Distributed Ledger Architecture for Real- Time Supplier Audit Trails and Regulatory Compliance Verification in Global Electronics Supply Chains

Abstract

The electronics sector depends on geographically dispersed, multi-tier supplier networks that generate enormous volumes of audit-relevant data every day. Conventional compliance approaches—relying on periodic manual audits, centralised repositories, and siloed information exchange—are ill-equipped to cope with real-time regulatory demands arising from frameworks such as the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation, RoHS Directive, REACH, and emerging digital-product-passport legislation. This paper proposes and evaluates a Distributed Ledger Architecture (DLA) built on Hyperledger Fabric that encodes supplier audit trails as cryptographically immutable on-chain records, automated via smart-contract chaincode, and enriched through Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensor oracles deployed at manufacturing nodes. A twelve-month simulation experiment spanning eighty supplier nodes across three continents demonstrates that the proposed system raises the supplier compliance rate from 75.5 % to 97.2 %, reduces audit-cycle time from weeks to sub-three-second confirmations, cuts per-supplier audit cost by 87 %, and reduces document falsification events by 96 %. The architecture is shown to scale linearly to 80 nodes while sustaining 2,890 transactions per second at a mean end-to-end latency of 148 ms—outperforming both Ethereum Proof-of-Authority and centralised database baselines across all throughput dimensions. The research contributes a formal DLA design schema, an empirical performance benchmark, and a policy mapping framework for multi-jurisdictional regulatory alignment