SAFEPOST is an FP7 European project which was active from April 2012 to July 2016 with the goal of a “reuse and development of Security Knowledge assets for International Postal supply chains”, as its full title explains. SAFEPOST addressed threats to postal security by designing and experimenting a sensor network detection system including gas, radiation, Raman spectroscopy and image-based sensors. In 2015, while SAFEPOST was running, the US Postal Service and IBM suggested the idea of applying sensors to the postal infrastructure components to bring the acquired data to the next supply chain level and optimize efficiency and costs, leading to an Internet of Postal Things.In this paper we provide a perspective view on how the SAFEPOST and Internet of Postal Things approaches can be merged and generalized to supply chains involving not only postal items, but also logistic infrastructures and business processes, in order to design an Internet of Safe Postal+Things.
Technical efficiency and spatial spillovers: Evidence from grain marketing cooperatives in the US Midwest