Blockchain-based Traceability Research Articles

Consumers' food control risk attitude for blockchain traceable information seeking: Evidence from fresh fruit buyers in China

The blockchain-based traceability in agri-food marketing has brought a disruptive paradigm shift by removing the inherent information asymmetry problem. Likewise, revealing sufficient product quality and attributes information could break agricultural markets' “Lemon Market” dilemma. This study takes the fresh fruit with blockchain traceability QR label as a case and systematically investigates the influence of consumers' food control risk attitude on information-seeking intentions. We utilized online survey data of 1,058 fresh fruit buyers and simultaneously applied ordinary least square (OLS), ordered logit model (Ologit), and propensity score matching (PSM) approaches to overcome the potential self-selection biases and confounding factors. The results show that risk attitude significantly negatively impacts consumers' information seeking fresh fruits. The stronger consumers' risk preference, the lower the probability of information seeking. Furthermore, we used PSM to overcome potential sample selectivity bias; therefore, PSM reinforces the significance of OLS and Ologit results. The sub-sample estimation results show that young individuals with high school and below education have stronger blockchain information-seeking intentions. The study provides new insights into the role of food control risk attitude and agri-food information traceability and offers several measures for policy and practice to realize a border trajectory in agri-food information disclosure.

Subsidy policies of a fresh supply chain considering the inputs of blockchain traceability service system

AbstractTo stimulate the development and application of blockchain technology, Chinese government put forward subsidy strategy. To explore the subsidy policies under the new background, we chose a fresh supply chain with one producer, one blockchain-based traceability service provider, and one retailer as the research object, and government subsidy strategies were divided into a fixed strategy and a varying strategy. Afterward, considering the trust level of blockchain-based traceability information and consumers’ preference to the blockchain-based traceability information, we revised the demand function, and three subsidy models were proposed and analyzed. Findings: (1) the varying subsidy will help the retailer, the producer, and the traceability service provider set lower prices. (2) Meanwhile, the varying subsidies offered to the blockchain-based traceability service provider and the producer will help the whole supply chain members obtain more revenues.

Design of a Blockchain-Based Traceability System with a Privacy-Preserving Scheme of Zero-Knowledge Proof

With the fast development of the industrial Internet, its interconnectivity poses new challenges for the cooperation of industrial entities. Cooperation among these entities is built on trust, and trust is based on high-quality industrial products at reasonable prices. A traceability system can play an essential role in objectively reflecting the production process and promoting this trust. However, traditional traceability systems often have data privacy issues. Because traceability data are collected or generated during the production process (namely, production-related data), they could be considered privacy data. Several researchers have introduced privacy protection schemes into the traceability system, such as authentication or encryption. Nevertheless, when a privacy protection scheme is established, the original data are disclosed to the legal user of the system, but the data may still be leaked intentionally or unintentionally. Except for data privacy issues, a traditional traceability system can be vulnerable to network attacks, data unavailability, and reliability issues. The authors conducted a study to overcome these shortcomings, and this paper reports the results. We built a traceability prototype system using a blockchain protocol and a zero-knowledge proof method. First, we built a blockchain to record key production process data, aiming to maintain data reliability and availability. Second, through an analysis of traceability purpose using production knowledge, the traceability purpose could be divided into multiple provable statements. By introducing privacy protection through a zero-knowledge proof, the traceability process was converted to proving relative statements. Finally, the statements were validated by a smart contract that provided openness and reliability during the traceability process. Analysis has shown that our approach could meet the requirements for high security and privacy. In addition, the paper also discusses the calculation cost of the traceability process to show our work’s viability. The traceability system described in this paper creates new possibilities for constructing a healthy and reliable trust relationship between production entities to provide further support in the development of the industrial Internet.

Blockchain-based traceability system for supply chain: potentials, gaps, applicability and adoption game

ABSTRACT There are hypes towards blockchain-based traceability systems (BCTS) both from academia and industry. This paper discusses challenges and policy recommendations for BCTS from a viewpoint of industrial application and market competition. First, the potentials of BCTS and the gaps between the ideal and the reality of BCTS are elaborated. Second, we discuss the applicability of BCTS. Third, by a game-theoretic model, we study when supply chains should invest in BCTS. Investment is recommended when investment cost is relatively low compared to the price and market competition is less intense. A prisoner’s dilemma arises when investment cost is at a moderate level.

Research Review of Agricultural Product Traceability System Based on Blockchain Technology

With the frequent occurrence of domestic agricultural product safety accidents in China, consumers' trust in the quality and supply chain of agricultural products is gradually declining. Traceability, as a production control system that can connect all links of product circulation and manage undirected tracking of products, is of great significance to guarantee the quality and safety of products. In the traditional traceability system, there are problems of asymmetry, inaccuracy, non-transparency and insecurity of information. Blockchain can provide powerful technical support for the construction of agricultural products traceability system by virtue of decentralization, transparency and openness, non-tamperability and distributed storage. Applying blockchain technology to agricultural products traceability can effectively protect the rights and interests of all members of the agricultural products supply chain and the general consumers. Based on the analysis of the concept and main features of blockchain, this paper summarizes the research and application progress of blockchain-based traceability system at home and abroad in recent years by studying the traceability mechanism of agricultural products. The advantages and challenges of the implementation of blockchain-based agricultural products traceability system are elaborated. It is hoped that this paper can provide useful references for the research and establishment of blockchain agricultural products traceability system.

Blockchain-Based Traceability System to Support the Indonesian Halal Supply Chain Ecosystem

The halal industry is constantly developing into a broader concept of the Islamic economy, an economic activity that follows the Islamic-based principle. As a populous Muslim country, Indonesia follows the growth trend by aiming to dominate the global halal market. The strategy is to improve the current halal assurance process. Presently, the technology and procedure do not provide enough process transparency, traceability, and granularity of information. To achieve the strategic goal, a technological change is needed. A new emerging technology, blockchain, may potentially answer the challenge. This study’s first objective is to discuss improving the current assurance practice in the Indonesian halal supply chain ecosystem, particularly in the meat industry. The second objective is to construct a traceability system model for the supply chain. Our goal is to propose a blockchain-based halal traceability system model. The model can be enhanced to be a national standard tool to develop the economy towards a sustainable supply chain.

Blockchain technology: a troubleshooter for blood cold chains

PurposeBlood cold chain (BCC) represents a system for preserving the blood during its journey from the donor to the ultimate transfusion site. Existing BCCs have many drawbacks related to information transparency and information security. Secured and real-time information sharing in BCC can bring several benefits. The purpose of this paper is to summarise the issues in typical BCCs and to explore the scope of blockchain in the management of BCCs.Design/methodology/approachIssues in the existing BCCs are identified through a narrative review. To explain the potential of blockchain in mitigating these issues, a blockchain-based traceability solution is demonstrated with respect to a particular BCC scenario. The BCC management system discussed in this study makes use of the Ethereum blockchain’s smart contract feature and internet of things (IoT) technology. The smart contract is written in the solidity programming language and tested and validated using the Remix integrated development environment.FindingsBCCs are concerned with several issues both from technical and non-technical perspectives. Blockchain technology is capable of troubleshooting the issues in the existing BCCs. Combining blockchain and IoT technology enables real-time information sharing among the entities. The demonstration presented in this work depicts how the blockchain-based smart contract can support operations in a typical BCC.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper explores the scope of blockchain in BCCs through a demonstration. To get insights into its technical and economical feasibilities, further investigations are needed.Originality/valueBlockchain-based traceability system presented in this work can be adopted in BCCs to ensure the quality of blood or blood products. Blockchain-based smart contracts can aid the BCCs to achieve a proper balance between blood shortage and outdating.

Characterization and Costs of Integrating Blockchain and IoT for Agri-Food Traceability Systems

An increasing amount of research focuses on integrating the Internet of Things and blockchain technology to address the requirements of traceability applications for Industry 4.0. However, there has been little quantitative analysis of several aspects of these new blockchain-based traceability systems. For instance, very few works have studied blockchain’s impact on the resources of constrained IoT sensors. Similarly, the infrastructure costs of these blockchain-based systems are not widely understood. This paper characterizes the resources of low-cost IoT sensors and provides a monetary cost model for blockchain infrastructure to support blockchain-based traceability systems. First, we describe and implement a farm-to-fork case study using public and private blockchain networks. Then, we analyze the impact of blockchain in six different resource-limited IoT devices in terms of disk and memory footprint, processing time, and energy consumption. Next, we present an infrastructure cost model and use it to identify the costs for the public and private networks. Finally, we evaluate the traceability of a product in different scenarios. Our results showed that low-cost sensors could directly interact with both types of blockchains with minimal energy overhead. Furthermore, our cost model showed that setting a private blockchain infrastructure costs approximately the same as that managing 50 products on a public blockchain network.

Using blockchain to signal quality in the food supply chain: The impact on consumer purchase intentions and the moderating effect of brand familiarity

Food safety is a public health issue of paramount importance. In this regard, blockchain has emerged as a promising technology that allows users to effectively and efficiently record the origin and flow of products and eliminate or reduce harmful food fraud. Consumers can benefit from this development by receiving up-to-date and verifiable information about the origins and delivery routes of their purchases. Drawing on signaling theory and the results of two experimental studies with 151 and 152 participants, respectively, we investigate how the use of blockchain to trace food products impacts consumers’ perception of product quality as a mediating variable and subsequently their purchase intention. Our framework further considers brand familiarity as a moderating variable. The findings from the two experiments show that blockchain labels as a signaling mechanism in food supply chains help to strengthen consumers’ perceived quality of food products, which, in turn, increases their purchase intention. This effect is more pronounced for less familiar brands, which is valuable information for managers who want to build a brand’s reputation. From an academic perspective, we highlight the applicability of signaling theory to identify blockchain-based traceability systems as important drivers of perceived product quality and consequently purchase intention.

Strategic analysis for adopting blockchain technology under supply chain competition

ABSTRACT This paper studies the strategy of adopting blockchain technology (BT) in two supply chains, each consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer. We find that the adoption of BT in supply chains is related to consumers’ traceability awareness and the blockchain-based traceability cost-sharing between the manufacturer and retailer. Specifically, when both consumers’ traceability awareness and the proportion of the blockchain-based traceability cost borne by each retailer are low or moderate, the equilibrium strategy could be that one or both supply chains adopt BT. Moreover, when one supply chain adopts BT, the other may be a free rider. When both supply chains adopt BT, one supply chain can gain a competitive advantage when its retailer shares more of the blockchain-based traceability cost than the rival. Counterintuitively, when traceability awareness is high, neither of the two supply chains should adopt BT.

Traceability Platform Based on Green Blockchain: An Application Case Study in Dairy Supply Chain

Recent progress in IoT and software development has simplified data acquisition and immutability of information in the agri-food supply chain. In the last few years, several frameworks and applications were proposed to ensure traceability in the agri-food-sector using distributed ledger technologies (DLT) such as Blockchain technologies. Still, no other study has presented a Blockchain-based traceability platform with a lower impact on the environment and lower cost for each transaction sent by the supply chain. This article presents a traceability platform based on Green Blockchain with low energy consumption and costs savings applied to the Fontina PDO cheese supply chain, part of the project “Typicalp”, funded by the European Union (EU). The proposed traceability system is based on Algorand Blockchain, which uses the Pure Proof-of-Stake mechanism of consensus that requires minimal computational power, is highly scalable and environmentally sustainable. In addition to the environmental and financial benefits, the developed traceability platform has made it possible to digitize the entire production chain, making the data immutable and available in real-time for Fontina consortium operators and final consumers.

Information Sharing Management System Based on Blockchain Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

In recent years, the food supply system has become increasingly globalized. Traditional traceability systems have issues with centralized administration, opaque information, untrustworthy data, and the ease with which information islands can be created. To address the aforementioned issues, this study proposes a blockchain-based traceability system for storing and querying product information throughout the agricultural supply chain. Most existing systems, on the other hand, are unable to meet the traceability and management requirements of ASCs. To address these concerns, we first develop a blockchain-based ASC architecture for product traceability, which provides decentralised security for agri-food tracing data stored in ASCs. A Deep Reinforcement Learning based Supply Chain Management (DR-SCM) system is then offered to make effective judgments on the production and storage of agri-food commodities for profit optimization. In a variety of ASC scenarios, extensive simulation experiments are conducted out to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed blockchain-based infrastructure and the DR-SCM strategy.

Blockchain-based traceability in food supply chains: requirements and challenges

Blockchain-based traceability in food supply chains: requirements and challenges

Blockchain-based traceability in food supply chains: requirements and challenges

Blockchain-based traceability in food supply chains: requirements and challenges

Blockchain-Based Traceability for the Fishery Supply Chain

Efficient traceability management is necessary for managing products in the fishery supply chain. Any negligence in products’ traceability can result in food fraud that may adversely affect the consumer’s health. Monitoring and tracking of the fishery supply chain operations can assist system stakeholders in identifying the origins and causes of product fraud and malpractice. Most of the existing systems and technologies used to manage the fishery supply chain processes fall short of providing traceability, accountability, transparency, reliability, trust, privacy, and security features. In this paper, we propose a private Ethereum blockchain-based solution to efficiently manage the fishery supply chain operations in a manner that is decentralized, transparent, traceable, secure, private, and trustworthy. We present the solution architecture and propose five smart contracts to automate the processes in fishery supply chain. We present ten algorithms along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details. We conduct a security analysis to show that the proposed solution is both secure and trustworthy. We compare our solution with the existing blockchain and non-blockchain-based solutions to show its effectiveness and novelty. We make the smart contract code publicly available on GitHub.

Investment Strategies and Coordination for Green Food Supply Chain: A Further Research Considering the Inputs of the Blockchain-Based Traceability System

Investment Strategies and Coordination for Green Food Supply Chain: A Further Research Considering the Inputs of the Blockchain-Based Traceability System

Blockchain-Based Traceability for Shipping Containers in Unimodal and Multimodal Logistics

An unprecedented amount of goods and commodities are shipped and transported globally each day through different modes of transport. Due to its complexity, the maritime industry suffers from a lack of trust and secure ownership evidence, protracted documentation procedures, and excessive data aggregation. These shortcomings are reflected in cargo processing delays and elevated costs in the shipping process. Most of today’s systems and technologies leveraged for managing shipping containers in unimodal and multimodal logistics fall short of providing transparency, traceability, reliability, audit, security, and trust features. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution that allows users to trace and track their container shipments in a manner that is decentralized, transparent, auditable, secure, and trustworthy. We employ the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to overcome the limited data storage problem. We develop smart contracts and present algorithms along with their full implementation, testing, and validation details in both unimodal and multimodal logistics. We present security and cost analyses to show that the proposed solution is secure and cost-efficient. Furthermore, we compare our proposed solution with the existing solutions to show its novelty. All developed smart contract codes are made publicly available on GitHub.

Does Blockchain-Based Traceability System Guarantee Information Authenticity? An Evolutionary Game Approach

Does Blockchain-Based Traceability System Guarantee Information Authenticity? An Evolutionary Game Approach

Blockchain-Based Traceability System From the Users’ Perspective: A Case Study of Thai Coffee Supply Chain

We explored the use of blockchain technology for traceability to improve the safety and value of food, focusing on the coffee supply chain as a case study. The main goal was to evaluate the feasibility in terms of design, perceived benefits, and challenges of applying blockchain and traceability from the users’ perspective. We implemented a prototype using a user-centered iterative interface design. Then we used the prototype to answer our research questions in mixed-method research, including in-depth interviews (10 participants) and a survey (350 participants) with stakeholders in the coffee supply chain in Thailand. The results showed that timeline-based design was preferred over map-based or text-based design for the visualization of traceability information and that blockchain was a promising technology, as 67% of the survey participants saw a positive influence of blockchain on the adoption of applications. The most notable benefits were origin checking and increasing product trustworthiness. The most notable challenges were inaccurate or incomplete information and the disclosure of trade secrets. More work is required to address the challenges for everyone in the supply chain ecosystem to adopt the proposed traceability system, including (1) providing trustworthiness and completeness of information by cross-checking with third parties or other users, (2) protecting sensitive information by aligning users’ interests or allowing control of information disclosure, and (3) educating and giving producers the motivation for the difficulty and the extra work.

Blockchain-Based Traceability System for Product Recall

In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework involving a traceability system for product recall (TSPR) designed to develop a traceability system integrated into the product recall system deployed to the Ethereum to ensure the transparency and visibility of the recall process for all stakeholders. The proposed system incorporates all four stakeholders, including supply chain (SC) participants, the food safety regulatory system, the admin, and end customers, into one chain. In the proposed TSPR system, individual components are developed to provide primarily product traceability events, product recall data and status, which are stored in the blockchain to authorized stakeholders. Moreover, the entity relationship and activity diagram of the TSPR system are developed. In the experiment, we develop three smart contracts of the TSPR system using Remix IDE running on an Ethereum test network. A scenario of the events of product traceability and recall in the SC is developed. Two criteria are used to test the validation of contracts: the correct operation and measurement of gas costs. The results show the correctness of three smart contracts, thereby ensuring that the stakeholder chain is provided with visibility and transparency primarily for the product recall process. Moreover, the summation of gas costs deployed in the TSPR system in Ethereum Mainnet for the regulator and manufacturer is $30.23 and $111.54, respectively. However, when using the Polygon Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the gas cost remains $0.022 and $0.083, respectively; thus, we recommend this system for stakeholders to help them achieve lower costs and increased economic worth.