# An Architecture for Reliable Transportation of Delicate Goods
## 6 Discussion, Conclusions and Future Work
The operators only need to have a conventional smartphone/tablet, with the application installed and with access to data communications. No high-value structural investment is required and even the acquisition of monitoring devices may be gradual. In operational terms, operators have costs with data communication and protocol operationalization, but such costs are quickly covered with the provision of a high-value service (being able to charge more for it). The company that provides the transportation service to the final customer has, as operational costs, the access to the cloud services, that should be provided by a third party other than the company itself, so as not to jeopardize the integrity of the data and the process. The customer and other operators are assured that the transport was (or was not) carried out as agreed; and in case of non-compliances, it is easy to identify the defaulters and determine responsibilities. This is particularly relevant when the damage is not immediately identifiable in the merchandise. The authors believe that the requirements defined for the solution match the needs of the market and that, despite being of interest to those involved, it is designed from the perspective of who actually pays--the customer. Nevertheless, part of the future work will validate whether the defined requirements effectively allow a solution that can be implemented and used in a real context and, if the presented work could be the basis for the creation of an open standard. The architecture is in an advanced phase of prototyping and submitted to several functional tests and technical validation in controlled and properly characterized and identified scenarios. Several complementary requirements have already been identified, which aim to deal with more specific situations, namely, to provide novel services, some of which are already in the design phase. At present, the authors are specifying the structure of the cloud service, based on blockchains and smart contracts technology [42; 43; 44; 45; 46]. It will also be useful to analyze the adequacy of the solution to societal crises (such as those related with the operational logistics of vaccines for COVID [47]), as well as conducting several studies on specific parts of the solution and its implementation (as is the case of the comparative analysis of consumption, lifetime and operating costs for the various topologies proposed, considering alternatives regarding the variables to be monitored). Furthermore, there is still a lot of practical and research work to be done about the procedures related with the contracting of the service and how to validate its viability (in useful time). P.M.: Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing--original draft. J.R., R.L. : Investigation, Writing--original draft, Writing--review & editing. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. This work has no funding. Not applicable. This work has been supported by FCT--Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia within the Project Scope: UIDB/05757/2020. The authors declare no conflict of interest.