B-MARCO: a blockchain-driven multi-national auction and resource optimization framework for cross-border logistics and trade
Cross-border maritime logistics requires coordination among carriers, ports, customs authorities, and financial institutions, yet existing workflows are often constrained by fragmented regulatory data systems, inefficient dynamic capacity matching, and slow batch-based clearing. This paper proposes B-MARCO, a blockchain-driven multi-national auction and resource optimization framework for cross-border maritime logistics. B-MARCO integrates permissioned consortium coordination, rolling auction-based market clearing, a hybrid GA-GSA dispatching engine, and privacy-preserving access-control and compliance-verification components. The evaluation uses a semi-synthetic discrete-event simulation with a 7-day horizon, hourly decision intervals, 30 random seeds, and shared order streams across all configurations. Under a 5,000-orders/day workload, B-MARCO achieves a 91.80% transaction success rate and 21.53 h average end-to-end latency, compared with 60.09% and 36.66 h for the 24-hour batch-clearing baseline. Relative to a centralized rolling-matching baseline, it reduces average latency by 13.60%. The ablation results show that rolling auction clearing reduces latency, while smart-contract-based settlement-delay reduction is a major contributor to improved success and deadline performance. These findings support the value of combining rolling market clearing with spatial-temporal dispatch optimization in simulated cross-border maritime logistics, while the blockchain and cryptographic modules define the broader coordination, auditability, and data-governance architecture.