Overview on the Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Systematics and Their Scalability Tools

Houssein Hellani,Ernesto Exposito,Layth Sliman,Abed Ellatif Samhat

doi:10.28991/esj-2021-sp1-04

Abstract

Modern IT technologies shaped the shift in economic models with many advantages on cost, optimization, and time to market. This economic shift has increased the need for transparency and traceability in supply chain platforms to achieve trust among partners. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is proposed to enable supply chains systems with trust requirements. In this paper, we investigate the existing DLT-based supply chain projects to show their technical part and limitations and extract the tools and techniques used to avoid the DLT scalability issue. We then set the requirements for a typical DLT-based supply chain in this context. The analyses are based on the scalability metrics such as computing, data storage, and transaction fees that fit the typical supply chain system. This paper highlights the effects of Blockchain techniques on scalability and their incorporation in supply chains systems. It also presents other existing solutions that can be applied to the supply chain. The investigation shows the necessity of having such tools in supply chains and developing them to achieve an efficient and scalable system. The paper calls for further scalability enhancements throughout introducing new tools and/or reutilize the current ones. Doi: 10.28991/esj-2021-SP1-04 Full Text: PDF

Highlights

Product complexity and market globalization have led most companies to collaborate for the purpose of providing the best quality and prices
Hereafter we investigate the relations between supply chain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Distributed ledger technology (DLT) that determine the strength of the modern supply chain
The proposals of the developed DLT-based supply chain contain some tools and solutions. We investigate these projects and retrieve the existing tools that could be used to fulfill the scalability requirements related to the supply chain progress

Summary

Introduction

Product complexity and market globalization have led most companies to collaborate for the purpose of providing the best quality and prices. A successful collaboration requires a reliable, effective, and error-free supply chain system. Each step of the production process ranging from the reception of the source material, industrialization, and to transmitting the product to the consumer, establishes the supply chain. At any stage of a supply chain, collaboration is essential among partners that end up with the final product tagged by all stakeholders: producers, vendors, retailers, consumers, and any involved party [1] for a successful end-to-end production. Research studies [2,3,4] show that distrust between the partners of a supply chain is a critical issue that hinders collaboration [5, 6]

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