bank supply chains with a Blockchain-Enabled IoT ecosystem for transparent, secure and efficient humanitarian logistics

This study proposes a blockchain-enabled IoT ecosystem to optimize food bank supply chains, addressing challenges such as inefficiencies, perishability, and lack of transparency. Unlike existing studies that examine blockchain or IoT technologies in isolation, this research proposes a unified, multi-level optimization framework that embeds blockchain-enabled IoT capabilities directly into food bank supply chain decision-making. The multi-level mathematical model integrates donors, food banks, and charities, using IoT tools for real-time monitoring and blockchain for secure, traceable transactions. By optimizing donor and food bank selection, vehicle routing, and demand fulfillment, the system minimizes costs while ensuring timely food delivery. Numerical results on sample problems demonstrate the model’s scalability and efficiency, achieving near-optimal solutions with less than a 1% cost gap compared to exact methods like CPLEX, while reducing computational time by 34 times. Sensitivity analyses highlight the system's adaptability to demand fluctuations, with only a 6.79% cost increase for a 50% demand rise. This framework demonstrates, through simulated yet realistic food bank scenarios, the potential of blockchain and IoT to enhance the transparency, efficiency, and sustainability of food bank supply chains, and it can be directly instantiated with operational data from real food banks .