Zhihao Hao, Dianhui Mao, Bob Zhang, Min Zuo · 5 authors
Current food traceability systems have a number of problems, such as data being easily tampered with and a lack of effective methods to intuitively analyze the causes of risks. Therefore, a novel method has been proposed that combines blockchain technology with visualization technology, which uses Hyperledger to build an information storage platform. Features such as distribution and tamper-resistance can guarantee the authenticity and validity of data. A data structure model is designed to implement the data storage of the blockchain. The food safety risks of unqualified detection data can be quantitatively analyzed, and a food safety risk assessment model is established according to failure rate and qualification deviation. Risk analysis used visual techniques, such as heat maps, to show the areas where unqualified products appeared, with a migration map and a force-directed graph used to trace these products. Moreover, the food sampling data were used as the experimental data set to test the validity of the method. Instead of difficult-to-understand and highly specialized food data sets, such as elements in food, food sampling data for the entire year of 2016 was used to analyze the risks of food incidents. A case study using aquatic products as an example was explored, where the results showed the risks intuitively. Furthermore, by analyzing the reasons and traceability processes effectively, it can be proven that the proposed method provides a basis to formulate a regulatory strategy for regions with risks.
Jiang Duan, Chen Zhang, Yu Gong, Steve Brown · 5 authors
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one out of 10 people get sick from eating contaminated food. Complex food production process and globalization make food supply chain more delicate. Many technologies have been investigated in recent years to address food insecurity and achieve efficiency in dealing with food recalls. One of the most promising technologies is Blockchain, which has already been used successfully in financial aspects, such as bitcoin, and it is attracting interests from food supply chain organizations. As blockchain has characteristics, such as decentralization, security, immutability, smart contract, it is therefore expected to improve sustainable food supply chain management and food traceability. This paper applies a content-analysis based literature review in blockchain adoption within food supply chain. We propose four benefits. Blockchain can help to improve food traceability, information transparency, and recall efficiency; it can also be combined with Internet of things (IoT) to achieve better efficiency. We also propose five potential challenges, including lack of deeper understanding of blockchain, technology difficulties, raw data manipulation, difficulties of getting all stakeholders on board, and the deficiency of regulations.
Christoph Stach, Clémentine Gritti, Dennis Przytarski, Bernhard Mitschang
A large number of food scandals (e. g., falsely declared meat or non-compliance with hygiene regulations) are causing considerable concern to consumers. Although Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used in the food industry to monitor production (e. g., for tracing the origin of meat or monitoring cold chains), the gathered data are not used to provide full transparency to the consumer. To achieve this, however, three aspects must be considered: a) The origin of the data must be verifiable, i. e., it must be ensured that the data originate from calibrated sensors. b) The data must be stored tamper-resistant, immutable, and open to all consumers. c) Despite this openness, the privacy of affected data subjects (e. g., the carriers) must still be protected. To this end, we introduce the SHEEPDOG architecture that “shepherds” products from production to purchase to enable a trustworthy, secure, and privacy-aware food monitoring. In SHEEPDOG, attribute-based credentials ensure trustworthy data acquisition, blockchain technologies provide secure data storage, and fine-grained access control enables privacy-aware data provision.
Jedsada tipmontian, Jaime Castellanos Alcover, M. Rajmohan
Today’s food supply chain is incredibly complex and imposes enormous challenges across the Globe. Products are transported through multimodal transportation internationally, comprising of combination of ship, rail, truck and flight modes etc. The supply chain under multistage network poses more quality related issues. Hence, blockchain technology helps to enhance food safety and quality in the logistics process. This, when coupled with the existing traceability system can create more agile value chain and closer customer relationship across regions. Though, Thailand is a leading food exporter, it lacks in implementation of blockchain technology. The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of blockchain technology adoption for safe food supply chain management through System Dynamics (SD) approach from management perspectives in Thailand. The preliminary survey and discussion were carried out with the participants from food expert firms, and causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams were developed and validated. The trade-off, challenges and opportunities of applying block chain technology on the global food value supply chain has been discussed throughout the system dynamics model. The major contribution of this work is in providing insight into some of the main dimensions of block chain technology and its implications for global food value chain performance improvements.
Abstract Agriculture 4.0 is the era of integrating intelligent technologies in agriculture. Problems such as low informatization, food safety, high management cost and imbalance between supply and demand in agriculture have greatly hindered the development of agriculture. The various properties of blockchain technology can make up for the lack of agricultural mechanism, and the fusion of the two is a hot issue in the application of blockchain. Blockchain technology has already had some application cases in the field of agriculture. Based on the research status of Chinese and foreign scholars in this field, this paper firstly introduces the basic overview of blockchain. Then, with agricultural supply chain and agricultural product traceability as the core, it describes the application of blockchain technology in the agricultural field, and further explores solutions to different application problems. Finally, combined with the practical application of “agriculture + blockchain”, relevant Suggestions are proposed to provide reference for cross-disciplinary research.
The integration of sensors and internet to the supply chain has created a new window in the supply chain management called as virtual supply chain which bears the features such as real-time tracking and monitoring of goods flow in the physical supply chain. The food supply chain is one of the delicate supply chains due to perishability, which can be due to various physical and biological factors, also the stringent safety and sustainability requirements of the product. The use of sensors and IT technology enables real-time data collection of the changes that take place in the food supply chain. The paper presents the integration of blockchain to the current virtual supply chain thus eliminating or changing the roles of intermediaries in the virtual supply chain and facilitating transparency, integrity, and authenticity of the data in the food supply chain.
In recent years, food safety problems have become increasingly serious. The traditional supply chain traceability solution faces some serious problems, such as centralization, data tampering, and high communication costs.... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Tech Science Press
IoT-enable monitoring can provide valuable information for the shellfish quality evaluation during cold storage condition. However, IoT based information storage relies on the centralized platform, it is possible to tamper. In this paper, we establish blockchain based multi-sensors (WSN) monitoring system to collect quality parameters and verify captured information for improving transparency and trust during cold storage. The implementation of the K-means and SVM algorithms were used in quality evaluation applications to classify and predict the quality loss of frozen shellfish. The results show blockchain based WSN monitoring can achieve the dynamic indicators continuous monitoring and ensures the data security and reliability. The proportion of the training set and the test set in the allowable deviation range is 88.89% and 87.17%. The root mean square error (RMSE) of training set and test set are 0.1502 and 0.1793 by SVM model. The performance of the K-means and SVM model has higher accuracy than BP model. This paper could help to reduce the risk of food losses and improve quality and safety management of frozen shellfish during cold storage.
Prithviraj Lakkakula, David W. Bullock, William W. Wilson, Lakkakula, Prithviraj · 6 authors
A blockchain is a distributed, public or private digital ledger that uses cryptography to record transactions across computer networks to prevent records from being altered retrospectively. This paper illustrates the impact of blockchain technology on total cost, time, and risk in international commodity trading using a hypothetical case of soybean trade from Jamestown, North Dakota, to China. The results suggest that the savings include 2.3 cents per bushel of soybeans and a 41 percent reduction in the total time, including documentation and transit time. Further, the 5 percent value-at-risk model shows a reduction of 2.6 cents per bushel of soybeans traded using blockchain technology. These results are significant for agribusinesses and other agricultural stakeholders who are evaluating the benefit of adopting blockchain technology in international commodity trading.
The frequent occurrence of food safety accidents at the global level has triggered consumer sensitivity. Establishing a food traceability system can effectively guarantee food safety and increase consumer confidence and satisfaction. Existing food traceability systems often ignore environmental factors that affect food quality at all stages of the supply chain, and the authenticity of the information obtained through traceability is difficult to guarantee. In this study, a food supply chain traceability model was established based on blockchain and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies. The model focused on the traceability of environmental data during the various stages of the food supply chain and combined a centralized database and blockchain for data storage. The lot identification data of the various supply chain stages were stored in a centralized database, while the environmental data were stored in a blockchain. Thereby, the authenticity and accuracy of the traceability data were ensured. The blockchain part of the model has been simulated in the Ethereum test environment, and the experiment has achieved traceability of temperature data.
Adnan Iftekhar, Xiaohui Cui, Mir Hassan, Wasif Afzal
Food supply chain plays a vital role in human health and food prices. Food supply chain inefficiencies in terms of unfair competition and lack of regulations directly affect the quality of human life and increase food safety risks. This work merges Hyperledger Fabric, an enterprise-ready blockchain platform with existing conventional infrastructure, to trace a food package from farm to fork using an identity unique for each food package while keeping it uncomplicated. It keeps the records of business transactions that are secured and accessible to stakeholders according to the agreed set of policies and rules without involving any centralized authority. This paper focuses on exploring and building an uncomplicated, low-cost solution to quickly link the existing food industry at different geographical locations in a chain to track and trace the food in the market.
Innovative solutions addressing product anti-counterfeiting and record provenance have been deployed across today's internationally spanning supply chain networks. These product anti-counterfeiting solutions are developed and implemented with centralized system architecture relying on centralized authorities or any form of intermediaries. Vulnerabilities of centralized product anti-counterfeiting solutions could possibly lead to system failure or susceptibility of malicious modifications performed on product records or various potential attacks to the system components by dishonest participant nodes traversing along the supply chain. Blockchain technology has progressed from merely with a use case of immutable ledger for cryptocurrency transactions to a programmable interactive environment of developing decentralized and reliable applications addressing different use cases globally. In this research, so as to facilitate trustworthy data provenance retrieval, verification and management, as well as strengthening capability of product anti-counterfeiting, key areas of decentralization and feasible mechanisms of developing decentralized and distributed product anti-counterfeiting and traceability ecosystems utilizing blockchain technology, are identified via a series of security and threat analyses performed mainly against NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System (NAS) which is one of the solutions currently implemented in the industry with centralized architecture. A set of fundamental system requirements are set out for developing a blockchain-enabled autonomous and decentralized solution for supply chain anti-counterfeiting and traceability, as a secure and immutable scientific data provenance tracking and management platform in which provenance records, providing compelling properties on data integrity of luxurious goods, are recorded and verified automatically, for supply chain industry.
The rapid changes in textile and clothing industry's operational environment in which apparel businesses are collaborating with their suppliers and customers have recognized interoperability of information systems as an important factor. The need to address this challenge becomes vital in the context of new paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), and its ability to capture realtime information from different parts of textile and cloth manufacturing value chain by using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags and sensors-based data communication networks. In this process, enterprise information system architecture plays an important role in storing, processing, and distributing data. Despite contributing to the rapid development of IoT applications, the current IoT-centric architecture has led to a myriad of isolated data silos. This paper presents a blockchain-based architecture for the IoT applications, which brings distributed data management to support transactions services within a multi-party apparel business supply chain network.
Blockchain implementation in agriculture has begun. Blockchain is recognized as an emerging technology in the agri-foods industry which may provide an efficient and robust mechanism for enhancing food traceability and a transparent and reliable way to validate quality, safety, and sustainability, of agri-foods. However, the technology is in its nascency, therefore, this review was written to foster discussion and encourage the application of blockchain technology, especially in the agri-food industry. In this review, the working principle of blockchain for data recording and tracking is briefly described. The collaboration models for the current blockchain applications on agri-foods are summarized. Furthermore, the specific utilization of blockchain to enhance safety and quality of agri-foods is discussed in four aspects: enhance the data transparency, realize data traceability, improve the food safety and quality monitoring, and reduce the cost of financial transactions. A case study on a Walmart pork traceability system has been provided to demonstrate how blockchain may be used to enhance the food traceability. Finally, challenges and future trends of blockchain technology in agri-foods concerning data/cost management, data security, and data integration are discussed. Blockchain technology reveals a promising approach to foster a future of agri-foods system in a way that is safer, healthier, more sustainable, and reliable.
In recent years, various food-safety issues have aroused public concern regarding safety in the food supply chain. Since grains are closely linked to human life and health, it is necessary to effectively manage information in the grain supply chain. The grain supply chain is characterized by a long life cycle, complex links, various hazards, and heterogeneous information sources. Problems with traditional traceability systems include easy data tampering, difficult hazardous-material information management, the “information isolated island” problem, and low traceability efficiency in the whole supply chain. Blockchain is a distributed computing paradigm characterized by decentralization, network-wide recording, security, and reliability. As such, it can reduce administrative costs and improve the efficiency of information management. Based on literature research and a field investigation of wheat-processing enterprises in Shandong Province, We analyze the operation process of grain supply chain. This study, therefore, proposed a new system architecture in the entire grain supply chain based on blockchain technology and designed a multimode storage mechanism that combines chain storage. This prototype system was tested and verified using actual cases and application scenarios. Compared to traditional systems, the proposed system is characterized by data security and reliability, information interconnection and intercommunication, real-time sharing of hazardous-material information, and dynamic and credible whole-process tracing. As such, this system is highly significant and has reference value for guaranteeing food quality and safety-process traceability.
Bin Yu, Ping Zhan, Ming Lei, Fang Zhou · 5 authors
Currently, food quality has become a major concern for the food industry. To efficiently detect food quality problems during the production process, food enterprises must build quality monitoring systems. However, in a traditional quality monitoring system, data tampering and centralized storage have become barriers to reliability. In addition, due to lack of sufficient automation, traditional quality monitoring approaches are usually inefficient. Fortunately, blockchain is a promising technology that is tamper-proof and decentralized. Moreover, smart contracts, which are executable codes on the blockchain platform, are able to conduct transactions between mutually untrusted parties and are self-executing and self-verifying. By combining smart contracts and quality evaluation models, this paper presents an intelligent quality monitoring system for fruit juice production. This system has the characteristics of high automation and high reliability. In this system, response surface models are established based on preproduction data, and the optimal production condition for each stage is identified. During the actual production process, smart contracts are executed to record production data on a blockchain. These data serve as the inputs for evaluation models. Based on the evaluation outcome, smart contracts will decide whether the production process can be resumed or not. To evaluate the feasibility of the presented system, a prototype version of the quality monitoring system for flat peach juice production is implemented based on the Ethereum platform and executed in the Remix IDE.
Tanvir Ferdousi, Don Gruenbacher, Caterina Scoglio
Distributed ledgers using blockchain have gained traction in the supply chain industry due to their unique features of immutability and transparency. They have given people the abilities to solve business problems which were impossible using traditional systems. The US beef cattle industry lacks adequate traceability as most of the farm owners consider such data confidential; possibly harming their businesses if exposed. This article attempts to solve this problem by proposing a smart contract-based supply chain framework using a permissioned blockchain network. This system supports anonymity for the users to protect identities and lets every user store their data locally, while ensuring that the changes are recorded in the chain with cryptographic proofs (hashes). The proposed framework also has methods for the users to perform business transactions and transfer animal-related data to new owners as required. In addition to that, smart contracts have been added to conduct anonymous surveys for data aggregation. The technical contribution of this article is in the system design on how users, data, and communications are handled to maintain data ownership and user privacy while ensuring immutability and confidentiality at different levels of data aggregation. This article also contains an evaluation of the system using integration tests where the outcomes meet the expected design requirements. The framework can be applied to the US beef cattle industry as well as other supply chains with minimal modifications.
Blockchain-based product traceability systems are receiving increasing attention from both industry and academia. Existing systems make full use of the traceability and non-modification characteristics of blockchain technology and realize the openness and transparency of product traceability information in the entire supply chain. However, existing systems do not consider government regulation, cannot protect enterprise sensitive private data effectively, and have performance bottlenecks. To address these problems, this paper proposes a product traceability scheme based on the permissioned blockchain within a double-layer framework. We introduce the double-layer framework and describe its advantages in detail. We also describe the smart contracts (chain code) in the double-layer framework. Finally, we test the performance of the proposed scheme through simulation experiments. The simulation results demonstrate the performance of nodes in the main layer, which is very important for consumers to obtain product traceability information, is optimized.
In this study, we attempted to develop and implement a blockchain Corda-based record sharing system for traditional agricultural (agri-) researchers, workers, and their managers. Corda differs from other domain and practical blockchain techniques (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum) with respect to its main aims and structural features. Corda-based network systems can transmit and share basic data concerning ledgers at banks or other financial societies and can be handled on common web browsers (e.g., Google Chrome or Microsoft Internet Explorer). This study consists of three phases: (1) designing and confirming the validity of the entire system, (2) constructing and tuning various minor system settings (e.g., programs or networking specifications), and (3) conducting experiments in indoor settings using hoe acceleration data obtained from previous research projects. The integrated system performed with an acceptable level of accuracy. However, it was extremely difficult to quantitatively present the accuracy data. We were unable to concretely show the success and error rates for the data transmitting and receiving, nor the examination operation time. We thus present the specific error content. Overall, the main error trends were (1) errors concerning the rather small transaction time-delay, (2) mistakes concerning the transaction data in the system, and (3) broken transaction data in the system. In particular, we could determine the transaction time delay according to the JavaScript operations and features by observing. We present experimental ranges for these time delays and other error types. Noting concerns concerning previous trials, we suggest practical applications of the proposed system. In short, we believe that our results are novel achievements in the fusion of agricultural informatics, statistics, and human dynamics. We believe that combining this data and other kinds of timeline data with blockchain-based technology and multiple sensors will improve not only agri-business and management, but also agri-skill and security.
This paper analyses how blockchain technology works in agri-food supply chains. It also intends to identify the benefits and limitations associated with the potential widespread use of this technology to improve efficiency and sustainability performance. Despite the undeniable benefits of blockchain and the possible improvements to enhance transparency, reliability and accuracy of information, considerable challenges to its widespread adoption persist. The transformational potential of blockchain technology can be unlocked by: a) the creation of a pre-competitive space for unprecedented horizontal collaboration amongst supply chain actors to reduce cost and maximise benefits; b) the redesign of centralised governance systems of existing tracking and information-sharing platforms; c) the integration of blockchain and Internet of Things devices.
The need for beef supply chain traceability system is vital due to increase in counterfeiting and use of excessive preservatives and hazardous chemicals. To overcome these problems, it is needed a system which provides the option for the consumer to verify the origin of all input materials for food product based on one step forward and one step backward in supply chain mechanism. Blockchain technology is used as the solution to this problem. This paper aims to identify the requirement and designing the traceability system that could capture all relevant data. The design of beef supply chain traceability system will be described as a business process flow with BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), in which BPMN will be described the stakeholders involved with the task and needs of the designed system. Based on requirement analysis, this system composed of 4 stakeholders, namely the farmer, feedlot, industry, and retailer. The result showed that the blockchain can create a transparent and efficient supply chain through sharing data between the stakeholders.