InoculLedger: A Secure and Scalable Distributed Ledger for Efficient Vaccine Supply Chain Management

Abstract

The Vaccine Supply Chain (VSC) is a crucial component of the Healthcare Cyber-Physical System (H-CPS), enabling seamless coordination among various entities to ensure the timely delivery of safe and effective vaccines. Given the extensive number of interactions and the stringent requirements for monitoring environmental parameters, the VSC features a highly complex architecture with intricate operational dynamics. This complexity, coupled with the reliance on multiple centralized systems, often results in lack of transparency, making it challenging to monitor the vaccine movement withing the supply chain network as well as recording the temperature excursions. To address these challenges, a novel blockchain-based system that provides a transparent and secure mechanism for storing and accessing vaccine records is proposed. By leveraging the IOTA Tangle data structure, system meets the high throughput demands of the application while ensuring data integrity and scalability. A proof-of-concept implementation was developed and analyzed to evaluate its scalability and adaptability for real-world deployment, demonstrating its potential to revolutionize the VSC by enhancing transparency and efficiency.