Blockchain solution to enhance supply chain data provenance

Abstract

Consumers are demanding more visibility to the products they purchase. In the past decade, importance of the traceability of products from source to retailer has grown high. Supply chains have become more complicated in structure, difficult in task, and dealing with wide range of stakeholders. Many organizations do not have complete view of the entire supply chain. They only have a system to control their own operations. Due to these limitations supply chain transparency become a complex problem to solve. Most of the currently available supply chain management systems are built using traditional client server architecture. Information in the traditional systems is controlled by one single authority. Because of that, information can be mutated and there is no assurance of the correctness of available data. Furthermore, traditional systems are not transparent, and consumers don’t have the ability to access the information in those systems. This lack of transparency causes numerous issues and difficulties in the supply chain mechanisms in respect to security, traceability, authentication, and verification. As a result, the connection between supply chain entities is lost, making it difficult to trace the product’s provenance details. The main goal of this thesis is to visualize the product’s provenance information to the consumers. With the traditional systems visualizing provenance details is hard to achieve due to the limitations mentioned above. In order to overcome these limitations, blockchain based supply chain system has been proposed which developed using smart contracts. The system is built on top of Ethereum Blockchain, a distributed public blockchain. By implementing the system using blockchain, the traceability and the ability to share information among each entity in the supply chain will be made easier and trustworthy.