Abstract Blockchain technology plays a very positive role in promoting the development of the port supply chain. Although there are some practical examples of blockchain in the port supply chain (eg. Trade Len or Cargo Smart), there are few application scenarios. Therefore, blockchain technology has yet to be widely used in the port industry. This may be related to the construction of blockchain. This paper analyzes the impact of blockchain technology on the port supply chain and the technology sharing on the shipping market. It is found that the investment of blockchain technology in a competitive environment has different characteristics. When the efficiency of technology investment and the proportion of market expansion reach a certain combination, there are two different equilibrium strategy choices: Only technology investment or technology sharing. Based on the above research results, this paper further investigates the results of the comprehensive influence of different factors such as competition intensity and market expansion proportion.
As a disruptive tool, blockchain technology can eradicate the product-counterfeiting problem in supply chains. However, a blockchain-supported platform charges an operating fee to legitimate manufacturers and retailers for product traceability and authentication. In this study, we employ enterprise profit-driven analytical models using Stackelberg equilibrium theory and highlight the values of blockchain-supported e-commerce platforms in addressing the product-counterfeiting problem. To measure the actual benefits of blockchain technology, we compare the profits of all agents in two different supply chains, traditional and blockchain-supported. Results show that the application of blockchain technology is not always beneficial to manufacturers, retailers, and customers. However, when the manufacturing cost of a legitimate manufacturer is sufficiently high, the manufacturer generates more profits using blockchain technology. Further, for a price-sensitive market, a retailer tends to trade in a blockchain-supported e-commerce platform if the retailerās qualification in the platform is lower than that in a traditional supply chain, and the manufacturing cost of the counterfeit manufacturer in the platform is higher than that in a traditional supply chain.
The risk of supply chain disruption is usually related to daily disturbances in supply chain operations (e.g., demand fluctuations) and some emergency risks, such as earthquakes and epidemic outbreaks. During a crisis, companies need agility to quickly find new suppliers and open auxiliary sales channels to meet customer needs and remain competitive. However, identifying āeventā is one of the most difficult challenges of current decision support systems. If the system encounters an emergency, it is usually unable to promptly notify users of the warning to avoid risks. A sensible solution is to incorporate the real-time event-monitoring system into SCM (i.e., supply chain management) in order to share emergency information in the early stage for preemptive management in the supply chain. On the other hand, in order to process confidential supply chain data with other members, the SCM infrastructure requires secure data sharing. The blockchain-based SCM system can improve the transparency of traceability to ensure that the supply chain system provides high-quality products and protects data privacy and security. The view is taken; therefore, in this work, we combined a method of real-time event detection using collected Twitter data and blockchain technology for event monitoring to improve the visibility of the supply chain system and take preemptive measures for risk avoidance. The experiments show some interesting results and potentials for future work in the field of the agile supply chain.
Purpose Blockchain technology was developed to synchronize the data and transactions over the supply chain network and connected nodes. This paper aims to show how blockchain technology can enhance flexibility and agility in supply chain operations. The integration of blockchain and other recently developed technology can help deal with supply chain uncertainties and other challenges being faced by the industry. Design/methodology/approach Through an extensive literature review of existing research papers and conversation with supply chain managers, barriers and challenges in the supply chain were identified. Some elements were researched of blockchain technology that can be used to resolve some challenges. Blockchain technology and other technologies integration is developed for implementation in supply chain for better visibility and efficiency of supply chain. Findings The challenges in the supply chain are categorized, and the solution is given through the integration of blockchain and other technologies like Internet of Things and artificial intelligence. The integration shows the execution of tasks through blockchain and various technologies in supply chain. Research limitations/implications Blockchain in supply chain is finding its strong place in India when compared to developing nations. There is a need for technology experts, supply chain managers and consumers to understand blockchainās importance. Challenges faced by industries to use blockchain may be analyzed further with real-life industry case studies. Practical implications This research helps enterprises in successful execution of smart technologies in their supply chains. This research helps enterprises in successful execution of smart technologies in their supply chains. Managers and practitioners may use the models developed in real-time implementation. The technologies are described in detail to help the practitioners select the best suitable for their organization. Social implications Digital supply chains are finding the way in industries due to lean and efficient nature. It is beneficial to use the smart technologies to make supply chain green and sustainable. Originality/value The implementation of the digital supply chain and its challenges are discussed in the research paper. This will work as a platform for research in the area of technologies for supply chain.
Banks attempt to invest in emerging financial technology (FinTech), such as blockchain, to enhance competitiveness. There is a great deal of literature on the technical and legal aspects of blockchain. However, there is little specific guidance on how banks can apply a holistic model to evaluate the blockchain-based business. This study proposes a hybrid decision model with confidence-weighted fuzzy assessments to address this valuable research topic. Supported by a group of seasoned experts, five major blockchain-based business models are evaluated for a domestic bank in Taiwan. The key findings contribute to understanding the importance of the involved factors and identifying the ideal business strategy for the bank. The result suggests that the most crucial dimension is policies and regulations, not the technical capability of banks.
The traditional oil supply chain suffers from various shortcomings regarding crude oil extraction, processing, distribution, environmental pollution, and traceability. It offers an only a forward flow of products with almost no security and tracking process. In time, the system will lag behind due to the limitations in quality inspection, fraudulent information, and monopolistic behavior of supply chain entities. Inclusion of counterfeiting products and opaqueness of the system urge renovation in this sector. The recent evolution of Industry 4.0 leads to the alternation in the supply chain introducing the smart supply chain. Technological advancement can now reshape the infrastructure of the supply chain for the future. In this paper, we suggest a conceptual framework utilizing Blockchain and Smart Contract to monitor the overall oil supply chain. Blockchain is a groundbreaking technology to monitor and support the security building of a decentralized type supply chain over a peer-to-peer network. The use of the Internet of Things (IoT), especially sensors, opens broader window to track the global supply chain in real-time. We construct a methodology to support reverse traceability for each participant of the supply chain. The functions and characteristics of Blockchain and Smart Contract are defined. Implementation of Smart Contracts has also been shown with detailed analysis. We further describe the challenges of implementing such a system and validate our framework's adaptability in the real world. The paper concludes with future research scope to mitigate the restrictions of data management and maintenance with advanced working prototypes and agile systems achieving greater traceability and transparency.
ŠŃŠ¹Š“Ń ŠŃ, Ayad Hendalianpour, Mohammad Hamzehlou, Mohammad Reza Feylizadeh Ā· 5 authors
Globalization initiated the challenges in Supply Chain (SC) such as management and control. In this situation, Blockchain as a digital distributed ledger can guarantee clarity, tractability, and safety. Many case studies proved that we can use Blockchain Technology (BT) to solve global supply chain problems especially in smart contracts with their potential applications. BT is in its early period and it is hard to find supply chains that have successfully implemented this technology to track their sustainable actions. Therefore, it is worth studying about the role of customers, members, domestic, national, and international challenges that could resist implementing Blockchain and may affect SC sustainability. Accordingly, four categories of barriers to the use of BT are introduced which are inter-organizational, intra-organizational, technical, and external barriers. Then with Bayesian Best Worst Method, we ranked the BT barriers and the sub-barriers. The study illustrates the interconnection of these barriers and the priority of each element. The lack of business models and the best practices in implementing Blockchain technology is a challenge and it is important that practitioners acknowledge these barriers in the first steps.
Kotha Raj Kumar Reddy, Angappa Gunasekaran, P. Kalpana, V. Raja Sreedharan Ā· 5 authors
As world is affected by demand volatility; process uncertainty; supply chain complexity and information ambiguity forming a VUCA world. To manage this scenario, industries are adopting emerging technologies for business excellence and one among them is Blockchain. Blockchain technology (BCT) is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that stores transactional records in a tamper-proof and immutable way; it is a promising solution for incorporating transparency and traceability in traditional ecosystem. As automotive industries are facing a Volatile environment, Uncertain schedules & information; Complex supply chain networks, and Ambiguous decisions that cripples the automotive supply chain (ASC). Therefore, BCT can be used to address issues related to ASC in VUCA world. Keeping this in mind, study reported a systematic literature review (SLR) of BCT applications in ASC. More than seventy research papers were reviewed based on different BCT characteristics and applications. Through content analysis, study explored how to link supply chain visibility, information transparency with BCT for an efficient ASC in VUCA world. Moreover, a BCT implementation framework is proposed for ASC, to provide a decision-making approach for practitioners in VUCA world.
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple committees, where each processing a separate set of transactions, rather than the entire network processes all transactions. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic approach to analyze the security of sharding-based blockchain protocols. Based on this approach, we investigate the threat of Sybil attacks in these protocols. The key contribution of our paper is a tractable probabilistic approach to accurately compute the failure probability that at least one committee fails and ultimately compute the probability of a successful attack. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a numerical and comparative analysis of the proposed approach with existing approaches.
This work assesses the impact of blockchain and smart contract on the visibility of construction supply chain and in the context of payments (intersection of cash and product flows). It uses comparative empirical experiments (Charrette Test Method) to draw comparisons between the visibility of state-of-practice and blockchain-enabled payment systems in a commercial construction project. Comparisons were drawn across four levels of granularity. The findings are twofold: 1) blockchain improved information completeness and information accuracy respectively by an average 216% and 261% compared with the digital state-of-practice solution. The improvements were significantly more pronounced for inquiries that had higher product, trade, and temporal granularity; 2) blockchain-enabled solution was robust in the face of increased granularity, while the conventional solution experienced 50% and 66.7% decline respectively in completeness and accuracy of information. The paper concludes with a discussion of mechanisms contributing to visibility and technology adoption based on business objectives.
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding\nis one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The\nbasic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple\ncommittees, where each processing a separate set of transactions, rather than\nthe entire network processes all transactions. In this paper, we propose a\nprobabilistic approach to analyze the security of sharding-based blockchain\nprotocols. Based on this approach, we investigate the threat of Sybil attacks\nin these protocols. The key contribution of our paper is a tractable\nprobabilistic approach to accurately compute the failure probability that at\nleast one committee fails and ultimately compute the probability of a\nsuccessful attack. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct a\nnumerical and comparative analysis of the proposed approach with existing\napproaches.\n
This research focuses on analyzing the state of the art of the blockchain technology and in publicizing the potential applications and implementations that the blockchain can deliver to the supply chain. For this, it will be explained in a simple way technology and its operation in the supply chain and case studies of real companies that are currently betting on this technological revolution, capable of improving the efficiency of any process logistic.
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS has been heavily debated in the blockchain community. The debate is centered around the argument that whether rich miners possessing more stakes will obtain higher staking rewards and further increase their potential income in the future. In this paper, we define two types of fairness, i.e., expectational fairness and robust fairness, that are useful for answering this question. In particular, expectational fairness illustrates that the expected income of a miner is proportional to her initial investment, indicating that the expected return on investment is a constant. To better capture the uncertainty of mining outcomes, robust fairness is proposed to characterize whether the return on investment concentrates to a constant with high probability as time evolves. Our analysis shows that the classical PoW mechanism can always preserve both types of fairness as long as the mining game runs for a sufficiently long time. Furthermore, we observe that current PoS blockchains implement various incentive models and discuss three representatives, namely ML-PoS, SL-PoS and C-PoS. We find that (i) ML-PoS (e.g., Qtum and Blackcoin) preserves expectational fairness but may not achieve robust fairness, (ii) SL-PoS (e.g., NXT) does not protect any type of fairness, and (iii) C-PoS (e.g., Ethereum 2.0) outperforms ML-PoS in terms of robust fairness while still maintaining expectational fairness. Finally, massive experiments on real blockchain systems and extensive numerical simulations are performed to validate our analysis.
Tan Guerpinar, Gilberto Guadiana, Philipp Asterios Ioannidis, Natalia Straub Ā· 5 authors
In recent years, blockchain technology is expanding to new areas beyond finance, proving its use as an underlying technology for several application areas in supply chain management. There, the technology can be used to improve collaboration and transparency between supply chain partners. In this paper a systematic literature mapping is presented, which investigates the state of the art regarding blockchain-based applications in supply chain management. Identified applications are then analyzed regarding their industry sector, implemented blockchain framework and addressed challenges.
Matheus V. X. Ferreira, Daniel J. Moroz, David C. Parkes, Mitchell Stern
In recent years, prominent blockchain systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have experienced explosive growth in transaction volume, leading to frequent surges in demand for limited block space and causing transaction fees to fluctuate by orders of magnitude. Existing systems sell space using first-price auctions; however, users find it difficult to estimate how much they need to bid in order to get their transactions accepted onto the chain. If they bid too low, their transactions can have long confirmation times. If they bid too high, they pay larger fees than necessary. In light of these issues, new transaction fee mechanisms have been proposed, most notably EIP-1559, aiming to provide better usability. EIP-1559 is a history-dependent mechanism that relies on block utilization to adjust a base fee. We propose an alternative design -- a {\em dynamic posted-price mechanism} -- which uses not only block utilization but also observable bids from past blocks to compute a posted price for subsequent blocks. We show its potential to reduce price volatility by providing examples for which the prices of EIP-1559 are unstable while the prices of the proposed mechanism are stable. More generally, whenever the demand for the blockchain stabilizes, we ask if our mechanism is able to converge to a stable state. Our main result provides sufficient conditions in a probabilistic setting for which the proposed mechanism is approximately welfare optimal and the prices are stable. Our main technical contribution towards establishing stability is an iterative algorithm that, given oracle access to a Lipschitz continuous and strictly concave function $f$, converges to a fixed point of $f$.
Selina Demi, Ricardo ColomoāPalacios, Mary SĆ”nchezāGordĆ³n
The novel, yet disruptive blockchain technology has witnessed growing attention, due to its intrinsic potential. Besides the conventional domains that benefit from such potential, such as finance, supply chain and healthcare, blockchain use cases in software engineering have emerged recently. In this study, we aim to contribute to the body of knowledge of blockchain-oriented software engineering by providing an adequate overview of the software engineering applications enabled by blockchain technology. To do so, we carried out a systematic mapping study and identified 22 primary studies. Then, we extracted data within the research type, research topic and contribution type facets. Findings suggest an increasing trend of studies since 2018. Additionally, findings reveal the potential of using blockchain technologies as an alternative to centralized systems, such as GitHub, Travis CI, and cloud-based package managers, and also to establish trust between parties in collaborative software development. We also found out that smart contracts can enable the automation of a variety of software engineering activities that usually require human reasoning, such as the acceptance phase, payments to software engineers, and compliance adherence. In spite of the fact that the field is not yet mature, we believe that this systematic mapping study provides a holistic overview that may benefit researchers interested in bringing blockchain to the software industry, and practitioners willing to understand how blockchain can transform the software development industry.
Purpose Performance assessment of blockchain in the supply chain requires a systematic approach because of its interdisciplinary and multiobjective nature. Hence, four types of performance domains are identified, namely, environmental, economic, customer and information. Design/methodology/approach The following methodologies have been utilized: (1) literature review to find relevant factors, (2) factor analysis to validate factors and (3) DEMATEL theory to find the cause and effect relationships amongst performance measures. Findings An integrated holistic performance assessment model incorporating the 4 criteria and 25 subcriteria is applied. Originality/value This is the first paper to analyze blockchain performance in an industry setting.
Yunshu Liu, Zhixuan Fang, Man Hon Cheung, Wei Cai Ā· 5 authors
Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from ever-increasing storage costs, which in general have not been properly compensated by the usersā transaction fees. This reduces the incentives for the minersā participation and may jeopardize the blockchain security. To mitigate this blockchain insufficient fee issue, we propose a Fee and Waiting Tax (FWT) mechanism, which explicitly considers the two types of negative externalities in the system. Specifically, we model the interactions between the protocol designer, users, and miners as a three-stage Stackelberg game. By characterizing the equilibrium of the game, we find that miners neglecting the negative externality in transaction selection cause they are willing to accept insufficient-fee transactions. This leads to the insufficient storage fee issue in the existing protocol (i.e., deployed in Bitcoin and Ethereum). Moreover, our proposed optimal FWT mechanism can motivate users to pay sufficient transaction fees to cover the storage costs and achieve the unconstrained social optimum. Numerical results show that the optimal FWT mechanism guarantees sufficient transaction fees and achieves an average social welfare improvement of 51.43% or more over the existing protocol. Furthermore, the optimal FWT mechanism reduces the average waiting time of low-fee transactions and all transactions by 68.49% and 61.56%, respectively.
Accurate data and strategic business processes are crucial to all parties in a supply chain system. However, the absence of mutual trust can create a barrier to implementation. Several studies have shown that supply chains face challenges arising from a lack of trust with respect to the sharing of data. How well each party trusts the data they receive can have a profound influence on management decisions. Blockchain technology has been widely used to process cryptocurrency transactions. Recently, it has also proved to be effective in creating trust in the Internet of things (IoT) domain. Blockchain technology can facilitate mutual trust between parties who would otherwise have been doubtful of each other's data, allowing for more effective and secure sharing of data. However, if the blockchain is not IoT-optimized, companies can experience significant delays and the need for extensive computational capacity. Moreover, there are still some limitations regarding the consensus between the nodes in the traditional consensus approaches. Here, we propose an alternative approach to creating trust in supply chains with diverse IoT elements. Our streamlined trust model simplifies data sharing and reduces computational, storage, and latency requirements while increasing the security of the IoT-based supply chain management. We evaluate the suggested model using simulations and highlight its viability.
Private permissioned blockchains are deployed in ever greater numbers to facilitate cross-organizational processes in various industries, particularly in supply chain management. One popular example of this trend is Hyperledger Fabric. Compared to public permissionless blockchains, it promises improved performance and provides certain features that address key requirements of enterprises. However, also permissioned blockchains are still not as scalable as centralized systems, and due to the scarcity of theoretical results and empirical data, their real-world performance cannot be predicted with the necessary precision. We intend to address this issue by conducting an in-depth performance analysis of Hyperledger Fabric. The paper presents a detailed compilation of various performance characteristics using an enhanced version of the Distributed Ledger Performance Scan (DLPS). Researchers and practitioners alike can use the various performance properties identified and discussed as guidelines to better configure and implement their Hyperledger Fabric network. Likewise, they are encouraged to use the DLPS framework to conduct their measurements.
Intelligent transformation of manufacturers requires smart logistics transformation collaboration, which improves competitiveness. In this study, we construct a Stackelberg game model based on the mutual influence and restriction in the relationship between a manufacturer and a logistics service provider (LSP) undergoing smart logistics transformation. We investigate whether cost-sharing (CS) or revenue-sharing (RS) contracts can coordinate the supply chain and suggest a hybrid CSāRS contract to improve performance. We find that, compared with decentralized options, CS and RS contracts achieve a higher level of smart logistics transformation. While the coordination and effectiveness of CS contracts are superior to those of RS contracts, neither can fully coordinate the supply chain. The proposed hybrid CSāRS contract allows the manufacturer to share the LSPās costs before the transformation and its partial revenue after transformation, so that the LSP can reduce its service charge, thereby achieving full supply chain coordination.