SID: Service Identification and Discovery Framework for Decentralised Supply Chains

Abstract

The traditional decentralised supply chains are facing challenges to meet the increasing demands for openness, transparency, trust and efficiency. As a result, blockchain-based decentralised supply chains are emerging. However, how to identify and discover various services in a decentralised supply chain remains an unsolved issue. This paper presents a new framework for modelling and discovering services in decentralised supply chain systems. In the framework, W3C Decentralised Identifier (DID) is adopted to describe service attributes to meet different business and technical requirements for a supply chain service. While blockchain is used for publishing and storing DID, a graphic-database-based service repository is proposed to organize these DID strings in a natural way as a graph for better service discovery. An Ethereum-based prototype is implemented as a proof of concept to demonstrate its feasibility and usefulness.