CoC: A Unified Distributed Ledger Based Supply Chain Management System

Abstract

Modern supply chain is a complex system and plays an important role for different sectors under the globalization economic integration background. Supply chain management system is proposed to handle the increasing complexity and improve the efficiency of flows of goods. It is also useful to prevent potential frauds and guarantee trade compliance. Currently, most companies maintain their own IT systems for supply chain management. However, it is hard for these isolated systems to work together and provide a global view of the status of the highly distributed supply chain system. Using emerging decentralized ledger/blockchain technology, which is a special type of distributed system in essence, to build supply chain management system is a promising direction to go. Decentralized ledger usually suffers from low performance and lack of capability to protect information stored on the ledger. To overcome these challenges, we propose CoC (supply chain on blockchain), a novel supply chain management system based on a hybrid decentralized ledger with a novel two-step block construction mechanism. We also design an efficient storage scheme and information protection method that satisfy requirements of supply chain management. These techniques can also be applied to other decentralized ledger based applications with requirements similar to supply chain management.