Development of a reliable supply chain system using blockchain

Abstract

Traceability and food quality are significant challenges in realizing a reliable food supply chain. The reliability of data in supply chains is one of the critical factors. Ensuring transparency, integrity, and availability is the primary requirement for establishing a proper supply chain network. Blockchain is a distributed structure of immutable records that are chained together to form blocks. It provides a guarantee of storing the data correctly and reliably. Smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts containing the terms of the agreement between the entities involved, provide utility for automation of reputation calculation with the transactions. Reputation systems allow participants to rate each other, thus building trust through reputation. The present reputation systems have bounded scrutiny and lack granularity; hence they are not ideal for supply chains. In this work, we propose a reliable supply chain framework using blockchain and smart contracts. It uses a consortium blockchain network to trace communication between the participants and to calculate reputation scores dynamically. Rewards and penalties are assigned to the participants of the supply chain network based on the food product quality involved in the trade. The network participants have defined roles and the access permissions govern who can access the ledger. An immutable ledger stores all the transactions occurring in the network. Any change in one block will reflect in the consecutive blocks, which ensures the data is reliable and secure. The proposed system is implemented using Hyperledger Composer. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of throughput and latency for varying asset size and batch size using the benchmarking tool Caliper. Results show that the security and reliability provided by the proposed framework justify the overheads in contrast to a trading model that does not include a blockchain network.