# An Architecture for Reliable Transportation of Delicate Goods
## 6 Discussion, Conclusions and Future Work  
The architecture described in this work aims to certify the conditions of transport, registering and contextualize, in time and geographically, any noncompliance that might occur. This architecture is generic and can be applied in many contexts, regardless of the geographical scope and range (regional, national or worldwide). It is designed to simultaneously safeguard the interests of the end customer and of the service providers, allowing the provisioning of a high-value service which, by its characteristics, is absolutely relevant in the current context of global trade. This architecture has several singularities that make it unique. Starting with the motivation: ensuring compliance with transport conditions in an effective and immutable manner, to all those involved in the process--promoting transparency, liability, quality of service and the safeguarding of the goods and of the interests of the consumers, who are the end payers. Compared with others, including those presented on this paper, the proposed solution can be effectively applied at intercontinental scale and on scenarios where the transport logistics are done involving many suppliers (the most common scenario). Its conception considered the large distances and times, the existence of different means of transport, the  
Figure 13: Report protocol for the terminal devices reports nonconformities to the central. nonexistence of a global and effective communication infrastructure, and the involvement of many operators, which, despite cooperating to ensure a service, belong to different enterprises that might not have the same level of commitment or responsibility. The solution reached is the result of a well-balanced equation between the requirements of the problem that effectively matter, the available technologies, the way that the transport and logistic enterprises are organized and work, and the solution cost (a critical factor to foster its adoption by the market). For this, important options had to be considered and firmly supported by a careful and sustained study, given that such options are contradictory to the current trends, clearly present in the analyzed solutions, and less attractive from the point of view of the scientific research. There were some major decisions that definitely influenced the proposed architecture:  
* Relegating real-time communication to a non-critical requirement--can be critical for specific contexts and an additional added value, but for the vast majority of situations it is of no practical use. * Supporting the solution with viable technologies, assuming in a pragmatic way that a communications infrastructure on a global scale, with acceptable usage costs (for the problem in question), is not yet a reality. * Assuming a pragmatic stance regarding the usefulness of information (considering the goals of the solution) and the moments when it is actually necessary--when the merchandise and the responsibility for it passes from one operator to another. It is important to highlight that the proposed solution has a clear and immediate identification of who did not comply with the agreed conditions to transport the merchandise. Even without using global communication channels, the architecture presented can continuously monitor the merchandise and report non-compliances in useful time, simply using BLE and conventional smartphones/tablets, working without geographic, temporal or distance restrictions. Furthermore, with the proposed technical solution and technologies, the type of battery chosen (CR2032) can last for years, probably beyond the useful life of the device itself. The cost of adopting such a solution essentially requires the purchase of monitoring devices by the company providing the transport service. The devices are based on affordable technologies and materials and, judging from the experience that the authors have in developing this type of solutions, it is realistic to estimate that the production cost is below $10.