A Decentralized Architecture for Supply Chain Visibility: Integrating Blockchain, Smart Contracts and IoT

Abstract

Blockchain has been recognized as a promising technology to improve transparency, authenticity and efficiency in supply chain (SC) traceability for food, pharmaceuticals, textiles etc. It is observed that recent literature have extensively studied blockchain based traceability systems in the domains, level of implementation maturity, technical architecture and sustainability dimensions. There have been experimental models to demonstrate that a practical, inexpensive and scalable blockchain has not yet been fulfilled. In textile and garment, numerous blockchain frameworks consider problems of information asymmetry and low visibility by providing secure sharing of data, smart contract based validation procedure, and transparent tracking (e.g., organic cotton supply chain). Decentralized types such as Hyperledger Fabric provide greater integrity, quality assurance and process traceability over traditional centralized models within the Agri-Food sector. Other possible works address enhancing efficiency, for which a parallel record-search is proposed by developing multi-chunk replication and maximum matching algorithms to lower time overhead by more than 85%. On the whole, the blockchain is promising but needs to be practically validated on a large scale.